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Online Marketing ConsultantLocation: Case Studies 3 The Learning Curve--> Online Marketing ConsultantCase Study 3: The Learning Curve The Learning Curve When Debbi first decided to take her beaded jewelry business online she was excited and confused. She was excited because it will open up a huge marketing opportunity for her. She was confused because there were so many details to the project. How to buy a domain, how to get the domain visible to the public, how to write web pages, what should the site look like, how are sales transactions handled, how are credit cards processed, how is the customer’s information relayed to know what they ordered and where to ship it to, and a half dozen or more other questions. She put it together one piece at a time. Surfing around on the Internet and using Yahoo searches she began to find some of the answers to the questions. Shortly after she purchased her new domain, www.vampsart.com and purchasing her first hosting company she began to question the reliability of information she was getting. She had no way of knowing if she was paying too much or getting the wrong type of service. She pushed forward with a bit more caution, and realizing all the while this would be similar to how customers might feel while surfing her website. There are rumors of Internet hoaxes and rip offs out there but than again there are also risks in opening a brick and mortar store too. Debbi knew that part of being the business owner means shouldering the risk and the responsibility. The part of going into business on the Internet that was really stimulating for Debbi was the website designing. Her creative skills and artistic talents went right to work on creating a beautiful work of art in website format. She was discovering many new software programs for graphics and one particularly made for creating human like graphics. A whole new business was unfolding for her as she continued to move forward with her online beaded jewelry business. During her Yahoo searches for business information Debbi had also found a few bulletin board sites where other crafters and artists gathered to share ideas and show their works. It was through these bulletin boards that she discovered the graphics software programs and learned about Dreamweaver web publishing software. When she reached the point of having her website completed she posted to the bulletin boards so every one could take a look at her site and her jewelry. The feed back was tremendous and positive. It seemed every one liked both the site and her jewelry creations. Debbi was ready for the customers now. New jewelry designs were popping into her head faster than she could draw the rough drafts. The thrill of having her business on line seemed to inspire a creative spurt in her. She began to shop and hunt for specialty beads for her new creations and to begin crafting them. As one would be completed she would snap a few pictures of it and quickly add it to her website for customers to purchase. She would also be sure to post it on the bulletin boards so that all of her craft and artists friends could take a look at the new design. She had never felt so inspired to create before. A little over two months after the grand opening of her web business Debbi began to wonder why she had been getting no sales. She would look at her weblogs as provided by her hosting company and see that she was getting 15 to 25 customers a day, but no sales. She had joined a few of her artist friends webrings to help bring in customers and a few craft websites did a link exchange with her as well. She felt confident that she had a great site and great designs, but she didn’t feel good about not having any sales. When she had asked on the bulletin boards she was told that it would take a few months for the search engines to pick up her site and then a few more months for them to list her. Debbi was shocked at the lead-time to get listed in the search engines. She began to do a search everyday on the search engines to see if her site was listed yet. Her search for “Beaded Jewelry” came up with the same results day after day, and her site was not there. Three months have gone past and she has 14 new designs in addition to all of her other jewelry creations and she decides to stop creating new products. Debbi is becoming very concerned about the lack of sales from her site. Her weblogs were still showing anywhere from 10 to 40 customers a day visiting her site. She wondered what had gone wrong? Debbi called me after she had her website for five months and had only managed one sale. She didn’t think it really counted because the purchase was from a cousin in response to an e-mail Debbi had sent her. I could tell Debbi was anxious about having made a poor decision to put her business on the Internet. Her first question to me after having explained all that had occurred so far was, “What is the magic ingredient I’m missing here?” The only reply I could offer was, “Proper planning is all that you’ve left out.” We spent several minutes discussing the difference between planning how to create the business and run the business and planning how to make the business successful. There is hope I explained to her and you haven’t wasted your time with all you have done so far. A few months later Debbi was calling me to report her progress and after a rather lengthy explanation of what tasks she had finished and which ones had gone undone, she said, “I have made at least one sale a day for the past four straight days.” After congratulating her, I told her to finish up the few remaining tasks and she was well on her way. I didn’t here from her again for three months. The jewelry business was doing okay, she reported, but she still felt it could do better. She