Author: David Dinh

For over 10 years David has helped drive hundreds of thousands of customers to businesses and understands what it takes to manage the chaos and headache of customers across different departments, systems and platforms. From roles in product development, product management, working in enterprises and advising for businesses going to sale and exit, David’s DNA is understanding the customer. David currently serves as Chief Operating Officer and Growth at Woveon, ensuring teams can scale and respond back to all their customers.

DIY: Your Perfect Sales Strategy

Posted on December 17, 2018June 23, 2021 by David Dinh

To succeed, every business needs to develop a good sales strategy. However, good marketing is not the end of the effort. Instead, businesses should leverage good marketing for further development i.e. for planning and implementing a strategy to successfully sell to their customers. A deliberate, thoughtful activity, successful sales requires a process that you initiate repeatedly.

Below are a few DIY sales strategy that you need to consider

In short, successful sales isn’t possible without an effective sales strategy. So, how do you create an effective sales strategy and what sales strategies do you include in it?

1. Plan Ahead

Without some planning and forethought, you cannot have a successful sales campaign. Before anything else, you need to list down the goals for your sales campaign. Once you’ve done that, set the parameters for your campaign i.e. how much you’ll spend on materials, which sales channels you’ll use, what special offers would you have during the course of the campaign and how long the campaign will run.

Be specific when setting your goals. A good thing to do would be setting the main goal and a stretch goal. For example, if your main goal is selling three thousand units of a product then your stretch goal could be selling five thousand units of the same product. Once you know your target, you will have a good idea of how long it’ll take for you to reach your goals. Moreover, you will have a good idea of how much money you should be ideally spending on your campaign.

Related:
Proven Sales Strategies

2. Consider the Type of Sales Strategy Your Business Needs

Businesses have to choose from two basic types of sales strategies: direct and indirect. If you go for a direct sales strategy, you will have to fight your competitors head on to win customers. Businesses using this strategy talk about each feature of the competitor’s product and then compare it to theirs. This is the reason a direct sales strategy is often referred to as ‘negative selling’. On the other hand, an indirect sales strategy involves the use of more subtle techniques to win customers and make sales.

Unlike the businesses using a direct sales strategy, businesses using an indirect sales approach demonstrate/promote features and benefits not offered by their competitors. An indirect sales strategy requires a lot of research and analysis to be successful.

3. Think About Ways to Motivate Your Sales Team

Once you’ve set the parameters for your sales campaign, you need to think about how you can motivate your sales team to make the campaign successful. Even the best-planned campaign will fail if you don’t have a motivated sales team. Offering extra compensation to the sales team can help you to make your sales campaigns successful. Of course, the easiest and probably the best way to motivate salespeople is by offering a cash bonus. For example, if the purpose of a sales campaign is to promote and sell more of a particular -product then a good strategy would be offering the sales team double commission for successfully selling that product.

Another strategy that could work well is setting up a contest where you offer the salesperson selling the most units of the new product a big bonus. If you’re short on cash, then you can offer some non-monetary rewards such as certificates and medals.

4. Define Your Target Market

Your sales success depends on how well you know your target market. You won’t be doing business with everyone. And even if you were, you’d have to start somewhere. To build up momentum in your sales campaign, you need to have a specific target area or market. This is the area or market you need to focus on. It is important that your target market is big enough. Your odds of success will decrease if your target market is too small. To have the numbers working in your favor, you may have to combine two similar target markets.

CTR Benchmarks for the e-Commerce Industry

Posted on December 15, 2018March 5, 2019 by David Dinh

When you’re practicing in any particular field, you need to pay attention to the benchmarks which apply to it. If you don’t know what the benchmarks are, you’re not going to be aware of whether you’re meeting business goals or missing it by a wide margin. For this reason, you need to be aware of the benchmarks that apply to you, particularly when you’re using Click Through Rate a.k.a CTR for your website and in the e-Commerce industry.

Luckily, there are various benchmarks that apply and you can look at the following areas to know what to keep an eye on.

