eSpire Marketing

Shipping is a cost that people don’t like to pay. Unfortunately from an ecommerce standpoint it is something that has to be dealt with. The retailers don’t want to have to pay it because it will cut into their profit margins. I respect that, everyone has to work within their own margins. But especially in this economy we all know that a sale is tough to come by. Everyone is taking a hit right now, if you have someone telling you that they aren’t, they’re probably lying to you. Just about the only thing that is increasing right now in the U.S. is the size of our government. If you are looking to increase your sales conversions and revenues online, free shipping might just be the way to go for you.

As we’ve talked about before, in order to be successful with online sales, you have to create an “in store” real life environment on your website. People are still adjusting to this whole ecommerce thing. While the numbers continually increase every year for the amount of people who shop online, it still isn’t as regular of an occurrence for people to shop online, as they would in their local hardware store.

Think of it like this; In a store a customer can get the satisfaction of having their product instantly, but they have to pay a sales tax. Online a customer has to wait a few days or longer to receive the product, and they don’t get the satisfaction of really seeing the product before they decide to buy it. Also online, the consumer doesn’t have to pay a sales tax (in most cases) if they decide to buy online. By adding in the cost of shipping, you are essentially adding a sales tax to your online items and you’re already at a disadvantage because your customers have to wait a few days for their products. If you eliminate the sales tax you are elminating that ugly cost that the consumer already doesn’t want to pay. Your conversion rates are going to go up by a couple percent or even more. As a result you’ll get more sales and higher revenue numbers.

We tested the theory on one of our websites with a 72 hours Free shipping sale on everything except already on sale items. Our average sale dropped a bit (the price of standard shipping), but our conversion rates went up by 1.5% and our total number of sales increased by around 50 extra sales a day. For those of you who don’t think that’s a big deal, do the math for yourself.

Calculate it for yourself

Average Sale Amount x Average number of orders

vs

(Average Sale amount – Cost of shipping) x (Average number of orders + 50 extra orders)

The numbers add up quickly. You’re getting more product out to more people, and creating the chance for a lot more long standing relationships with these customers. You’ve just gotten rid of the biggest roadblock to online sales by dropping your shipping price. Take a look at Zappos they got rid of the cost of shipping for their customers and they were so successful that the online giant Amazon bought them out. If you don’t believe it will work test it with a sale, I promise you you will see these results.

Everyone has to work within their own margins, but for whatever reason people really hate paying the price of shipping. If you can’t just flat out cut the cost of shipping on every sale, consider raising the price of all of your inventory online by 1 or 2 percent. Find margins that work for you and make it happen. It is entirely worth it.

Look if you haven’t noticed lately, everyone seems to think they are a Twitter expert. The fact of the matter is there isn’t a single person out there who is a Twitter expert. NOT ONE! They are all selling you or feeding you information that you could find out very easily on your own. So put away your credit card, and start focusing on what really matters, and the truth is what matters.

The truth of the matter is that Twitter isn’t even an expert on Twitter. If they were an expert on Twitter, don’t you think they would’ve found a way to monetize it at this point? Every single automated direct message I’ve ever seen come from a “twitter expert” is something that I learned through my own 20 minute Google research. Trust yourself. Don’t trust anyone. Don’t even trust what I say. Seek out the knowledge for yourself. I love to teach everyone whatever I can because it’s what I’m passionate about, but even some of the big dogs that I read screw up from time to time.

I hope all of you are reading daily, not just blogs, or forums, grab this thing called a book, read it, take notes, and formulate your own ideas reflecting upon what you’ve just read. It’s weird how they say everything you need to learn you learn in Kindergarten, well here is another such example. I’ll be here in the meantime trying to get you the best knowledge to the best of my abilities, as quickly as is humanly possible. I have a great following and I can’t thank all of you enough. You make my day that much more special. Thanks for reading. Now take a tip from your high school principle and hit the books.

I am running a case study with one of the Twitter accounts that I am working on where I am finally scheduling a recurring tweet. I use the service Tweetlater to do all of my tweet scheduling. In the past I have been very hesitant about using the scheduled tweet on a recurring basis, simply because it seems extremely spammy to me. I hate spam, as I’m sure most of you do, but I figured there is no better way to tell if my followers think it is spam than to test it out and see what happens.

Here is the hypothesis that I am running under – By scheduling a recurring tweet on a sale that we are having I will increase the amount of sales during the promotion by at least 10%. I also believe that I will not lose any or gain any new followers as a result of sending these recurring tweets.

