INTERNET & CATALOG MARKETING FOR SPECIALTY FOOD COMPANIES

• Your home page is where most of your customers and prospects start – and where many of them leave without going any further. There are a couple of things to bear in mind:


• If you currently have Flash on your home or primary landing page, it's likely depressing your web sales. Many website programmers and other folks who are technically oriented seem to love flash. However, it slows the shopping process and therefore hurts sales. In general, ecommerce websites whose main goal is to sell product should avoid Flash animation at the entry point to the site. If the powers that be in your organization insist upon having Flash, lobby hard to make it a left or top navigation button (Nav) on the site, and not THE entry point to your site.


• Try to have 'buy' buttons and prices on your home page. It’s your window dressing. Imagine having a store with no indication in the windows as to what you sell, or how much it will be. How many new customers would be brave enough to walk in with that little information? Sell on the home page—this area is like the cover and opening spread of your catalog. Feature your best sellers or new items. Don’t make site visitors have to drill down two or three layers deep to become site customers. Sell, sell often and sell early in the process. Give them the opportunity to put an item in their cart with one click on your home page. You will be rewarded.


• Don’t make visitors register or do anything but the absolute minimum to order from you. This mean no “required” site surveys, registrations, log ins, sign ins, or any other non-essential hoops to make the customer jump through. Shop your own site with an eye toward reducing the number key strokes required for someone to successfully complete the order—nothing more than the item and quantity; and bill-to, credit card, and ship-to info.


• Unlike apparel or hard goods sites, almost all specialty food site’s sales are be concentrated on a handful of items. Therefore, you need to keep these items looking fresh, so repeat site visitors get beyond a cursory look at your home page.


• If applicable, show your core products in seasonally-relevant packaging.


• In cases where you are selling steaks, lobsters and other products that don’t lend themselves to seasonal packaging, you can still create the look with photos that are propped with a seasonal theme.


• Just changing the colors of the borders on the home page can give a fresh look at no cost. Think seasonal colors when you make the change.


• Borrow these proven sales boosting techniques from catalogs:


• Make is easy for customers to find your contact info on most if not every page of the site.


• Bigger pictures tent to outsell smaller pictures.


• Make sure copy is readable—dark type over light backgrounds is best. Make type sizes large enough to read on standard-size monitors. While internet shoppers tend to be younger than catalog shoppers, that’s no reason to make your font sizes small and hard to read.


• Give visitors a reason to buy from you vs. the competition. Have a strong guarantee and make it easy to find. Let customers and visitors know there data and privacy are secure with you. Show your physical address and location. State your hours of operation when they can talk to a live human being. Show your phone number—often!


• Use offers to drive more sales. Unconditional free shipping is almost impossible for specialty food companies to offer and still be viable, yet consumers are looking for it. Therefore, you may have to use variations on free shipping and other offers (e.g., free gift with purchase, free samples, discounts, etc.) to entice new and existing customers to order from you.


• Remember that specialty food by mail and online is largely a gift purchase—you are in the remote gift solution business. Therefore, make it as easy as possible for customers to use your site for gift giving. This includes online gift lists, gift reminder services, e-certificates, multiple ship-tos for each bill to and many more.

By making these simple and often no or low cost changes to your website, you will be well on your way to more online sales in the holiday 2006 season.

In the next issue of the Food-by-Mail Industry Update, we will share a few techniques you can use to drive more traffic to your site

If there is a particular aspect of specialty food online marketing that you would like to see us cover, we would love to hear from you.

For a limit time, we are offering our readers a free website marketing review. We will evaluate the features, look and navigation of your site. We will compare your key online stats and benchmark them to the food online industry average. And we will provide a written summary or our findings and recommendations. The website review is totally free, totally confidential, and without further obligation on your part. Give me a call or drop me an email if you would like to learn more.

Warmest regards,

Tony Cox
President
Catalog Solutions

ABOUT CATALOG SOLUTIONS

Catalog Solutions helps specialty food catalogers and internet marketers grow and make more money by developing, managing and implementing their mail order and online marketing programs. We are the only catalog/internet marketing consulting firm that works exclusively in the specialty food industry. Helping smaller companies or large companies with small mail order or internet divisions is what we do best.

Visit us online at CatalogSolutions.net to download a copy of our free booklet, The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Catalogers, and for information on our fully guaranteed introductory program called JumpStart.