Below are e-Commerce Metrics to look for

1. Data Collection

When it comes to the benchmark for data collection, the lowest time for it is a difference of a year. The click-through rate differs each month and it is difficult to make a correct reading of the results you’re going to get. For this reason, it isn’t uncommon to see proper CTR readings being done over the course of a year. Some businesses even tend to focus on this aspect on a two-year basis so that they can study the fluctuations and other issues with more ease.

The reason why data collection is encouraged for a longer period of time is that it allows for the problems to be correctly visible and be easier to identify. A click-through rate can be rather fickle and what looks bad in one month might make a complete recovery in the next one without requiring much intervention from your side.

2. Dividing Into Segments

The data collected shouldn’t just be filed under one category. For a correct view at the click-through rate your e-Commerce business enjoys, you need to define the data and consider a few other factors in mind too. By dividing it into segments, you end up increasing the significance of the data in hand. With e-Commerce businesses, you want to understand which platform the clicks are coming from. This will give you an understanding regarding the success or failure of your total click click-through.

On this basis, you can have it dividing into three major sections such as mobile, tablet and desktop. Not only does this allow you to optimize your e-Commerce strategy, but it also ensures that you can apply various other functions which can make your store more attractive for users.

3. Know the Industry Standards

Once you have the data into different segments, you want to be aware of where your standing is in comparison with your competitors. While growth in the e-Commerce industry is fast, the competition you face is usually fierce because there are plenty of stores and products as well as industry giants such as Amazon and eBay. For this reason, working out where you stand in the market will help you understand the kind of changes you need to make. Knowing your industry standard can play a huge impact on determining how far or how short of the mark you have fallen.

By understanding this aspect, you will be able to work out your progress and the growth you need to experience. Keep in mind that getting the average for your total click through rates can be tricky as it is not just different from industry to industry; it is also different for each segment within the same industry too. For this reason, you can turn to online tools that can crunch all the industry data and show your average in comparison to the e-Commerce industry.

4. Comparison through Correlation

Now that you found the average of your click through rate which applies to the industry average as well, you need to focus on the correlation of your data. Correlation will allow you to make more accurate comparisons regarding the data you get. It also gives you a clearer image of the kind of benchmark expected from you and the kind of progress you should be making.

Correlation also gives you a clearer picture of each component in your CTR strategy and how it is working out to be. At the end of the day, it also helps to highlight which areas need more work and which are underperforming. Using a simple graph and a formula, you can easily make sure that you have all the components you need to excel and grow with ease.

With these industry benchmarks, you will be able to utilize and improve your click through rate with bigger success.

Proven Sales Strategies

Posted on December 10, 2018March 15, 2023 by David Dinh

The ease to launch an online store has significantly increased the number of businesses competing against each other online. Having a winning sales strategy is extremely important for businesses wanting to boost sales and achieve customer success. To smooth out the bumps and make revenues incredibly predictable, you need to have a strategic plan to increase sales. Even a slight increase in sales will allow you to experience downstream benefits. So, having the right sales strategy in place is crucial. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to spend excessive amounts of money to increase your sales and grow your business. There are some affordable yet effective sales strategies that you can use to trigger increased sales and business growth.

Below are Proven Sales Strategies to Increase Sales

1. Offer A Single Product or Service on Your Home Page

Do you sell countless products or services on your website? If yes, then it’s recommended that you revisit this sales strategy of yours. According to the experts, the fewer products you have in one place, the more likely you are to make a sale. Though, it’s crucial that you use the additional space available to you to describe the products in more detail. Kissmetrics outlines this situation perfectly in their article https://blog.kissmetrics.com/too-many-choices/ “Are you losing sales by giving customers too many choices”.

The aforementioned- strategy is all about focus. Rather than offering a large range of products with little detail about each product to please every visitor to your site, you choose to offer one product with more detail about it to remove the doubts of your most valuable visitors and convince them to buy your product. Now, this does not mean that you stop selling your other products. You can always use follow up offers or the other web pages to offer them to your customers. However, to be 100% sure that this strategy will work with your target audience, you need to test it. Only after testing will you know whether offering a single product or service on your home page is an effective sales strategy.

2. Use AD Extensions to Get More Clicks

Ad-extension is a no-brainer if you’re selling stuff online. Available in both Bing and AdWords, this feature ‘extends’ your ad and give people more options to click. Without costing you anything extra, ad-extension increases the click-through rate of your ad. Isn’t that amazing? Following is an example that’ll help you understand this better.

