Top 10 mistakes to avoid in Internet Marketing 2021 | Part- 2 |

Not Planning Ahead For Sales 

The whole point of Internet marketing is to sell online. It may come as a surprise then to find out that many Internet marketers fail to plan their sales funnel ahead of time. Doing things by the seat of your pants may work to make a few sales here and there, but to really exploit the power of the Internet and make a living doing Internet marketing, you must plan ahead for sales using a carefully thought out sales funnel.

The Mouth Of Your Sales Funnel

Your sales plan should include different ways to harvest an email address from your visitors. This puts them into the mouth of your sales funnel where you can market to them again later on. Without this initial contact information, later plans won't generate sufficient sales. Always start by getting the contact information and permission to contact that person online.

 A Whirlwind Of Sales Activity Down Your Funnel

A well-planned sales campaign keeps track of people visiting and what they are buying. It has several email campaigns going at the same time, depending on what group a customer happens to land in demographically. One email list may be marketing to people who have yet to buy anything, while another may be marketing to people who are your top buyers. Whatever your approach, you should have definite categories or demographics of visitors and planned sales campaigns directed at just that group.

 One way to do this is to put customers into groups based on the amount of money they tend to spend. Small spenders might be marketed with low cost product lines, while big spenders are marketed with bigger packages and items. If someone starts out small and suddenly buys a large package from you, you will want to have a system in place that shifts them from the small spenders’ campaign to the big spenders’ campaign immediately. That way, you don't lose the opportunity to market to people or to send them two offers, one from a big spenders’ list and another from a small spenders’ list.

Automate Email Campaigns Carefully 

Take advantage of multiple online tools and services to keep track of your email sales campaign. A good service that many Internet marketers use is AWeber.com. This allows a third party to manage your email sales campaigns, giving you the opportunity to spend more time planning roll-outs and to feature promotions.

Lack Of Automation Tools And Services

 At first, the temptation for most Internet marketers is to do everything manually to save money. This will quickly become unmanageable as your lists get bigger and your product line becomes more varied. Add a few extra sites to manage multiple income streams, and you can quickly become confused or overburdened with the multiple minute details of operating several Internet commerce sites. The solution is to start automating things before your business gets too unwieldy and you lose customers.

Tools Versus Services

 Automation can be done via tools or services. The AWeber.com site offers a service to manage multiple email campaigns. This is done by a third party, and there are some advantages to this approach. You don't have to install any special tools on your site, and everything is managed by someone else. The disadvantage is that you pay for the service monthly and you are subject to their terms and conditions. If that is still cheaper than installing your own tools, then there's no reason not to use a service versus a tool. However, typically, installing the tools on your own site will give you far more control and be less expensive in the long run.

Things You Want To Automate 

The email campaigns are definitely an example of an online business activity that you want to automate. Other types of functions might be helpdesk activity, where the first line of response could be an FAQ or a search box that is specifically set up to look through help content to aid a person in figuring out their own problems.

Don't forget that other tools exist to centralize your entire business activities, regardless of how many sites you own. This can help you to keep track of what is selling or not across multiple sites. It will also help with affiliate programs that might be available on different sites too.

 Speaking of affiliate programs, that's a perfect example of scripts and software programs that you can install on your website versus using a service. You can go to third-party sites like ClickBank.com or CJ.com and just use their programs to add an affiliate site. The cost though can be very high for someone starting up. If you plan on making an affiliate program an integral part of your sales strategy online, the sooner you get that functionality up and running on your sites, the more you will save money.

Failure To Track And Test Results 

After a failure to plan ahead for sales, one of the biggest faults that young Internet marketers tend to fall into is a failure of tracking and testing results. They may not even be aware that there are techniques, like split testing, that can help them to define why one sales campaign works better than another. It might even be due to something simple, like a different headline in the sales copy that can generate 50% more sales, but having done no split testing, they will never figure that out. It's very important to continually track and test the results of different sales campaigns and strategies to see which ones work for you and which ones yield poor results.

 Email Results Tracking

This can be especially true for Internet marketers that choose to go it alone and not automate with tools and services that provide some sort of feedback on the efficacy of a campaign. For email services, you want someone who can give you open rates and click-through rates on the email campaigns that you send out. If you have low open rates, you will know that the hooks and headlines are potentially uninteresting. If you have low click-through rates, you can concentrate on increasing the immediacy of the promotion to add a sense of urgency to your sales promotions. There are a number of different things that can be tracked to give you feedback on how you are doing, even before you make a sale.

