Internet Marketing Help - Useful Help For Internet Marketing Beginners

The 3 Main Purposes of Your Website

A good product or service website should never just be an online catalog of your offerings. To maximize your sales, you need to make sure that you are using your website to it's fullest potential. There are three main purposes that your site should fulfill;

1. Customer Acquisition Winning new customers. This involves the whole process of converting your site visitors into customers. Your website, and especially your copy (text), should clearly communicate what you are offering. You should outline the benefits of your product or services and provide relevant information on the right pages. Your entire website should be geared at helping people to buy the products or services that they have come looking for. Your website is also a brand building tool, so remember to clearly portray your business image and what you stand for.

2. Customer Retention Keeping customers. You can increase the chances of a customer buying from you repeatedly by using timely reminder emails, promotional offers and incentives for them to keep coming back to your site. A weekly newsletter gives you the ability to deliver relevant and useful information containing good reasons for your subscribers to come back. Use your site as a communication tool, to get closer to customers. Through it you can learn more about them, customize content for them, and keep the conversation flowing. Make it easy for customers to communicate with you through your website by using such tools as a contact form, call back request forms, live chat, a forum and a facility for customers to check their order status easily. These things will all help add personality to your internet marketing.

3. Customer Extension Selling extra things to customers. As I mentioned before, you can really boost your sales by selling other relevant products or services to the same customer. By using your existing information about the types of things that were previously purchased, you can get a good idea of other products or services (or upgrades) that your customers might be interested in, and present these things before, or in followup emails after the sale.

What Kind of Website Do Your Customers Want?

Although there are many different types of websites online, ranging from big flash animations right down to text-only pages - how can you be sure what kind of website your customers will prefer? I think to answer this question, we need to look at the main things that people look for in a website.

A survey of 8600 U.S. consumers conducted by Forrester revealed the 4 main factors that made users return to a website:

1. High quality content - Good, relevant information that is easily accessible when the customer needs it

2. Ease of use - Clear, easy site navigation. Easy to find the pricing and order page and other required information

3. Quick to download - Internet users are becoming increasingly impatient and will mostly leave if the website takes too long to load

4. Updated frequently - Fresh content. New information which is useful, relevant and timely for the audience. This could involve industry news, a blog, regular forum posts, competitions and special seasonal promotions.

To compare the best credit card be sure to check out my site over at http://www.creditcardhelp.com.au