I chose 10% because that is my goal I’d like to increase each promotions effectiveness by at least 10%. I don’t believe that I’ll lose or gain any followers as a result of this because I believe that the amount of people who decide not to follow me anymore will equal the amount of new people who do decide to follow me. The case study is going to be 2 weeks long. By the end of next week I will share the results with you. Let me know what you think about this case study, if you’ve run it before great, tell me your results. If you haven’t run it before and are interested in it tell me what your thoughts are on the recurring tweets.

Quality Vs. Quantity, that is the question that everyone is asking themselves when trying to start their Twitter campaigns for their respective businesses. I have worked with both and seen results with both, but I am here to tell you why having quality Twitter followers is far better than having a large quantity of them for your business.

What is your main motivation for starting a Twitter account anyway? Is it direct sales? For some of you it might be, but I would say for the majority of you, you want the opportunity to create opportunities for viral marketing and get the chance to be more connected to your customer base. Quantity might get you more direct sales, but with so many people in your feed at all times, it’s nearly impossible to pick out which of your twitter followers is actually a fan of yours, and actually cares about your product. If you have a refined list of people who truly care about your business, you will get the chance to really connect with these people, and turn them from a one time customer, into a lifetime customer.

What else can you get from a quality twitter following? As you’re connecting with these true fans you’ll get a chance to hear some of their stories, some of them will probably even let you know why they love your business so well. It’s the word of mouth marketing that you are really looking for right? There is nothing like it. Think about it, when you want to try a new restaurant in town, who do you go to? Generally, you ask your friends right? Well that’s what these quality twitter followers will give you, they will recommend you to their friends, and even better they will do it on a large social network in front of millions of users for everyone to see. Recommendations from other people are so valuable. Don’t you want to to get as much of it as you can for your business?

Like I said before I’ve seen great success with both types of Twitter marketing. It is really up to you to decide what you want. I will tell you that in my experience the quality followers will give your business a much more intimate relationship with your customers and that will help you tremendously. Test both theories for yourself though. If you start with one and find that you want to go another direction you can always change paths by refining your list later, or trying to go out and get as many people to follow you as possible.

Twitter or Facebook? This fight has been brewing for the past year or so since Twitter had it’s big coming out party when Dell told everyone they made $1,000,000 on their Twitter account last year. I read the article recently 5 Reasons Twitter Will Take over Facebook while they made some great points. While this image might be a bit much I’m here to give you the 5 Reasons Twitter Won’t Take over Facebook.

1. Applications: While Twitter has cool outside ways to enjoy Twitter and post pictures and all of that jazz, Facebook has many more on site applications that are more relevant to its user base. Think about it, look in your latest news feed, you’ll see that 4 or 5 of your friends just played around with a quiz application to figure out which Harry Potter character they are more likely to be. It is so much easier to connect to all of the things you love, in so many different ways, through Facebook than it is on Twitter.
2. Search for Old Friends: Twitter has a great search engine for finding other people who are interested or talking about the same things that you are. Facebook needs to integrate that type of search technology into their site. BUT, when it comes to locating old friends, Facebook takes the cake. I constantly am looking for people that I know on Twitter, and since you don’t readily have all of their information available on Twitter, those old friends are hard to locate. Both sites need to take notes from each other’s sites to improve these features. Facebook has twitter dominated in this front
3. Picture Albums: The use of picture albums on Facebook is awesome. Once you post a photo album all of your friends can go back at any time to take a look at those old photos. Twitter has the ability to share photos (and videos) but only in real time. Once a photo has moved far enough down a users timeline, the photo is virtually lost. Again Facebook is killing twitter in the photo sharing realm.
4. 140 Characters or More: Well we all know that Twitter allows you to tell a story in 140 characters or less. But Facebook gives you the opportunity to share a story in more detail without having a blog. You can write and create entire notes on Facebook. If you wanted to do that on Twitter, you’d have to have a whole series of successive tweets, and the story is likely to get lost in most of your twitter followers’ timelines. Facebook 4 Twitter 0.
5. More Brands in More Places: While Twitter allows a brand to create a twitter page, Facebook allows brands to create all sorts of fun pages, applications, and you can even connect your website directly to Facebook. I know we all like to think that Brands follow consumers, and that is true for the smaller brands, but pop-culture and big brands, drive what we do. And let’s face it, being able to design a custom t-shirt on a website, and then send it directly for all of your friends to see on Facebook, is much cooler than just telling people about it on Twitter.

