As part of my work I ended up at the Irish Internet Association's conference "8 Ways to Sell More Stuff" at the Davenport Hotel in Dublin, last Thursday.
As a developer I wasn't expecting to learn too much from a conference about selling and online business, but then it's always good to keep up to speed with all areas of your work, and understanding business in relation to IT systems and websites is probably as important as making sure an index is properly optimised on a database table or some other uber-geeky thing like that.
An Post
The afternoon started off, after some tea and coffee and very nice short bread biscuits, with a talk from the Conference's sponsor, An Post. They were basically flogging their service for parcel delivery to internet businesses that need a delivery service. Fair play to them for this though as they were sponsoring the event. The other point they raised was the relaunch and rebranding of their shopping website shoppingdirectory.ie to iloveshopping.ie. This seems to be another good outlet for Irish internet businesses to flog their wares through, and extend their market reach.
Curious Wines
Next up was Michael Kane, founder of Curiouse Wines, along with his brother Matt. Mike is obviously a guy who cares about what he sells and making sure his customers get the best service. This talk was more of a case study in to starting and building an online business.
His talk focussed on customer service, for example including a small christmas present in a delivery, being courteous and personable in emails and on the website, not pretending to be something you aren't, as well as not spamming people and respecting people's wishes to be contacted (couldn't agree with him more on this point, as I really don't think a database of users emails is a measure of success and abusing such a list with spam or what you think is useful emails is just wrong and ultimately detrimental to a companies reputation).
He also touched on using Facebook and Twitter pre-launch, not ramming it down your friends and followers throats, but building up a base and follwoing, chatting with people, being "sociable" and then just mentioning your website is launched. Not rocket science, but not trivial or quick and easy.
Customer Faithful
Rick Harris from Customer Faithful was next up. Clearly somebody who knew his business about customer experience, how to improve a website from a consumers point of view and make the most of what you have to find that niche market.
He broke his talk down in to four sections:
- Responsibility
- Vigilance
- Resourcefulness
- Networks
Responsibility was to wrap the benefits into buying a product e.g. the consumer wants a dishwasher and all they really care about is getting a good dishwasher, but if they see all the otehr benefits such as environmetally friendly, energy efficient, it may just help to tip the scales in your favour.
Vigilance was about giving confidence and advice to the consumer, to make sure they made a good choice and the right choice.
Resourcefulness focused on helping the user make a smarterr choice, perhaps a personalised choice if you can't compete with the likes of supermarkets, and the right choice so that the consumer definitely gets what they want.
Networks hihglighted the fact that it's not jsut about social networking such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, but about online partenerships too e.g. tying up with PayPal, a delivery service like An Post, UPS, FedEx or DHL, or joining a reward scheme like Nectar or Air Miles.
Manpacks
After the break there was an entertaining speech from Andrew Draper of Manpacks, delivering his keynote address. In Manpacks own words, Manpacks is "a start-it, stop-it, change-it-anytime subscription for underwear, shirts, and socks" because "men hate to shop". A site with a pretty novel idea, executed well.
This again was more a case study of setting up an online business than anything else, but there were a few nuggets of information and re-enforcing of simple ideas that are key to the online industry such as the user experience matters and is "absolutely key", don't make the user think (e.g. you don't want the user confused about where to click to buy stuff or how to find a product) and the user will always have questions.
Another thing taken away from this talk was iterative design processes and testing, always tweaking the design, running A/B tests to see what performed best. One highlight was when he mentioned that an expert had said place products on the homepage, which they did but affected their site in bad ways, so they took it off. This shows that what works for one, does not always work for the other, so test and experiment.
Some references taken from this talk include:
- http://springwise.com/
- The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steven Gary Blank
- The 4-Hour Workweek - Timothy Ferriss
- The Purple Cow - Seth Godin
Spendrift Consulting
Following Andrew, was Ed Langley from Spendrift Consulting. He mentioned a couple of quotes from some internet marketing surveys such as "choice, value and service" and "choice, value and convenience", which formed the core of his presentation.
Towards the end he spoke about conversion rates, highlighting the fact that if you have a 3% conversion rate, a 1% increase in your conversion rate will lead to a 33% sales increase, before re-inforcing the idea that as involved with your site and products as you may be, always try to use the site as a shopper and see what and where improvements can be made.
He concluded by stating these key points:
- A small increase in conversion rates can have a huge impact.
- Some stuff to improve a site can be done already without great expense (or any expense except a little time).
- Plan changes and measure them, before, during and after.
- Research your options.
After these presentations, there were a few quickfire 15 min presentations from various companies before movng on to the final presentation.
Landing Page Optimisation - Niamh Phelan
I probably found this the most interesting and relevant talk from my perspective as a developer. Niamh Phelan, from Dell, spoke about the "upper funnel" and "lower funnel". The lower funnel being the fairly linear checkout process, the upper funnel being where the user jumps around the products, into the basket, back out, a few more products, back in, so on and so forth, before entering the lower funnel, if they move in to the lower funnel at all.
She then went on to talk about identifying key landing pages through Google Analytics, using Content > Top Landing Pages > Entrance and Exit rates, and experimenting with different landing pages using Google Website Optimiser and A/B testing etc.
Niamh's personal blog can be found at http://holisticanalytics.ie/.
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