In the aforementioned-example, people looking to buy a new pair of Ray-Ban have two places other than the main link to click on. The two-additional links are ‘Men’s sunglasses’ and ‘Women’s sunglasses’. By saving them a step, the additional links make it faster and easier for potential customers to find exactly what they want. This in turn prevents them from going to a competitor’s site. In the end, this increases your chances of making a successful sale, making the use of ad -extensions one of the best sales strategies.

3. Offer A Personalized Experience

By offering a personalized experienced to your prospects or visitors to your site, you will increase your chances of making a sale. Today, more and more customers, especially online customers, are demanding personalized, one-of-a-kind experiences that cater to their needs and interests. Thanks to technological advancement, even the smaller players can create a personalized shopping experience that helps them to capture the interest and preferences of the individual shoppers. By leveraging individualized promotions and user experiences, you can increase your sales. Unsure how to do this? Shopify provides examples of how this can be done https://www.shopify.com/retail/4-ways-to-personalize-your-customer-s-shopping-experience

4. Bundle Your Products and Services

A sales strategy that many businesses have used to considerable success is selling products and services as a package rather than individual offerings. Most people equate bundled services or products with savings, even if the savings are minimal. So, by offering your services or products as a package, you will make it easier for yourself to sell. Now, when you package your services and/or products, make sure your bundle offerings are flexible.

A potential customer may not buy a bundle you’re offering if he or she feels that only two of the five services/products offered in the bundle apply to his or her business. You will be able to use this sales strategy successfully if you stay flexible enough to change different products or services to align with multiple needs.

5. Build the Right Relationships

In the business world, who you know is more important than what you know. If you want to taste success then you must build the right relationships, both online and offline. Regardless of which industry you belong to or what type of product you sell, you will find like-minded businesses out there and these businesses are who you need to befriend.

Build a relationship with businesses that are closely aligned to you but aren’t your direct competitors. Some examples are bloggers, suppliers, industry experts. By building relationships with the above, you will get the word out about your business and this will increase your chances of making successful sales.

Digital Transformation Best Practices

Posted on December 5, 2018June 23, 2021 by David Dinh

The government of Australia has already outlined a number of initiatives, related to digital transformation, in the Budget 2017-18, stating that they are working to modernize and consolidate their systems, also training their staff members in various digital skills. Being the key solution to adopt advancements of technology, digital transformation, and its proper implementation, are crucial for existing businesses in Australia.

With the advancement of consumer technology, there is also a transformation of the various ways in which a consumer explores, discovers, buys or engages with your services and products, allowing them to shift their behavior from traditional boundaries.

The Most Effective Digital TransformationPractices

1. Create an Exceptional Digital Team

The most effective practice for digital transformation is to build a high performance and efficient digital team. To utilize the team purposefully, management must strive to make a team of individuals with varied backgrounds. This makes them a dynamic team that is well equipped to lead in the digital world.

To be more precise, these individuals know how to deal with the odds and be comfortable with the uncomfortable business situations, ensuring a consistent journey towards digital transformation. It is important for a digital team to keep the mindset of experimentation. This in turn, significantly helps in shifting the mindset of the whole organization in lesser time and more efficiently.

2. Follow through with the Shared Vision

Digital transformation must be a shared vision to reach a favorable outcome. In this way, an organization can achieve the complete transformation with successful implementation through the organizational structure, by means of a series of projects and different combinations of new initiatives.

This practice brings a lot of responsibility for the management in terms of bringing the people together, creating and clearly communicating a shared vision, convincing people to strive hard for that vision and to work mutually and collectively, to not only figure out the approach but to ensure its attainment.

3. Thinking from the Outside-In

To adopt and implement digital transformation, the best practice is to build the culture of thinking from the outside-in i.e. from the perspective of the consumer experience. To keep it more accurate, make a good combination of analytics and user experience that will help in driving the consumer-oriented strategy. The most important factor is to prevent a fall to the level where it fails to meet the expectations of the end consumer.