had completed all of the objectives we had previously established and sales were regular, but not fantastic. She was tracking daily sales for several months and the more she studies the numbers the more frustrated and confused she was becoming. There were days with as few as one sale and than there were days with as many as ten. It was bothering her that sales weren’t steadily increasing and the wide variance of one day to the next. I asked her to send me the ten weeks of data that she had collected on daily sales. When I received the data I worked with the daily sales to normalize the figures. The data normalized by grouping four days together. She had a total of 74 days of which I used the first 72 and with the subgroups of four it left me with 18 data points to work with. I established some basic statistical facts e.g., variance, standard deviations, and average. With those figures I was able to report to Debbi that there was nothing unusual about days with ten sales or days with only one. It was all vary predictable based on her data. In other words her site is functioning perfectly with all of the given factors at play. Before she became too wrapped up in trying to understand statistical variances and laws of probability and chance, I asked her, “why on earth are you studying daily sales?” Tracking daily sales only tells you what the business is doing for you. If you are trying to make changes to the company performance and results, you need to measure the variables that are affecting daily sales. We spent a few days going back and forth in e-mail while Debbi tried to get a handle on the items that effect sales in her business. Eventually and surely she came to understand the marketing side of her business was more than just having a website and great products. She came to know that running a business was more about finding customers and seeking marketing opportunities than it is to produce a great product and service. Not to take the great product and service lightly, but without a customer to buy it, any product has a zero dollar value. Debbi still stays in touch with her crafters and artists bulletin boards but not nearly as often as she used to. These days she spends more time on a variety of bulletin boards gaining a reputation and promoting her business to potential customers. We established six areas for Debbi to collect data in. I asked her for 30 to 40 days worth of information on all six factors and daily sales. The plan was to perform a correlation analysis to see which variables have positive and which have negative effects on her daily sales. The variables are Google, Yahoo, MSN, Forum 1, Forum 2, and Webring traffic sources. After receiving the data a correlation was calculated for each variable to sales, scatter plots and a box whisker plot were developed and provided to Debbi. I then explained to her what all of the data and plots were telling her about her traffic and sales. Of all the variables only MSN traffic is contributing to sales. There were a few negative effects but each of those were not strong (Forum 2 and Webring traffic). The box whisker plot shows that MSN is also relatively stable traffic and Google has a large variance and the highest amount of traffic is not likely to occur again. See the correlation analysis here. Debbi understood the analysis as it confirmed what she was recently discovering about marketing her business. The webring traffic and the forums were definitely not the right traffic for sales. She was thrilled that MSN was a strong contributor and concerned that Google was not. Google was sending a lot more traffic and if it would convert like MSN traffic her sales could more than double. Her next question was perfect: “Why is MSN producing more sales?” To answer this we had to go back to her weblogs to investigate keywords from each of the search engines. Are Yahoo, MSN, and Google each sending traffic with the same keyword search? The log analyzer that her hosting company provides didn’t include this information. The analyzer only showed the amount of traffic from each source, but not the keywords. With a phone call to the hosting company I was able to get the raw server logs for the previous 60 days. I was then able to determine which keywords were bringing traffic from each of the three search engines. MSN was sending her traffic for the term “beaded jewelry”, and “hand made necklace”. Both of those terms are great for her site because customers searching for either of those are likely to be a buying customer. The number one keyword from Yahoo was “tinker bell”. Debbi had designed a necklace and earring set that she calls tinker bell. The name of the html page is tinker bell and the meta tag title was tinker bell. However, a surfer who is searching for tinker bell is not a customer looking to purchase jewelry. Her Google traffic was very similar to the Yahoo traffic. The keywords were not bringing her the right traffic. Debbi has learned a lot about marketing and doing business on the Internet. It may seem that her learning curve was hard won, but her attempt to start a web business is not all that different from many other’s. She was sharp enough to realize something was wrong with her approach and then to do something about it by finding a consultant. She was willing to apply many changes to her techniques, activities and style of managing the business. Today she is making steady growth in sales and using her data to look for root causes instead of just tracking the end results. When she finds something that works and proves itself statistically she then gets to work on capitalizing and spreading the discovery as much as possible. She’s got it! Case Study 1 Case Study 2 Case Study 3 Case Study 4 Case Study 5
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