Both of these sites have a lot they can learn from each other. But for the foreseeable future, Facebook is King. And until it’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg decides to sell it and take the money, it’s going to continue to grow at a great pace. He and everyone at Facebook are cutting edge. Twitter relies on everyone else to come up with their ideas and try and implement them. I’ll leave the comment board for all of you to debate this further.

The airlines are FINALLY getting with it. First it was the airports that were slow to get wireless connectivity in their airports for the traveling business people and now the airlines are going to offer wireless internet connections on premium flights.

United Airlines, American Airlines, Delta are all going to offer wifi service on their flights. The wifi connections are probably going to cost a little bit of money but if any of you have been as frustrated as I have that I could not access the internet in the air you’ll be willing to pay a solid amount just to be able to get work done. The wireless service will be based off of the aircell telephone technologies that were introduced to airplanes about 15 years ago.
Southwest Airlines is in the meantime looking into offering a satellite based internet connection. While they have not unleashed any official plans to bring internet connections to the air they are in the process of testing.

Obviously with 9/11 and the collapse of the air travel industry following those events, it wasn’t high on the priority list. But in this fast paced world of constant communication it is about time that they got some connections to their airplanes.

The pricing structure will likely be similar to some major airports in the country which are based on a per flight connection rate. The price is not yet known but it would seem to me they would be able to make their money back in ticket sales and added flight value in a very short amount of time.

My best bet would be that they will charge around $5 per flight to use the internet. I love and have to be connected at all times, so to me that is a fair price, but for the shorter flights that might be a bit steep. Either way, I am extremely excited about the news and I am betting that all of you are as well.

Hey everyone, I trust that you are all having a fantastic start to your week. I am as well, I am just looking for some content ideas from all of you. I want to know what you want to see on here. I have posted a bunch of social media stuff, small business tips, twitter reviews, and other content and now I’m asking for all of you to tell me which direction you’d like me to go with my next few articles. The person who’s idea I use will get credit for it on the blog and our twitter accounts.

Here’s how to give me your idea:

Email Me you ideas and give me your first name and where you are from. I get a lot of email from my readers and the number one thing I always want to know is their name and where they are from. I like to hear all of the fun an interesting ideas that you all ask me about. It’s really fun to get to know all of you a little bit better. So please email me your ideas and give me the above information so that I can give you credit.

If You Aren’t a subscriber Yet here’s how to subscribe
Click on either the orange RSS icon under the “RSS Feed” portion of the sidebar, or you can click on the Email Updates button directly below the RSS icon to receive free updates from eSpire Marketing. It’s as easy as that. I am planning on starting to do a lot extra for my subscribers since the list of them has gotten to be quite large. Thanks everyone!

Recently I purchased a Canon Vixia HSF10 for the extremely high price of $1299 at a local Best Buy. I was extremely excited to get the opportunity to use the brand new 1080P high definition camera. The camera is sleek and very easy to use…if you have a Windows Machine that is. I am a mac user. I love mac, they are in my and millions of other people’s opinions the best computing machine that money can buy. Apparently Canon missed the memo. I opened the box to find out that they only have exporting software available for windows computers!

Now I do believe that this is the 21st century; am I right? I guess maybe it was wrong of me to assume that a big company as large as Canon would have the common sense to send out cross compatible software, as not to pigeon hole a large portion of their potential buyers. I use Final Cut Pro for all of my video editing needs, as do hundreds of thousands of other users, large marketing firms, and big businesses alike. Let me tell you what I have to do in order to actually even begin to edit the hours of footage I’ve shot in the past days.

WARNING: If their are children in the room you might want to read this later, the anger level could cause you to want to swear loudly

Step 1
After searching for two hours to see if Canon had gotten with the times and posted any sort of software to fix their compatability nightmare, I found only one feasable solution, import the live footage into iMovie then export it to Final Cut. Now that does sound like a pretty easy solution right? WRONG!

Step 2
After you have waited for 1.5 hours for your video footage to actually import to iMovie, the next step is to spend another hour or so “pre-editing” the video footage to be exported to final cut. This is an HD camera, if you don’t have the money to spend on a supercomputer like the big dogs have, this process will take FOREVER to do.

Step 3
FINALLY you are ready to export the pre-edited video from iMovie to send for the final editing in Final Cut. The next step is to wait 5 hours for your footage to export from iMovie into a compatible version you will be able to actually edit in Final Cut. I suggest going to the bar and getting a beer or two while you wait, maybe run some errands, by the time you get back your video might actually be ready to be imported to Final Cut for final editing. (NOT SURE HOW LONG THAT TAKES. I’m still waiting for this step to complete as I’m writing this article. It’s been 2.5 hours and iMovie still says I have 235 more minutes until I can edit the video.