The process of changing the existing working patterns of an organization requires efforts in the right direction. Expanding an existing platform of an organization may demand contributions and acceptance of changes organization-wide. To keep efforts in the right direction, the first thing is to do only what is truly required and not being done for the sake of digital transformation.

4. Analytical and Experimental

There is no right way to attain digital transformation. This extensive transformation requires hours of experimentation, and accurate analytical thinking, before reaching the desired outcome. Become experimental and analytical, and try something outside the box – an initiative, which will help in opening new and better ways to measure the performance immediately. While planning has its own importance in digitally transforming an organization’s culture, the best practice is to think and implement it in shorter cycles and to apply the information and strategies accurately.

Customer Privacy in a Nutshell

Posted on December 1, 2018March 5, 2019 by David Dinh

Think that maintaining the confidentiality of consumers is only a consideration for business giants like Sony or Facebook? Think again.

In recent years, numerous small and big organizations have not only lost their customer base due to privacy issues but were also sued due to these privacy mishaps. In the modern world, organizations are, morally as well as legally, obligated to deal with the private information of their customer base fairly and respectfully.

Customer Privacy: Comcast Vows to Respect Consumers’ Privacy

Comcast – a big name in global telecommunication recently pledged respect for the private information of the customers. The giant decided to distance itself from ISPs like Verizon or AT&T that lobbied the Congress to dissolve internet privacy protection.

Complying with federal privacy protection laws, Comcast first supported the removal of newly-imposed regulations. However, it clearly stated that it has no intention of selling the customer’s histories or web browsing data, and will ensure the privacy of consumers’ data.

Wonder how Google always show results and advertisements that match your current or existing interests?

The Sharing nature of consumers:

Just by visiting a website, you may be unwittingly sharing your personal information, in terms of your IP address, the page that led you to this current website and the websites you have been visiting over and over again, or the searches you have been making over the internet.

And by collecting cookies and with various advanced tracking mechanisms, companies are gathering enough information to shift user priorities and experiences pretty easily, and without directly communicating with the end user.

Eventually, what you are most likely to find on the webpage in terms of advertisements, news, and updates is everything related to your current interests!

So isn’t it good to get such kind of personalization as a user?

Yes, it is, except in the situation when your personal information is misused, through various means and for many reasons. There is a lot of consideration, amongst many big and small start-ups in Australia, for the privacy issues and what users are actually risking while reaping this kind of personal experience.

With the increasing level of awareness amongst users about this cyber threat, companies are now forced to shift their business strategies to maintain the confidentiality of the information along with meeting their customers’ expectations.

Consumer Privacy as part of an Organisation’s Business Strategy

Every business strategy is now focusing on keeping customer privacy as their prime consideration in establishing laws and policies. Some businesses, however, fail to understand the importance of the data acquired by them, as well as the risks attached, and the responsibility that lies on their shoulders for its protection.

With the endless possibilities of using this data, consumers’ data is one of the most effective tools and a golden opportunity for companies to build their goodwill. Majority of the time, businesses take consumer privacy in account, only after witnessing an incident, which is why many organizations in Australia, are now changing the way they do business – keeping a good and fair balance between marketing strategies and protecting consumer privacy.

To keep it all transparent, companies are now also making these moves;

Better and clear communication of the organization’s privacy policies through different channels and ways that would keep it easy for customers to understand.
To foster trust, companies are now striving to ensure that a secured online environment is provided at all times.
Giving customers a better choice through various features and permission options, about sharing their private information or allowing collection of their data. Many websites are now including well-designed opt-out pages to give full control to the user for allowing or declining the collection of data.
Company websites are now using short term cookie timelines, also making the collected data anonymous frequently. Creating anonymous data requires masking of IP addresses and cookie identifiers, after a short while, or storing the information related to the account separately from the logs, to ensure improved security and privacy for their users.

Australian Government and Consumer Privacy

There are some privacy changes coming soon, in the next year, and organizations in Australia must be ready to adapt to these changes that establish a strong control of consumer privacy.

Some of these changes may include;

Data breach notification is becoming mandatory from February 2018, for all organizations/entities, which are required to act in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988. Following that, in May, the GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation – is also coming into force.