 Tracking Across Multiple Sites

Other types of functionality that need to be tracked are the results of your affiliate campaigns and sales promotions. If you are putting up multiple sites (as you should be), this type of tracking can be difficult to compare across websites. Try to centralize the operations of your sites so that you can get a good view of what techniques are more effective than others, regardless of the site you are on.

Do More Of What Works

It may seem to get boring, but a general rule is not to change a sales campaign until sales start to drop off. If a campaign is creating a lot of buzz and excitement amongst your visitors, it's only going to lose you money to cut it short before demand peaks out. On the other hand, you can increase demand by putting up short one-time offers and limited quantity offers. If you find that these types of offers work best, have these types of offers more often to bring in more money.

Failure To Meet And Exceed Customer Expectations

It's not enough to just give people a good deal these days. It has to be a great deal that is perceived to be of such great value that it would be a shame if they lost out on the opportunity to buy. One of the ways to create value packages like this is to understand your customer's needs and then exceed their expectations on what they think they can get for their money. This is a strategy that is becoming necessary as the recession wears away people's discretionary income and people are buying based on perceived value.

The Value Package 

If your customer expects to get one ebook for a set price on some topic of interest to them, and instead you offer them an ebook, an online video tutorial, and some short reports, all for just a little more, you will have created the perception of a high-value package. That's because you not only understood what your customer wanted, but you met and exceeded their expectations on what they thought they could get for their money.

Other Ways To Create High Value

Your product line isn't the only place where you can project an image of high value. Your business processes and customer service will also be important to meet and exceed customer expectations. If you have someone who buys a piece of software from you and then can't get it installed, no matter what deal they got, they won't be happy if they can't get someone to help them troubleshoot the installation. Keep in mind that you are going to have to add some services and business processes that keep the customer in contact with you when they need you so that you can continue to have a great online business reputation.

 Solicit Feedback And Act On It

There's no way you can think of everything that a customer might need or demand. That's why you want to add some functionality to your site that allows customers to submit feedback about their experience buying from your site. You should also have a system in place that categorizes and responds to these issues, whether good or bad so that the customer doesn't feel like they're being ignored. If you listen carefully to what your customers tell you, you can generate ideas for future products or business improvements that help you to keep exceeding customer expectations.

Poor Backup Systems

If your site goes down, do you have a mirror site or backup strategy to get back up as quickly as possible? If the answer is no, then as Murphy's Law suggests, this will happen at the worst possible time – mostly when you are rolling out one of your hottest, time-sensitive campaigns for the entire year. The impact will be immediately felt in lost sales. If you continue to have problems like this, you will also lose customers who will judge your online business based on the fact that you offer spotty service.

Always Back Things Up

It sounds cliché, but this advice is often ignored at the peril of the online business owner. How many Internet marketers have busted their butts to put up large amounts of keyword-rich content, sales promotions, and imageladen pages only to have the entire site crash afterward? If the site is not backed up online, they will have lost months of work, lots of sales, and a few customers too. Always back things up.

 Have Redundant Systems

Content and sites are the only systems that need to be redundant. Payment processors are a typical example where an online business only offers one payment gateway, like PayPal, only to have it experience some problem that makes a sale unable to be closed out. If you offer multiple payments processors, if one goes down, another may be able to step in and handle the transaction.

The same is true of your affiliate offers. Every offer is not going to be around forever. If you are using affiliate offers and marketing them on your site or within the content of your info products, it's important to plan a redundant offer in case the other offer disappears. The way to do this is to have a library of offers in an Excel spreadsheet or some other digital document. When you link to an offer, link to a redirect page that takes the person to the actual affiliate offer. If an offer changes, is exposed as fraudulent or expires, you don't have to go back and change links in any content on your site or within your info products. Instead, you will change the redirect page to a new affiliate offer and log that information into your spreadsheet. This way, you don't lose money from bad links and you keep your customers happy. They won't even notice that an old link is broken since the entire process is automated behind the scenes.

That's basically what you're hoping to achieve with redundant systems: a flawless execution of business processes, no matter what mishap might happen.