So, I speak to a lot of affiliates.

Some have the PPC experience of a geriatric turtle whilst many are only just starting out with testing PPC campaigns, landing pages, ad-copy, and fine-tuning all of these factors as a means of maximising profit. With this in mind, one thing that never fails to amaze me is the frequency of which I speak to affiliates who have not thought through the raw figures of the campaign they are spending their hard-earned wonga on.

Let me give you an example.

I recently spoke to an affiliate who was using PPC to promote a videogame store on a sales campaign. The store paid out 5% commission and he had been told that the average order value was £26. So, it doesn’t take ‘Arnold Cleverbugger’ to calculate that every successful conversion will be worth, on average £1.30 in commission to him.

Now, videogames retailers have more competition than the Olympic Games, so there is a fair chance that conversion rates (unique visitors/number of sales) wil be no higher than, let’s be really generous, 3%. (TOP TIP: this is the conversion rate to PPC traffic, not other types of traffic that may have higher conversion rates and distort the figures.)

So, following our example, every 100 clicks purchased will yield £3.90 in affiliate commission.It follows then that the affiliate must be buying clicks for less than 3.9p per click to be showing an operating profit.

Can this be done? Possibly, but the affiiate I was speaking to had his maximum bids (all of them, as he hadn’t heard of keyword tracking/identification) set to 10p per click, paying on average 9p per click. So, for every 9p he spent, he would earn, on average, 3.9p.

Now that is a very quick way to fall out of love wth PPC, not to mention your bank manager who wants his pound of flesh and your new lady-friend who has her eye on those new Jimmy Choo footwarmers.

So, the moral is to look at the simple mathematics first and select campaigns from there. Then, with split-testing, accurate tracking, and ongoing optimisation, the rest will follow.

It really is all just very simple mathematics.

I’ve pulled together a few of our favourite tools that we have found to improve efficiency within our team over the past 6 months. Some of these tools have enabled us to save many man hours that we would usually be lost from day to day, most of these tools are free to use with some having limitations dependant on the type of use.

Toggl, The Online Time Tracking Tool

Dave, the MD at Webtistic discovered Toggl a few months ago and we have found it to be a fab tool for tracking the time spent of designated tasks and for improving the overall effiency of the team. We downloaded and installed the Toggl Desktop software free version but there are paid plans available with more advanced features.

In a busy, thriving office environment where you’re multitasking it’s difficult to recall exactly how long you spent on a specific task such as taking telephone calls or answering an urgent email but with Toggl you are able to create individual tasks and switch easily between them, thus enabling the ability to track everything with a single click. You can then view various charts online and interpret the data in the ways you wish. We have found to be very useful in informing our weekly meetings

We have found it a great tool for tracking the time spent on SEO milestones. This enables us to accurately and confidently invoice SEO clients on a monthly basis thus eleveating the worry that wasted time or interruptions don’t become part of the client’s invoice.

Through Toggl, all the time spent on various daily tasks are monitored. This should then provide the basis for improved productivity as you can go on to analyse exactly where time is being spent and where you can allocate time more efficiently.

Toggl is also available as an application on smart phones such as Android and iPhones downloadable from the iTunes store or Android Market Place. It’s also available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Ease of use 8/10
Time saving 9/10
Making efficient use of your team 10/10

Dropbox, Simple Tool To Share, Store And Sync Files Online

Dropbox has been installed on our desktops as a way for us to easily share and update files that are used within our office on a daily basis. The contents of the Dropbox folder automatically synchronises between everyone in the office. This eradicates the mundane task of emailing files to each other for updating and checking and allows for a single copy to be stored that can be edited, accessed and saved by everyone remotely on the Dropbox server. You might be thinking, ‘What if I delete a file by accident?’. Well, you can undelete files by logging in to the Dropbox site where you can also view changes to documents that have previously been edited.

For us Dropbox has cut out the need for sending documents internally via email and the fact we can can all edit the one document stored on the Dropbox server is proving to be a great efficient tool for us. I’m pretty sure the standard free 2 GB storage allowance is adequate for the majority of smaller set-ups but this obviously depends on the file types that are being stored on the server. Dropbox runs in the background on your desktop and simply works like any other folder saved.