Together, both of these amendments, or let’s say requirements, are going to demand fundamental changes in all Australian organizations, in terms of handling consumers’ personal information, also setting the stage to introduce some of the largest privacy regulation changes in the last decade.

4 Terribly Executed Customer Strategies that People Use

Posted on November 27, 2018March 15, 2023 by David Dinh

Having a good customer service strategy is really important if you want your business to run smoothly. One wrong experience for a customer and it can create a snowball effect for the company and can ruin your brand image.

Unfortunately, bad customer experience is inevitable and there will come a point in time where you will have to deal with some dissatisfied customers. This is a good way to see any cracks in the management and service of your company and you can learn from the experience.

How you respond and react to your customers sets the tone for good damage control. No matter what the trends of marketing strategy for a business may be, one thing remains true that the customer is king. The customer might not always be right but you don’t have to let them know this. Your mission should always be to deliver the best, in any way possible, without causing any further problems for the people who help you run your business, a.k.a. the customers.

**4 Ways of NOT Carrying out a Customer-Driven Strategy**

1. Not following the market trends

Times have changed drastically since the advent of the internet. Marketing strategies have evolved over time and most of the ad campaigns rely heavily on online strategies to target customers. Online marketing tools are in fact, so important for any business that it is almost impossible to survive. Even mom and pop run businesses need some online marketing tools these days to attract more customers.

Using SEO based strategies to come up in the search results is just one of the many examples of how you can create a more customer-focused strategy. Cookies that follow online users and Adwords are also crucial to the online marketing mix.

See also:Customer Experience Strategy

2. Not including social media

These days, companies have at least one social media page even before they have a website. There is also a flipside to it; businesses that already have websites are now creating their own social media pages and strategies to target their customers.

Thus today, social media is like an extension of your business. A customer might not sit down specifically to send you an email or feedback for the product or service you are selling. But if you have a social media account that they follow and regularly use, there are higher chances of them coming to your page and leaving feedback. Your social media posts would be on their timeline or feed frequently and they will almost always respond or comment on it.

3. Not following up

Customer satisfaction and feedback are two sides of the same coin. Sometimes you have to nudge the customers a little to know what their opinion is and ask for their suggestions. A little bit of tweaking and change can go such a long way and in doing so, you will also gain their trust by showing that you genuinely care about their opinions.

Reach out to your customers by any means necessary after providing them with any service or product. You can have a questionnaire or online feedback form filled or send them an email. Having a rating and review feature like Amazon is a good example.

4. Not seeing things from the customers’ perspective

Many businesses just view their customer base as a bunch of numbers or a portion of the pie that they wish to devour. They should realize that at the end of the day, they are dealing with a large group of unique individuals that have to be catered to, according to their needs. Using the same cookie-cutter approach doesn’t do well all the time. Customers now know that when their rights are being stepped over. Even if the customer is wrong in a situation, businesses should never point it out in a way that would make them leave for good.

Connecting with the customers on a personal level and making them realize that they are dealing with people who care, is the best customer-centered approach any business can use.

What are the Components of Customers Data that Have to be Secured?

Posted on November 22, 2018June 23, 2021 by David Dinh

The level of security provided to the sensitive information of a business or an individual determines their privacy. With the digital age progressing fast with every passing second, the concerns on the privacy of data are mounting as well. Whenever and wherever the data is provided, collected, and stored, there is a high risk of its being misused, lost, or being accessed by unauthorized people when left unprotected.

Therefore, the Privacy Act 1988 was set in place to make the entities take essential steps for the protection of customer’s data and prevent it from being misused in any way. Moreover, this step ensured that the concerned authorities collecting the data would either destroy or at least de-identify the customer’s data once it is not needed anymore.

While the Privacy Act is subjected to a number of organizations, credit providers, agencies, and credit reporting bodies, the entities that do not come under this, should try to follow these rules as well. This will ensure improved security of the personal information of their customers.

Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) Guide

The Australian government has also released a guide that will help the organization secure private information in the best way possible. This guide is not legally binding. However, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) refers to it whenever it is undertaking any Privacy Act functions. Further information on the regulatory powers that are to be exercised can be found in the Privacy Regulatory Action Policy.

