It’s In The Stars is a personalized keepsake gift company. They have loads of positive testimonials from real customers. The site has good energy and a positive design. The director/owner paints a pretty clear picture of what areas she’d like help on. Right out of the gate, Elizabeth demonstrates she knows and cares about her customers.
“My best sales (and that’s not many) have come from publicity appearing in magazines and newspapers. Unfortunately that is not often possible to achieve every quarter, let alone every month.
The LoveStars (30-35 pages) and BabyStars (45-50 pages) bound reports are unique, personalised gifts that are ideal for anniversaries, birthdays, Christmas, dating couples, engagements, Mothers Day, new babies, Valentines Day and weddings. Overall, 83% of my customers are women, with most buying BabyStars but a fair number of women buying LoveStars overall. Curiously, we still get a lot of men who buy the LoveStars reports – perhaps they have run out of romantic gift ideas and want to please their partner with a tangible gift that literally says something about their relationship!
According to the stats, the vast majority of visitors come to my site looking for a free monthly horoscope. They can read that, and are invited to sign up for the free monthly horoscope which contains additional information, the 2009 annual forecast, a 10% birthday discount on any report, and to receive special offers and surveys. I have grown my email list organically.
I sell my reports through my website and also through 20+ gift websites in Australia, New Zealand and recently, the UK. After each report, I send my customer an online survey to fill out. To date I have 60+ testimonials – I had one customer tell me they’d bought their report after recognising the name of their lecturer in New Zealand so she knew they were genuine customers. I hope you can help me!”
– Elizabeth Ball
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Elizabeth.
I had a brief look at your website.
I’m a busy man, probably like many of your visitors male or female, and don’t have time to read through a lot of words and explanations. I need to understand within the first 5 seconds what’s on offer. from your home page – I don’t!
Some suggestions:
1. Have a tag line, which describes your products. even better, describe the problem it solves, or the reason your clients buy them.
2. Clean up your home page. Bigger font, and colors will direct peoples attention. You might need to consult with a web designer…
3. Consider a video introduction for first time visitors. They are not as expensive as you might think…(see http://www.clivevideo.com/ for example).
I hope this helps.
Raz Chorev, Sydney
Hi Elizabeth,
On the video, I agree with Raz. I have two clients that created video (one animated, one standard) and both pull in lots of visitors and help explain the concept. Yours is not a difficult concept to grasp, but people like to watch, to view, right? You can either do a full motion video with a person in it, something animated, or, you could do a screencast type of thing. A screencast is like a tutorial and the easiest, least expensive to do. Take a look at Jing Project (web-based and free) or their full product, Camtasia. You could walk folks through a few of the highlights.
I love that you are able to get a lot of people to register for their free forecast. What happens after? Do you have a Constant Contact drip type campaign going? I have mixed feelings about many of the drip marketing campaigns companies do because they miss the real relationship building. If you do that, you’ll want find a way to engage. Please send me a sample by email and that will help me frame additional thoughts.
Back to your first comment, you receive lots of traffic after publicity. Hmm. You might want to create an ongoing news release campaign (my assistant uses free distribution sites sometimes, it is easy to compile your own list of those) which is optimized for your keywords. I don’t find you in Google, Yahoo, or Bing in terms of SEO rank for personalized horoscope. SEO is a fast-moving target and a lot of work, but you may be able to do a lot on that front on your own. Take a look at LotusJump. I wrote a review about them at SmallBizTrends for Do-It-Yourself SEO. They are a very affordable and useful service for small business owners.
TJ
Elizabeth,
Raz and TJ have some great points – I too had a hard time understanding what you were selling at first since I have to click-through from the home page to really “get it.”
Two thoughts:
- Testing/Pricing/Product – Consider testing your prices (lower if possible) and/or providing a peek (maybe the video?) at a sample “report” (not the most romantic or emotion-charged term for your product really). If you can’t lower your price, consider developing a lower cost product as your entry level proposition in order to improve conversion and grow your list.
- Prospecting – Consider ties to wedding and new mom sites by either engaging in these (comments/community) or even advertising. On the romantic front, you might look into partnerships with dating sites/communities. There are many of these and they might be able to use community moderator’s or even want to integrate the sale of your products into their sites for a cut of the transaction. This might be best with the lower cost product suggested above and provide another way for those seeking others to “screen” their prospects … or even themselves!
Good luck!
Jeff
Thanks for all your suggestions. I have already tried some of them which weren’t successful, and have implemented others which were in LotusJump. Video is an interesting idea for 2010 – thanks again!