Ease of use 8/10
Time saving 7/10
Making efficient use of your team 8/10

TeamViewer

TeamViewer simply allows you to take control of another computer so it enables you to remotely control a client’s computer to give them a tutorial, presentation or to assist with a technical enquiry.

Taking control of another PC is straight forward as no software installation is required as long as you run the application on both sides. We also had no problem with firewalls blocking the application unlike other similar applications.

In addition you can transfer files using the drag and drop functionality. Dragging a file to a partner’s screen during a remote support session will automatically initiate a file transfer, placing the file on the user’s desktop.

TeamViewer is available on Windows, Mac, Linux and as a Mobile Application and we are currently trialling this free for personal use to decide if it will enhance the support we offer our clients. The early signs are that this could potentially save an incredible amount of time with regards to solving client’s technical problems.

Ease of use 8/10
Time saving 10/10
Making efficient use of your team 6/10

Google Calendar

Google calendar is available for free and enables you to set up a calendar for your business and can be shared with each member of the team. This enables you to keep track of meetings, deadlines, scheduled telephone calls and various other events. You are able to assign different colours to staff so that you can differentiate who is responsible for carrying out a specific event or task at any given time.

If you’re organising a special event, the calendar enables you to invite colleagues to a function and they can reply even though they don’t use Google calendar. Google calendar will then track accepted invitations.

You can get event reminders sent directly to your mobile phone or sent straight to your inbox and the calendar is easily accessed from the Google homepage but in order to use this you must sign up with a Google account.

We have found Google Calendar really useful when setting deadlines for clients and is a great way to see exactly who is in the office on any given day in terms of staff holidays etc…

Ease of use 8/10
Time saving 8/10
Making efficient use of your team 8/10

Skype and MSN

Both of these are web-based internet applications that are widely used and are better known than the other tools mentioned above but with our business being based in Derby, UK we have many clients and partners whom are London based so the video chat functionality is very useful. Both of these tools allow file sharing but in my opinion is that Dropbox offers a more simplistic answer.

Using Skype you can have a video conference and we find it’s a great alternative to business trips, helping you work together and make decisions while spending more time being productive in the office. Both tools are cost effective as the only outgoing are your internet costs providing you make your call through the connection using the webcam, microphone and speakers.

Both of these tools allow you efficiently to make quick contact with people. We also use it for communicating with staff working outside of the office. Furthermore you can leave staff messages which they can retrieve the next time they login.

I’m a big fan of both these tools and this is why we have awarded them nearly 5 stars.

Ease of use 9/10
Time saving 8/10
Making efficient use of your team 9/10

Robots, also known as web spiders, crawlers, or many other variations of insect, are a form of automated web programming that goes from website to website, mapping and gathering data.

They can have many different uses, from the obvious legal methods of web indexing and search engine development (which I will be talking more about later), but they are also used by less scrupulous technical minds to gather data such as email addresses, and other personal information that can be sold to agencies for spam emails, and can be a facilitator for fraud and identity theft.

The Standard for robot exclusion was defined on the 30^th June 1994 by the majority of robot authors and other people with an interest. Though this was launched as a standard, it isn’t backed by any official body and there is no regulation that a robot must adhere to the rules in the txt file, so some robots may ignore the txt file, regardless of what you put in it.

Robots.txt can be used to direct the flow of these automated scripts around one’s website. They can direct the robot to avoid a page, a subdomain, or an entire site altogether. It is important to note however that whilst a robot may avoid a page, the page, and the robots.txt file is still public, so it is not a good idea to use the robots.txt to hide data.

Robots.txt is an essential tool for anyone who is looking to optimise website ‘crawling’. Whether you create your own .txt file, or whether you have a professional company do it for you, ensuring that the flow of the robots is adequately controlled is essential.

The structure of a robots.txt is very simple, but if it’s not done correctly the robots will simply ignore it.