The data of customers are subjected to easy attack from the criminals of the cyber world in several ways. Thanks to the ambiguous nature that a connected world offers, the security concerns have increased tremendously. Mobile networks, BYOD, bringing your own devices in public areas, and IP addresses set to public setting provide environments that are unprotected and are not the best way to access sensitive data.

While the consumers are concerned that their data might be stolen, the government identities and businesses are always on the lookout for protection against malicious cyber attacks on a number of fronts, including even their own organizations.

Here are the Components of a Customer’s Data that needs Protection

This means that there is a great need to understand which type of customer’s data needs to be protected on a priority basis.

In order to make it easier for you to identify the data that should be protected, we have compiled a list of components of customers’ data that should be protected:

Biometric Information: This is used for identifying an individual on the basis of one of their distinguishing biological trait. Such traits include fingerprints, iris and retina patterns, signatures, and DNA. This information comes under the personal identification type and can create many issues if it reaches the wrong person.
License Number: Personally identifiable information is the licensee number since it is unique and can easily be traced to that individual.
Medical Information: Another important type of data that needs protection is an individual’s medical information. It can allow a criminal to commit identity theft.
Date of Birth: Perhaps no other information requires a higher level of protection than an individual’s date of birth as it is the most commonly asked question when checking anything for security purposes.
Employee ID: In the wrong hands, an employee ID can create a lot of problems for the person. If the data becomes insecure the thief can use the information for stealing other more important types of data.
Social Security Numbers such as Citizen Visa code: Stealing someone’s citizen visa code is the most common form of robbery. This allows the culprits to steal IDs and conduct illegal activities through it.
Patents: These allow a person to have legal ownership of their product.
Copyright: Anything that is copyrighted for an individual should be properly protected. Theft in this case means that you would be losing your intellectual property.
Industrial Designs: A company’s industrial design should also be well protected as well since they are responsible for giving them an economic advantage over other competitive businesses.
Trademark: What is more unfortunate than losing your original trademark? The logo of a company is their identification mark and losing it means losing a lot of clientele as well.
Data on new business Ideas
Passwords for forums where the customers market their businesses such as social media
Legal Documents numbers
Credit Cards: These should be protected for the safeguard of your hard earned money
ACH Numbers needs protection as well
Bank Account Information
Loan Information
Payroll Information: This can lead to financial losses
Non-salary Information (expenses, fringe benefits, pension, etc.)
Investment Information (Stock, 401K, Trade, etc.)
Any of the unique identification system that is created by the customer

The Secret Sauce for a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy

Posted on November 17, 2018June 23, 2021 by David Dinh

Whether you’re a billion dollar company with a million different customers to your name or a small firm still in its cradle catering to only a handful of people, you need a proper digital marketing strategy in place to lure customers and ensure that they stay on your website for longer than a few brief seconds.

Digital Marketing Strategy Ideas for 2019

1. Customer Segmentation

Businesses that fail to properly divide their customer base into proper segments fail in the long run. For instance, a toy will attract little kids while an electronic gadget will lure in older teenagers. If your company focuses only on marketing to the little ones, the teenagers and any adults will simply migrate over to your immediate competition. Your business suffers the loss of an important demographic simply because it failed to segment its customer base into identifiable groups each of which has unique requirements. One size doesn’t fit all. Learn to reach your most profitable customers first.

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See also: Customer Engagement

You will need proper advertisement campaigns focusing on both kinds of customers. It doesn’t really matter if your business does indeed sell to both of them. For instance, if you only advertise to little kids, you can’t expect teenagers to know of the brand new gaming console you’re selling by magically landing on your website. You can’t expect the kids’ parents to give your toys any importance either. You need to achieve a balance.

2. The Proper Use of Social Media

The entire world is using social media in one form or another. Whether it is the hulking social media giant that is Facebook or the front page of the internet, also known as Reddit, social media is a powerful tool, the effective use of which can propel your business to unprecedented levels of success.

With television and newspapers, you only have a limited reach. Advertising on them will expose your business to a few thousand prospective customers who won’t even bother to read your ad. But advertising on Facebook has the ability to reach more than a billion users. Devise a proper social media strategy now!