Step 4
Go to Canon support once more just to double check that you didn’t miss something and there actually might be a better solution for the millions upon millions of Mac users. Fail miserably. Call Canon support to realize that they aren’t open again until Monday. Go get more beer or run more errands to settle your nerves.

Step 5
Tell all of your friends about this article and possibly even link to it. Post it on all of the major social networking and social media devices you can find.

Step 6
After you have finally spent however long you have spent finishing the final product, go back to where you bought the camera and return it. Purchase a Sony, they have better cameras, with better features, and have the common sense to have cross compatible software included with most of their cameras.

I don’t know that I have ever been so dissatisfied by a $1300 investment in my entire life. I expected to be able to use my brand new camera efficiently and with no problems. I WAS WRONG! DO NOT BUY THIS CAMERA MAC USERS! That is all. Have a better day than Canon or this camera are allowing me to have.

First off let me preface this article by saying this: I am a huge fan of Google and everything that they do but they need to be watched closely they are almost getting too big. Tech Crunch posted that Google Gobbled up 90 Percent of Search Growth in 2008. If you’ll also look further into those numbers Google was the place that people searched the internet 63.5 percent of the time. Next, they came out with their own mobile operating system, then they came out with Google Chrome their internet web browser. Now they want to come out with their own operating system?

If you aren’t seeing what I’m getting at here it’s that Google already controls the market of search, making us rely on them for pay per click, and search engine marketing both on computer and online. If Google’s operating system takes off and they really get a significant market share in the PC world we will have to rely on Google for just about all of our online advertising. With control over so much of the online advertising world they can spike the prices as high as they want.

Think about it, how would you like your target keywords in your pay per click campaigns to shoot from $1.50 per click to $15 a click? I’m not saying that it is necessarily going to happen but it could happen and the situation does need to be watched closely. The article Why We should Root for Bing is pretty much on the same page as I am with all of this. Google, I love you but you need some good solid competition to keep you in check.

While everyone else is concerned with Twitter unleashing their own business model, I know that all of you are more interested in how to create your own twitter business model and how to turn those followers into customers. Monetizing Twitter is not all that difficult of a task. Some will tell you it’s a game of averages, that you should get as many people to follow you as possible regardless of whether they are actually interested in you or not, and start trying to sell things to them. There is no denying that you will see some success with that approach, but by using that approach you will lose some of the added value that your followers can bring you. People who don’t care about you, aren’t going to retweet your posts, aren’t going to say good things about what you’re doing, and aren’t going to be engaged with you on a regular basis. So my suggestion is, that you build a following of people who actually do care about you and your product. While your numbers may not be as big as the next guys, the value of each of your followers, will be much higher.

Step 1:
Build you network of caring followers. Post about things only related to your topic. Follow only people who are interested in your topic, and engage with people who are interested in your topic. The ability to create your own little niche of sorts on twitter is one of it’s greatest features. Using search.twitter.com you can find people who are talking about topics that are related to your field and engage with them.

Step 2:
Engage these followers in some way. Whether that just be general comments, contests, or by posting news updates about your product you need to engage these people and let them know that they are important to you from the start. My favorite thing to do is a contest. They work EVERY time because there is always going to be a small niche of people who are just looking for free stuff.

Step 3:
Determine your Twitter sales approach. Twitter is a great tool for a lot of things. It can be used for customer service, blogging, or sales. If you are looking to make your Twitter account drive more sales for you you have to be sales oriented. Use it to post your sales and deals but also use it to help your customers out with any problems they might be having with your site.

Step 4:
Give people incentive to follow you on Twitter. This should be done whenever you are trying to get more of your customer or user base to engage with you on social media. Give them a discount code just for following you. It’ll make them feel like they are a part of something exclusive and special.

Step 5:
Announce that you are on Twitter. Put a twitter icon on your front page and link it to your twitter page. Blog about your Twitter account. Let people know that they can find you on Twitter and let them know that just for following you you’ll give them an exclusive discount code.

The best way to sell things online is to test new and creative ideas. I challenge all of you to try and push the boundaries of normal practices and put your own spin on them. These are more of guidelines to help you get started selling on Twitter than anything else. Take my ideas and give them your own creative boost. That is when you’ll be able to really take off with Twitter and your other social media campaigns.