Robert Blaise

Do you know how much it costs to acquire each new customer via your website?

Websites are often a significant cost to companies and yet their performance is rarely measured. Your website provides you with an opportunity to acquire new customers in a measurable and cost effective way.

To achieve this, you first need to know what it costs you to acquire each new customer via the website today. Once you know this you will then know whether these new customers are profitable. Obviously if it costs $100 to acquire a customer to your website who only spends $40 during their lifetime then you are losing money.

In order to ensure that the website is positively contributing to the company’s bottom line it is recommended that you examine the cost of customer acquisition as a key performance indicator of your website.

To calculate your cost you need to know:

New customers per month

These are the new customers who have either purchased directly from your website or who became a qualified sales lead via your website or who visited your website and then purchased products or services from your physical outlets.

Website Development Costs

This is the total cost to develop your website as well as major modifications since it was implemented.

Estimated life of the website

How long do you think that this website will be useful to your company before it requires a major overhaul. This figure should be in months.

Monthly Promotion Costs

How much does your company spend on promotions or advertisements that include the website address. Make sure that you include all your online and offline advertisements and promotions.

Monthly Maintenance Costs

How much does your company spend running and maintaining the website including:

* Staffing costs to maintain the website, handle enquiries, etc.
* Hosting costs, ISP fees, bandwidth, etc
* Other fixed costs

Panalysis has put together a nice calculator where you can just plugin your numbers and see the results without doing the math be sure to check it out.

Ecommerce Beats Retailers In Customer Satisfaction

E-consultancy reports that a recent study conducted by the UK National Customer Satisfaction Index scored retailers, e-commerce reported a stunning score of 82 points for Q4 2008 (out of 100). Why is this news so interesting? Because the average retailer customer satisfaction score is 74.8.

Amazon and Play.com helped e-commerce separate itself from the rest by posting 85 and 87 satisfaction scores. I had a feeling Amazon would be ranked high on this list, but I’m really surprised to see Play.com achieve such a high customer satisfaction level. I haven’t personally played around with their site too much, but hopefully this will give them some much deserved attention in the conversion-world for their great work.

I must admit, when I saw Ticketmaster’s score of 74 a small part of me jumped for joy. I don’t think I’d rate their site that high, but I’m glad I’m not the only one. eBay also received a low score of 79. Sites like John Lewis and Tesco were not considered e-commerce Web sites, instead they were placed in an “other” category.

Posted by Taylor Pratt

Tags: E

Just finished a custom Twitter…

Just finished a custom Twitter design Soul Summer for check it http://twitter.com/soulsummer hit me back!

Tags: tweets

Social Media Marketing Good Fo…

Social Media Marketing Good For eCommerce http://tinyurl.com/ddftjk

Tags: tweets

Study: Social Media Marketing Good For eCommerce

Online retailers who haven’t embraced Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media sites had better get a move on if they don’t want to be left behind.  New stats indicate that a whole lot of people have turned to these resources to satisfy some marketing needs.

WhitePaperSource surveyed about 900 marketers and found, “The overwhelming majority (88%) indicated they were employing social media for marketing purposes.”  Which is impressive enough.  What’s more, these marketers aren’t coming up empty-handed.

A report states, “The number-one benefit of social media marketing is gaining the all-important eyeball.  A significant 81% of all marketers indicated that their social media efforts have generated exposure for their businesses.  Improving traffic and growing lists was the second major benefit, followed by building new partnerships.  An unexpected benefit was a rise in search engine rankings reported by more than half of participants.”

So there are really all sorts of ways in which social media marketing can work for online businesses.

It might be best to approach this matter with low expectations - don’t assume every person who follows you on Twitter to order 500 products - but considering that social media marketing is free by definition, eCommerce professionals should go for it.

Article by Doug Caverly

Tags: Social Marketing