Consumer Confidence: Maximizing Revenue In A Soft Market
For many webmasters in the adult industry the current market climate is new territory. The wild west days of throwing up a banner somewhere and waiting for your payout checks to start flowing in are quickly coming to an end. More importantly, the internet is no longer 'new' to customers, regulators or your competitors. Many buyers have been previously burned by unethical merchants and free content sites are shrinking the size of the pool of paying customers, while a combination of regulators and banks are making the market untenable for some previously profitable business practices. So, if you aren't going to just close down your sites and walk away... what can you do maximize revenue in a soft market?
Conversions Are King
In the past there were lively debates about whether content is king or traffic is king. In the current climate the reality is that conversions are king. 200 uniques that result in 3 sales are worth 3x as much 200,000 uniques that result in 1 sale. Buying massive amounts of traffic that doesn't buy anything or having great content that can't generate enough momentum at the point of sale to complete a transaction may look nice on a stats report about traffic or look good on your monitor in your office... but it doesn't make your bank statements look any better.
There are a number of products and services available to assist site owners seeking to get access to traffic or tracking, and many methods to acquire more content. However, the simplest and least expensive way to immediately improve your profitability is to work on your conversion ratios directly by generating a higher degree of consumer confidence in your site itself.
Fear & Uncertainty Kills Sales
No matter how good your content or products look, how cheap they are, or how desirable they are to a potential customer - If the consumer does not trust your site but wants what is inside... they will simply look to find the same or similar content somewhere else instead. Good sites that fail to earn the trust of a visitor are essentially just advertising a niche for their competitors. A customer who does not trust your website will not buy anything from it. Period.
"Between January and December 2009, the Consumer Sentinel Network received more than 1.3 million consumer complaints. Identity theft was the number one complaint category in the CSN for calendar year 2009 with 21% of the overall complaints."
http://www.ftc.gov/sentinel/reports/...nel-cy2009.pdf
A june 2008 Zogby Interactive Survey ?found that ninety‐one percent (91%) of adult users on the Internet are concerned that their identities may be stolen including 50% who are very concerned."
http://epic.org/privacy/idtheft/epic...nberg_6-09.pdf
There are dozens of other studies by reputable organizations and government agencies available online detailing the fact that many potential customers choose not to buy a product based on a lack of trust in the retailer or website. There are also studies showing that impulse buys happen far more often when the potential customer trusts the merchant or vendor which means more sales from customers who normally would not have bought anything just because they were comfortable and in a buying mood thanks to the way the merchant marketed their products or services. Put simply, you need to always be sure your customers are as comfortable as possible when you are asking them to give you their money or their personal information.
Ways To Simply, Inexpensively And Effectively Increase Consumer Confidence
1. Be Error Free:
Having any kind of imperfections on your websites can be a cause for consumer alarm. It is important to note that even a tiny error can do serious damage to consumer confidence because the size of the error is often not related to the amount of alarm it causes. All adult site owners try to make sure their pictures, links and videos work correctly but the smart owners go a step further.
Text:
Hiring a professional copy writing company or carefully proofing your own site text is a very simple way to increase consumer confidence. It may not seem like a big deal to you to have a few typos and misspellings on your tour text, but imagine if you walked into a fancy restaurant and the waiter handed you a meal menu that had several items misspelled. Would you feel safe and secure eating their food? Would you be more likely to eat somewhere else instead? What if the competing restaurant was only a click away and eating there didn't even mean you had to move to a new table? Site owners spend thousands of dollars on design and content... while a few hundred dollars spent on site text can have a very positive effect on every visitor your site entertains. If you lack the expertise or in-house staff to address the text of your site sufficiently, take a look at
www.AdultCopywriters.com or
www.EngineFood.com
Compatibility:
Make sure your site is compatible with as many browsers and user settings as possible. Not every surfer has the same setup that you have. Only 65% of Americans have a broadband connection at home, while 30% of Americans have used a mobile internet connection according to a 2010 FCC Report. It's an interesting report filled with statistical data that may give you a better idea of who is visiting your site and what they are using to see your products.
http://www.fcc.gov/DiversityFAC/0324...y-horrigan.pdf
Is your site available to your users in the format that they would be most comfortable viewing it? For example, not every mobile user is on an iPhone... and 'being error free' is something that only works on an individual basis. If your site works perfectly 99.9% of the time but does not work perfectly the one time a particular person is viewing it... you just lost any chance at converting a sale from that potential customer. There are plenty of online tools and services like
http://browsershots.org/ that can be helpful for testing.
Design:
It is true that design is subjective in many ways, but there are some objective measures of design as well. If your site looks like it was built in 2001 that does not mean it its going to convert like it is still 2001. Clean site pathing, clear interface controls and properly laid out design not only make your site look 'good', it also makes it look like the person operating it is reputable. If you walked into a shopping mall and saw the paint on the walls was peeling and the floors had not been mopped in months, you might leave and head to a different location before even considering buying anything from the merchants selling products inside. Top designers like
www.dickmansdesign.com don't just make sites that look pretty, they make sites that establish credibility through designs that are backed by detailed market research as much as they are backed by creativity.