The example below shows a robots.txt that tells all robots to ignore the entire site. If you want to add reminders for yourself as to what your specific commands refer to, you can use a ‘#’ at the start of a line to denote a comment.

The next example below tells robots to ignore any pages that start with ‘/fried chicken/’ and also shows how the comments tag can be used.

You can also use the ‘User-agent’ command to tell robots to avoid a page or domain, while at the same time, telling a specific robot to ignore that command, this is particularly useful if you have your own robot that you want to trawl a page or subdomain but you would rather it were ignored by other robots, the below example shows this.

When we start to talk about robots and SEO, the advantages of being able to tell a search engine spider to avoid a specific page or set of pages are quite clear.

If your site has a log in page, or a contact us page that doesn’t add value to the site and doesn’t require indexing by a search engine then it is more beneficial for your site for you to tell the spiders to ignore those pages, which will, in turn, allow the spiders to use their ‘crawl quota’ on pages of higher value.

So when you’re looking to make the most of this very simple tool, you need to remember a couple of simple rules.

• You only want the robots to index the pages on your site that add value.
• If you don’t want your customers visiting a page, you probably don’t want robots going there either.
• Remember that any page, on your site that isn’t adding value as it’s crawled, is consuming ‘crawl quota’ that could be going somewhere more worthwhile.

Ensure that you can create even a simple robots.txt to tell the search engines where to look, and you could notice a marked improvement in the value of your site.

I read a lot of SEO blogs and forums and it never fails to amaze me how the same, fundamental basic SEO questions crop up time and time again, and the same old advice is wheeled out, rinsed, and then wheeled out again. And then when that is finished, it is wheeled out again for good measure.

So, I thought I would compile the 10 most common SEO questions, and issues we come up against when assessing client’s websites.

• 1. URL’s and Duplicate Content: Do you have both a www version of your web pages AND a non-www version of your web pages? If so, Google sees these as 2 separate pages (the www version is effectively a sub-domain) and may determine either version as duplicate content. Also, natural incoming links may pass juice to either version of your page rather than a single one, diluting your incoming ‘link juice’.

• 2. Internal Links and Duplicate Content: Does any part of your internal page navigation link to a duplicate version of another page? The most common scenario here would be that your home page URL is ‘www.monkeyheadfood.com’ but your internal navigation points to ‘www.monkeyheadfood.com/index.html’ (or similar) which serves the same content. This also leads to duplicate content issues and the potential for incoming links to be split between the different versions.

• 3. Poor Keyword Selection: I think it was Darth Vader who said ‘the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant compared to the power of keyword research‘. Something like that anyway. All websites, new, old, good, bad and ugly, need to have conducted a full keyword research otherwise you are indulging in the webmaster equivalent of trying to nail jelly to a wall. If you haven’t produced a full keyword research document (or had one prepared for you) how on earth do you know what to target? How do you know where the search volume is? How do you know which keywords you actually have a chance of ranking highly for? You get my point.

• 4. Ignoring The ‘SEO Spine’: I have just made ‘SEO Spine’ up. Impressive little term, eh? Ok – I will move on. By ‘SEO Spine’, I am referring to your on-page keyword targeting. Ideally, your page should have your target keyword in the URL, the title, the heading tag, and the content, creating a ‘spine’ (but don’t over-do it and spam keywords). Can you see what I did there?

• 5. Images (only) For Navigation: The main search engines are still in kindergarten when it comes to reading text on images. They just aren’t very good at it. So, you should not be using images for navigation because you wont receive the positive ranking score from your anchor text, (which can be very valuable).

• 6. Title Tag Suicide: Your title tag is the ‘pocket dynamite’ of your web page. There isn’t a stronger signal of relevancy and Google loves to allocate bucket-loads of value to them. So, read this post about SEO and Title Tags now!

• 7. Unfriendly URL’s: Although the search engines can index ‘unfriendly’ dynamic URL’s these days, they still prefer the static versions of the same. I can tell you, for example, that Google certainly DOES prefer static URLs to their dynamic buddies. Perhaps more importantly, having keywords in the URL will increase your click-through-rate from the search engines as they appear in bold in the displayed listings.