3. Nail down those KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

KPIs are hands down the most effective means for you to gain insights into your customer base. Every website has access to this analytic, but most managers don’t place much importance to them and conduct their business like a headless chicken – no strategy, directionless and all over the place. Effectively tapping into KPIs will help you measure your sales growth and the working capital in your firm.

Customers are able to generate tons of useful data, all of which has been derived straight from your business. You should learn to surround yourself with these beautiful numbers which can help your business change for the better. It is equally important to not let big numbers delude you into thinking that your business will necessarily succeed. Sometimes numbers serve to merely comfort us without really providing useful insight. Each business has its own set of useful KPIs, identifying the useful ones from the relatively useless ones requires time and patience on your end.

4. Create Useful Content

Creating relevant content for your business is the most effective way of promoting your business by increasing your online ranking and encouraging more conversions. In fact, 72% of marketers believe that content was their most effective SEO tactic! You need a select choice of wording for your ad campaigns. These words aren’t just selected based on your whims and desires, but by gaining insights into your customer base through the use of KPIs.

The internet, as we know it, thrives on content creation. Websites such as YouTube and Vimeo won’t really exist if the content on them was lackluster. There are professional content creators available to do the job for your business if you don’t have the time or skills to do the heavy lifting. The more often you publish good content, the higher would be your website’s ranking, which means the likelihood of people clicking on it increases. It’s a vicious (but good vicious) circle that drives up sales exponentially and doesn’t keep your business in the lurch for too long.

5. Build a Great Website

An attractive website is a difference between successful conversions and failed ones. A boring colour palette and cluttered designs that resemble the early era of the Internet will put off even the most adamant of customers from using your business. There are literally millions of beautiful, free website templates to choose from which means you really don’t have an excuse to support your business with a dull looking website. Statistically speaking, 38% of people leave your website altogether if they find it too dull!

The Importance of Click-through Rate (CTR)

Posted on November 10, 2018March 15, 2023 by David Dinh

Monitoring the success of your digital campaign rests on several key factors. One of these key factors is an important but often overlooked metric; click-through rate. The metric often tends to get overshadowed by other metrics such as cost-per-click and the number of purchases made by a customer. Cost-per-click is just one part of the whole picture and will shed little light on the success of your marketing campaign without taking into account other key metric indicators.

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The click-through rate (CTR) measures how frequently an ad or page was clicked compared to how often it was viewed. A high CTR directly affects your quality score and the amount you pay each time someone clicks on your advertisement. The average CTR on AdWords is somewhere around 2%, a higher number doesn’t necessarily mean you’re on the right track though. CTR is very industry specific, so while 2% may be high for a nutritionist business, it might be considered too low for a paid publication. Remember that it is easier for you to gain an increment on your CTR and conversion rates than to try increasing traffic to your website. You can’t just snap your fingers and bring new visitors out of thin air.

There are subtle changes you could make to your ad or content which can profoundly impact the CTR of your digital campaign such as:

Making sure that the background of the ad has a different contrast to the website’s overall look and theme. If the ad blends in with the rest of the page, it really wouldn’t capture the reader’s attention, will it?
Once the reader does happen to look at the ad or page, your next step would be to ensure that the headline is capable of maintaining that attention. Using catchphrases such as “Watch this video”, “Phenomenal success with weight loss” will eventually push the reader to click on the ad. Remember that you’re dealing with human psychology and are finding ways of piquing a person’s interest – the numbers only reflect how well you’ve been able to grab a person’s attention.
Sometimes it is not a good idea to make your ads stick out too much from the rest of the content on the website. The more your ad resembles the colour thematic of the website, the higher are the chances that users will click on it. It is even better if the ad and content actually helps to supplement the information already present on the website.

Why Click-through Rate (CTR) is Important

1. Directly affects your Quality Score

Think of the quality score as your credit score. A bad credit score hampers your chances of qualifying for a loan, similarly, a lackluster quality score will increase the price you pay for each click. On the flip side, a higher quality score means Google will be charging you less per ad click, while simultaneously placing your ad and content at a higher rank.

