My 2008 Case Study
Sales, Stats and Action Taken
WARNING: “If you have an internet business and its in the beginning stages, or you are trying to get more sales from your current site, then this might be one of the most important post you’ll ever read. So pay close attention - this is REAL internet marketing.”
Okay guys, I sent an email to my list on my case study site - (About 100+ or so) and told them that I will be raising the price of the product. The reason I’m raising the price is so I can sell more and make more money. Now I know what you are thinking, “What! Raise price to sell more?”.
Yes! It’s called perceived value.
But we’ll get to that in a moment . . .
So what happened?
I made a few sales which was great, but at this stage of the game, what I really wanted were the stats.
And they are in:
The email was sent to 104 people - who were already receiving emails from me through a weekly autoresponder. So they were being pre-sold through the information from my weekly autoresponder.
Pre-Selling is giving quality free information away to help educate your customer about the product. This is not ’selling’ at all.
Out of 104 people, only 33 actually opened their emails and 20 of them took action by clicking on the link I sent them and bottom line, I made 5 sales.
What does all of this mean?
STATS:
33/104 = 31% of people bothered opening that email. Reason why the percentage was kind of low for my standards (Especially my first email blast) was because
I implemented a autoresponder system in January and the person who signs up - gets the autoresponder on a weekly basis. However, I only had 3 autoresponder emails setup. So after contacting them for the first three weeks - they weren’t contacted at all! I missed out on almost 15 weeks of customer contact that could have increased my business substantially! This 69th percentile probably saw my email and went “What the heck is Home Booze? I don’t remember this stuff!”
I feel so stupid right now because I missed out on sales, increased return traffic and increased search engine traffic (As the links on my newsletter redirected them to a relevant page on my site).
See this is what happens when (insert your excuse here) you start too many projects at once . But I’m kind of glad because I FINALLY got a schedule figured out and printed it out which sits on my desk daily. So bottom line, create a schedule for what you do and do it daily - lack of organziation is bad for your business as you’ve just witnessed! RRRRRRR
ACTION according to STATS:
I’m going to add 20 autoresponders and keep adding one every week to make up for this BS that I pulled on my self! Feel like a total retard.
NOTE: When I mess up, I’m really hard on my self - whatever! I’ll bounce back with a vengence! I forgive my self - its okay . . .
STATS:
20/33 = 60.6% of people who did read took action within the email and visited the site. This is good percentile - considering these people were only contacted three times or less. That shows the content within the emails is good and people like it. But it can always be improved. So with this number I’m happy.
ACTION according to STATS:
I will work on the look and layout of the newsletters a little - make it more clean, and besides I have to change the logo in the newsletters anyway.
STATS:
5/20 = 25% of people who came to the site after signing up to my weekly automated newsletter bought my product. That means my conversion rate from autoresponders is 25%. According to google analytics, its even better at 5/19 which is 26%!
Again, this could have easily been in the 40 percentile or higher (Just from experience) if I only contacted them like I was suppose to. But 25% still tells me that is a very healthy conversion rate and its only going to get higher. I should also mention the ebook customers get when the sign up - its really very informative.
ACTION according to STATS:
Create more customer contact by adding all the remaining newsletters.
So overall in my opinion - SWEEEEEEET!
I love stats because stats is what its all about - Welcome to REAL Internet Marketing.
Overall Action:
- Re-organizing and creating my autoresponders.
- Modify the look of the autoreponders a little - clean it up.
- Keep adding new autoresponders every week.
Don’t let all this “Stats Talk” steer you away into non-action because keep in mind, we are in the beginning stages of this case study so get stuff like this right the first time and then once done, just promote the crap out of your website!
But before we get to that stage, their is still a lot of work to be done - I’ll keep you posted 
PS: I’ll touch on the ‘Perceived Value’ thing in my next post after I jack up the price for my case study product.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Squidoo for one way backlinks
Okay, so today for our case-study, I created a Squidoo Lense. A Squidoo Lense is just another way of saying ‘A web page’. So basically, you get to create these mini one page sites about whatever you want.
Squidoo is a way to redirect targeted traffic and get a quality one way backlink to your site. Honestly, if I don’t get a single hit from that site I’m cool with that, because as long as my link is on their its all good :).
Why would you want to create a Squidoo page? Because they get a lot of traffic - although recently, Squidoo’s pages were shot down by Google due to many spam pages that Squidoo didn’t do $hit about. I actually wrote a pretty hardcore article about it on how much Squidoo sucks. I believe I called them ‘Spamoo’ LOL - I’m so funny
The cool thing is, they are now getting back on track and so you should take advantage and create a Squidoo Lense. I love the fact that I can add my RSS Feeds on their for my case study because then I don’t have to keep adding content on a regular basis to my Squidoo Page. It’s done automatically
Check out my Squidoo lense on “How to make alcohol” that I created for the case study. I’ll be adding more to it through the day and then I’ll just let it sit. If you notice, I’ve used the exact keyword as a URL for my Squidoo URL. Make sure you keep your keywords in mind. Especially the main keywords and especially when you are getting backlinks from high quality sites.
I’m also going to be adding further content to my Squidoo Lense to create further ‘deep links’ to my case study (I think I have some on their already.
SAY WHAT!: Deep links are links from other sites pointing to your website’s internal pages (Not your homepage). It gives more value to your site in the search engines and helps even more in serps.
After creating my Squidoo Lense, it gave me another KICK A$$ idea but I’ll let you know about it once I actually implement it.
My point is if you can get a one-way backlink from a high quality site, get it and keep hustling!
Popularity: 2% [?]
Getting testimonials from ebay for your website
Testimonials can increase your conversions and sales dramatically. They are a must. But you don’t need one liners - that only works on ebay because their is not enough room to truly describe the buyer’s experience. You need at least one paragraph when putting testimonials on your website. If you can get video testimonials, that is even better.
So how did I get testimonials from ebay for my case study? I used eBay’s email feature. I was selling my wine making kit on ebay until they suspended me for 30 days for having really slow shipment (My fault totally). But that didn’t stop me from growing. I took that as a positive and since I had a ebay store, I emailed all my buyers (Broadcasted email to all just by creating a template) and asked them for some feedback.
Understand that most people, even if they like your product, just don’t have time to respond - so I offered them a free gift (Free 3 months supply of yeast to go with the wine making kit) as bait.
Below is the copy of the email I sent them through eBay:
Now what I’m going to do is after each purchase, I’m going to send an email using eBay’s email system to each person who buys my wine making kit through ebay after exactly 14 days. This will not only build my testimonials for my website, but also help me improve my product further.
You don’t have to be an eBay Store owner for this as you can manually send an email such as above yourself - though an eBay store makes the job slightly easier. They even let your personalize emails which is an awesome start. This is a great way to improve your product, build relationships with your customers and get testimonials.
So the testimonials started coming in and I’m slowly adding them one by one. NICE
Click HERE to see how it looks like on my case study site. I hope you like the web 2.o design I chose.
Popularity: 2% [?]