• 8. Poor Site Architecture: Your website should be as ‘flat’ as possible to minimise the number of clicks from your home page to any other page (without using a search box). If you have less than 10,000 pages then you should, ideally, be able to reach any other page within 3 clicks.

• 9. Sub-Domains Not Sub-Directories: Google has changed the way it looks at sub domains and so, these days, it is much more beneficial to add any additional content (e.g a blog or an ecommerce facility) in a sub-directory. Reading reference: SEO Sub-Domains

• 10. Link Building:  We love link building. However, it seems that many webmasters don’t! A web page’s inbound link profile is the most important signal to Google when determining a pages trust and authority, which in turn, helps determine rankinings.We all-too-often see either very few links, or the worst set of spammy links since spam was invented in the world, ever, ever, ever. You need to build quality links, and when you have finished, you need to build some more.

Looking for a competitive SEO and/or link building quote? Contact us now!

A lot of time and money can be put into the design and development of a company’s website as they move into the daunting world of online retailing. Of course nowadays, especially given the weather Britain has encountered recently which has prevented people venturing to the high streets, you really need to be online if you want to compete with your competition.

So you have bought your desired domain name, you have designed (or paid for) your website and it has just gone live as you launch the site that is either going to earn you your crust or is a bit of fun/provides some kind of helpful service to others. Let’s assume this is your shiny new portal to online sales, you now need people visiting your site. There are various ways of boosting traffic to your site as blogged about here. There are, however, some easy ways of finding such places as free and paid directories to begin spreading the word about your new site.

If you are a regular reader of these blogs, you will know that ‘Link Building’ is a powerful method of building your reputation with Google, whilst trying to avoid places such as link farms and link exchanging. So where do you start trying to find free or even paid directories where you can submit them your site?

Google! (Or your preferred search engine )

The power of Google is often underestimated and a bit like Photoshop or an Android mobile phone, you may be comfortable using it but deep down you know it can do more, it’s just being informed of its capabilities. That’s why we are here to help!

Search engines have been around long enough now that most people know that you can search using +, -, OR and “quotation marks”. However there is more to searching than this, so make the most of it. Below is a list of search operators that are useful for finding potential  link targets or directories that you can submit your site to.

Combinations you can use in order to find directories:

keyword + “suggest url”

keyword + “suggest a url”

keyword + “submit a site”

keyword + “submit your site”

keyword + “add a url”

keyword + “add a site”

keyword + “add listing”

keyword + “add your listing”

keyword + “submit a listing”

keyword + “submit listing”

keyword + “submit your website”

These search terms are identifying websites containing the keyword and are primarily directory submission sites.

As you can see you need to conduct your search, exploring every combination when identifying directory submission sites. This can be a timely exercise, but can be performed by anyone and provided you stick to free directories, this method costs you nothing more than the time you invest into it.

So there you have it, link building can be made easy by the use of Google’s powerful search capabilities. Just be sure to have a quick look at our blog about Google’s penalties to refresh yourself with the potential dangers of embarking on an aggressive link building campaign over a short period of time.

Webtistic, Derby’s leading digital marketing agency are expanding again and so we are looking for a full-time, permanent SEO consultant (with potential to quickly lead onto a managerial position for the right applicant) to join our amazing team based at our Derby office.

About Webtistic

Webtistic are a full-service digital marketing agency who work with a wide range of clients. Based in Derby, we have enjoyed rapid growth due to our passion for the sector and our obsessive extra-mile ethos.

We love internet marketing, we love mobile marketing, we love innovating and doing stuff first, and we need somebody to share our love!

What we are looking for:

- a full understanding of SEO and link building
- a passion to innovate, excel, and be the best
- at least 1 year experience of working on SEO projects (agency or in-house)
- a good working knowledge of MS Excel
- a strong ability to write coherent reports, both for clients and internal use
- excellent communication skills

What we can offer:

- competitive salary (based on experience, etc) and performance bonuses
- ongoing training
- flexible working hours
- an opportunity to excel
- a really cool place to work

Interested?