2. It will help you understand what kind of messages matter to your customers

Since CTR is directly affected by how frequently a user clicks on them, a higher percentage will indicate if your ads or content are properly able to communicate with the audience or not. CTR can effectively help you fine-tune messages so the next time someone sees it, they will spontaneously click on it.

3. Target the right kind of audience

Although a large portion of readers might be able to spot your ad on a particular website, only a small portion actually want to click on it. You might be wondering why? Your keywords are not accurately geared towards attracting customers from your particular niche. For instance, if your ad contains the word ‘nutrition’, it may be seen by readers looking for nutritional pills rather than nutritional tips. A giant portion of your digital budget might be going to waste by reaching the wrong kind of audience who might be accidentally clicking on your ads, inflating your CTR percentage slightly so, but never translates to a call to action.

4. Predict offline conversions

According to Google, only around 45% of people that search for products online go through with transactions, instead preferring to make their purchase offline by making a visit to the retailer. The CTR percentage can be used as an indication of a customer’s interest level for your product. So while their curiosity might not actually translate to a call of action such as filling a form or making a purchase, it might strongly correlate to offline purchases.

5. Higher CTR score equals lower cost per click
The way Adwords decides your ad’s price is by multiplying your quality score with the bid price. A high-quality score significantly reduces your cost per click. The quality score itself is a function of CTR; the rule of thumb is that a higher CTR results in a higher quality score.

4 Handy Tips for Busy CIO

Posted on November 5, 2018March 7, 2019 by David Dinh

Customer experience has evolved unconditionally and exponentially within the last decade, and it’s expected to continually evolve in the coming years to a point where we might not even recognize what it looks like today.

The Essence of Customer Experience Management

Customer experience or CX could clinically be described as the product of the basic interaction between one organization and its consumer over the course of time. However, customer experience and by that connection, customer experience management is so much more than that today.

It’s the personalization of a fast, economical and interactive communication between an organization and every single one of its consumers. It’s the simplicity and ease of navigation, the awareness and advocacy of brand, it’s the integration of the purchase experience with the provided support and most importantly, it is the cultivation of the business relationship to result in a loyal and long-standing consumer.

Here are some handy tips for the busy CIO

1. Use of Established Technologies and Metrics

Customer experience management reduces down to only half the battle when there are established technologies and analyzing metrics in play. For CIOs to ease the management experience, not only should they weigh in and establish the pros and the cons of a customer experience strategy in order to separate the positive possibilities from the negative, but they should also utilize a dedicated CEM platform, personalization technologies, and management tools from the get-go to facilitate the processes.

2. Bridging the Online/Offline Chasm

The technology driven CIO’s that are focused on running and managing the IT aspect of customer experience management strategy often fail to take into account the human aspect of customer experience. For successful management therein needs to be the creation of a seamless balance between the online and offline management.

While people are naturally inclined toward the digital involvement of customer service, CIOs should ensure that the digitized support is directing the online traffic into offline traffic by encouraging them to physically engage with the brand.

This brings us to the next point.

3. Create Collaborative Support

Collaborative support is exactly what it sounds like. No one tech executive can be expected to handle the onslaught of customer experience management concerns on their own without the input of external representative. Not only does this hold true for the collaboration necessary between the online and offline elements, but it’s also equally as important for other organizations aspects as well.

By bringing other technicians and experienced individuals on board or by delegating the menial tasks to one of the lower tier advisors, the higher-ups can focus on the more critical problems faced by the company – in every regard – customer experience management related or otherwise.

There’s also another added benefit to creating collaborative support – apart from maintaining the CIOs sanity – and that is saving money.

4. Communication Consistency

Often times, it’s the smallest of inconsistencies which can cause the biggest downfall of an organization. A majority of the time CIO’s overlook the importance of creating a seamless consistency between the consumer and its communicative approach to the parent organization. The connective modalities are unstructured or lack fluency creates a further divide between the two making the jobs of the employees considerably difficult – at every level.

CIOs should ensure that the consumer is able to easily access the required assistance across all channels by the provision of the option of quick movements between the smart customer service solutions. This includes being able to jump from phone calls, to text or chat messages, all the way to emails or social media interactions – along with automated technology and support that enables for efficient, effective responses and thus a fluent customer service experience.