Great. Please forward an email with details of your SEO/digital marketing experience to Dave Bird (info@webtistic.co.uk) and I will be in touch.

Deadline for applications:  March 2nd, 2012

(No agencies please)

Now, I don’t mean this to be mindless self-promotion (although it all helps of course!), but more of an attempt to get some SME’s to think a little more logically about the management of their Adwords campaigns with a short example.

A small trader with a new e-commerce store came to me recently for a quote on managing his Adwords campaign. His store is a (very nicely designed) niche online gift store and he had been managing his own campaign with little success in terms of sales and he had got to that point (that I see very often) where his CTR was almost non-existent, his quality score was poor and his click prices had gone through the roof. His adgroups (and keyphrases) were illogical, his ad-copy all wrong, etc, etc…

His average cost per click was 37p and most of those were not targeted correctly. Suffice to say, he had no REAL idea as to how it was performing other than to say his sales were non-existent.

In short, it was a mess.

Anyway, when I first spoke to him on the phone, in the first minute he said the words that I never, ever, ever understand.

He said something like… ‘well the problem I have now is that I can’t afford to spend much on Adwords’.

Hmmm…

To that I said what I normally say…

[me] ‘OK… well, if you could find a way of buying 50 pence for 40 pence would you do it’?

[him] Err… yes… obviously…

[me] ‘And how much could you afford to spend on doing this?’

[him] *Laughs* – as much as i could buy…’

The Point? Well, if an Adwords campaign is correctly managed, this is possible, and in his case, is actually doing so. Less than 3 months on, his average click price is 24p, but, and here’s the killer part, we know that, on average, EVERY click is making him a profit.

How? Firstly, it’s about knowing how to manage an Adwords campaign (obviously), but less obviously, it is about measuring the performance of your ads and doing so constantly. You can use Google Analytcis to tell you exactly what return in terms of revenue each click gives and so once you have done this, you can see what a click is worth, and if you see what a click is worth, you know how much you will pay. After sufficient testing, If you know that a click on a certain keyword, consistenly results in an average profit of 50p per click, then you know what to pay up to.

So, in summary, if you are inexperienced with Adwords and need a single piece of advice, make very sure that you have installed Analytics and that you KNOW how to measure your campaigns performance.

It can be just like ‘buying profit’.

We run the Profitistic affiliate network, and come into contact with many merchants/advertisers who are looking to start an affiliate marketing campaign, or who are looking to expand an existing one.

They want to further their marketing reach, generate additional sales/leads, and make their brand as popular as possible, so one of the first questions we are often asked as a network is ‘how many affiliates will be promoting our website’? The answer of course, is that it very much depends on the merchant and the details of the campaign.

So, we decided to have a little office chinwag and discuss the Top 15 factors that we think dissuade affiliatese from running any particular merchants affiliate campaign.

Here are the 15 Reasons Why Your Affiliate Campaign Isn’t Attracting Affiliates:

1. Low Commission: An obvious one this, and fundamentaly the most important. If you offer a lower level of commission than that of your competitors, who do you think the affiliates are more likely to promote?

2. Poor Or Lack Of Creative Material: Affiliates are fully aware of the power of good creative. Poor creative generates low click through rates, and wastes potential earning opportunities. Also, a full suite of creative should be made available, including html (email creative) a wide range of banner sizes, text links, and any other supporting material.

3. Restrictive Terms: Affiliates use a wide range of traffic sources to drive sales/leads to merchants campaigns. Restricting promotional choice (e.g, no pay per click affiliates, no email affiliates) can severely reduce the amount of traffic being sent to a merchants website

4. Leakage: Prominent telephone numbers with strong call to actions (e.g call us now!) will serve to divert a proportion of affiliate referrals towards calling the merchant in question, rather than completing the online checkout process. This will result in lost commissions for affiliates. Experienced affiliates know this and will avoid such merchants.

5. Merchants Website Design/Usability: With affiliate marketing, conversion of traffic referrals is everything. The merchant’s website should be professional looking, and usable to maximise conversions. Poorly designed websites will see high bounce rates, and affiliate traffic will be wasted.

6. High Merchant Pricing (sales campaigns): This ties in with conversion rates. If a merchants pricing is higher than its competitors pricing, conversion rates will be low. Experienced affiliates know to compare prices and promote the merchant with the lowest pricing.

7. Low Stock Availibility: Similar to above. Conversion rates will be low if stock levels prevent referred traffic from converting into sales.

8. Brand Reputation: Affiliates know that well known brands are often trusted by potential customers compared to lesser well known brands and so, all other things being equal, convert better. Lesser known brands have to offer ‘more’ in order to attract affiliates to them.

9. Poor Localisation: Campaigns should be localised to the target market. For example, a UK landing page should show currencies in GBP, and address details should ask for Postal Codes (not ZIP codes). Don’t mention CNN or ABC News to UK visitors because they will see that it isn’t UK-specific which can drain trust.

10. Payment History: Some merchants are more reliable on the payments front than others. Savvy affiliates will know who pays (and who doesn’t) and prioritise merchants accordingly.

11.Payment Terms: Affiliates want to be paid as quickly as possible, using the most convenient, and lowest cost payment methods. If you are offering net-90 terms, and insisting on paying using Postal Orders, it willl effect affiliate take-up.

12. Trust Of Longevity: Does your campaign have monthly sales/lead caps? Have you suspended the campaign and restared it umpteen times? If so, you may have lost the trust of potential affiliates who require campaign consistency and longevity.

13. Pre-Approval Requirements: Many merchants (especially on the larger networks) pre-approve affiliates. The problem is that some merchants take weeks (or even months) to approve affiliates and so affiliates prefer to promote instant-approval merchants who enable immediate promotion. Merchants need to ‘strike while the iron is hot’.

14. Poor Campaign Descriptions: When describing their affiliate campaign, merchants should go into details about why affiliates should be running their campaign. Campaign descriptions should include all of the merchants unique selling points, and anything else that sets them aside from the competition.

15. Lack Of Niche Marketing Materials: Many affiliates require specific marketing resources to enable promotion. These may include data feeds, voucher codes, content units, and anything else a merchant can think of to increase accessibility.

We think this is a decent list of the main factors, but please feel free to add anything we have missed!

Building links is an important means to running a successful website. Incoming links improve your relationship with Google and influence your placement amongst the search engine results pages (SERPS). After you have exhausted any directories and other submission-type links with value, the next step is to begin building relationships with other websites in an attempt to earn yourself links. Below I have outlined nine top tips for writing link building e-mails.

1. Spend time targeting your desired audience
Begin by compiling a list of potential targets that you believe you could either negotiate a link from or who you believe you can offer something of value. Do not mass e-mail or spam people, it is important to research and contact other companies that are related or would have a reason to want to link to you. Consider bloggers – if you have interesting information or value to offer them, this could lead to them linking to you.

2. Keep your email short and sweet
Do not make your e-mail a daunting task to read or it will end up straight in the Trash. Get to the point and include only vital information and you stand more chance of your recipient actually reading it. Whether they reply is another matter, but getting them to read it is the first successful step.

3. Key information – who/why/what
Begin your e-mail by introducing yourself as a person rather than a company, and move quickly to informing them with why you are contacting them and what you propose.

4. Write the email with a personal touch
Try beginning your letter by describing why you like their site and use their names if you know who you’re writing to. It is important to the recipient that it does not feel mass produced and batch e-mailed as a personally written e-mail is much more likely to survive the trash. Mention individual content they have produced to personalise further.

5. Don’t ask for anything at first
If you go straight in asking for a link without offering anything first, the only thing you’ll get back may be an impolite response suggesting you do not contact them again. Instead suggest/offer something, such as interesting or related content or offer to write some unique content for them in the form of articles or blog posts. Also, iff you can generate interesting material, ultimately people will want to link to it.

6. Sign the e-mail off
Finish your e-mail off with your full name, contact details (including phone number) and company address as this looks much more professional, and gives greater credibility.

7. Be flexible
Be prepared to offer more than you originally offered. The person may come back to you with a slightly different proposition that you originally had not enquired about. However, if you are serious about securing links from external sources then you may need to meet them half way.

8. Build on your relationships
If you have successfully had a positive response, ensure that you continue to build on that relationship as this may help develop more links in the future.

9. Do not give up (but do not harass)
Try offering a product that they could review, or offer a product as a prize that could be presented as part of a competition on your targets website. This could lead to you ensuring a link on your targets homepage.

Right, now you are fully equipped to start building contacts with other websites.

Go get your writing hat on and good luck…

The voucher code debate – are genuine voucher codes simply a cheap and effective marketing tool or do they harm your brand?

Having a ‘voucher redeem’ area on your site could be looked at as eating away at your profit margin and allowing all customers the opportunity to get a discount. The customer may have purchased from your site even without a code, so why do it?

The Positives

Being listed on voucher code directories with as many as 5 million potential cusomers seeking voucher codes on a monthly basis will naturally generate sales and increase your brand awareness. As a retailer, factoring in a voucher code into your marketing plan will reduce your profit margin but in return could significantly increase sales volume – and getting a sale must be better than nothing.

Maybe seeing a ‘voucher code redeem’ area encourages potential customers away from your site to seek a promotional code from one of the many code sites which could be perceived to be a bad thing but if you were buying an identical or similar product and multiple sites sold it, would you purchase from the one that offered a 10% voucher code? Price is not always paramount as I’m personally a a great believer in product support and customer service but in today’s price conscious climate, customers enjoy feeling like they’ve got a great deal and a voucher code does just this as well as giving you the edge over your competitor. You may already have an extensive list of previous customers lying dormant who have opted in to receive marketing that could be emailed with a ’10% off code during December’ which would encourage previous customers back onto your site. In addition to being listed on voucher code directories it brings additional exposure to your brand and don’t forget there is an increased likelyhood that these customers will return and buy again.

A voucher code does not always have to be generic for example like ‘Save 10% off all products’, if your average basket order value was around £80 you could state spend £100 and save10% and this would be a nice a way of icentivising customers into spending a little more and increasing your profit. There are different types of strategic codes that can be used and our research shows that a high percentage of UK shoppers in search of a specific product take the reverse psychology route and opt to trawl the endless list of voucher code sites looking for a appropriate retailer and offer a voucher code before turning to Google to seek out their product through search.

The Down Side

Offering a voucher code opens up a new channel for sales as your code could be listed on freebie sites, voucher code sites, blogs, forums and many other sites but the viral spread of a code from site to site can be difficult to manage so this needs to be considered. You may notice voucher code sites offering exclusive codes and the reason for this is that they receive additional commission and an exclusive code from a retailer in return providing sites with increased exposure. Exclusive codes such as MVCBATHSHOP for example also help minimise the viral spread of codes as the code is created personally for My Voucher Codes in this case.

In all honesty we live in world of bargain hunters and savvy shoppers but you may not wish to be portrayed as a bargain/promotion retailer due to the fact that customers may perceive your products to be of lower quality and if this is the case you must ensure that voucher code directories fully understand and respect this as they may still list your site, with or without a voucher code.

Also, a retailer offering codes on a consistent basis makes it quite clear that you have enough margin to play around with and if you suddenly remove all active voucher codes then this can lead potential shoppers to seek alternative sites offering a voucher code. It’s also important to consider that there are shoppers who don’t even browse voucher voucher code directories and base their decision purely on price taken from Google search so it’s important not to increase your advertised price to cover your voucher code as you could be cutting out the shoppers who make their purchasing descions purely on displayed price. Admitedly it’s a fine balance between giving enough away to incentivise shoppers and remaining price competitive to non-voucher code users.

My Opinion

Before ruling out the use of offering codes it’s really worth taking some time to understand how they can be used as part of your marketing plan as there are a multitude of options available to incentivise people to your site using strategic codes.

Finally, please don’t just think that voucher codes are successful with purely high end well known merchants. Voucher code directories are prepared to add retailers large and small which helps to provide additional exposure regardless of business size, and should be considered by any retailer looking to increase online sales volume.