Frequently Asked Questions

FAQ regarding website enhancement strategies
FAQ regarding internet marketing strategies

FAQ regarding website enhancement strategies
1. What does the term conversion rate mean?
2. What can we do to improve your website's conversion rate?
3. What benefits can you expect from a higher conversion rate?
4. How can you calculate your website's conversion rate?
5. What conversion rate should you shoot for?
6. What does the term customer retention rate mean?
7. What can you do to improve my website's retention rate?
8. What benefits can you expect from a higher retention rate?
9. How can we calculate your website's retention rate?

FAQ regarding internet marketing strategies
10. How long have we been in business?
11. What are the most cost effective ways to drive quality traffic to your site?
12. What forms of marketing should you avoid?
13. What internet marketing services do we provide?
14. Why are we different?
15. How much will you pay for our internet marketing services in terms of Cost Per Click(CPC)?
16. What Pay Per Click(PPC) search engines do we deal with?
17. What is our directory enhancement service?
18. What are the costs of the media buys we commonly make?
19. What website metrics can we track?

FAQ regarding website enhancement strategies

1. What does the term customer conversion rate mean?
It means the percentage of website visitors that take various desired actions on one's site such as ordering online, filling out an information request form, downloading, registering, subscribing to a newsletter, etc.

2. What can we do to improve your website's conversion rate?
We have identified hundreds of website elements that can help or hurt a website's chances of persuading your visitors to take action. Our team of skilled copywriters, usability engineers, online marketing experts, web designers, and programmers can quickly make improvements to your website that will usually boost your conversion rate several hundred percent. We will closely measure the results of each change we make to determine the impact it had on site stickiness, sales, revenue, ROI, etc.

Sampling of the Customer Conversion Strategies We Offer:

• Rewrite homepage copy so that it communicates a strong
  MUST BUY NOW call to action
• Improve website's layout, navigation, and usability
• Create popup boxes on site arrival or departure that get the sale
• Create autoresponder(s) to help get the sale
• Rewrite copy on order page to get the sale and take advantage
  of upsell opportunities
• Suggest design changes to shopping cart to reduce the number
  of abandoned transactions
• Online forms of all types
• Virtual tour
• Enable Live Talk (Call website support)
• Enable Live Chat (Instant message website support)

3. What benefits can you expect from a higher conversion rate?
More visitors taking action will result in more sales, revenue, ROI, repeat visitation, referrals, etc. with no corresponding increase in traffic. That means more revenue for every dollar spent on sales and marketing.

4. How can you calculate your website's conversion rate?
Conversion Rate (CR) =
# of visitors who take action(buy) / # of unique visitors

5. What conversion rate should you shoot for?
Conversion rates fall in the range of 0-6% with the industry average being 2% presently. No matter what your conversion rate is presently, we are confident we can help you improve it. With full cooperation from a client, we can usually improve a site's conversion rate to over 4%.

6. What does the term customer retention rate mean?
Retention rate refers to your site's ability to win repeat business again and again from existing customers and new customers they refer. Most customers that end up buying from you will not buy on the first visit. To develop a meaningful, long term relationship based on trust will take a real understanding of human psychology and what website elements can best take advantage of human nature.

7. What can we do to improve your website's retention rate?
We can remove numerous elements we have identified that dissuade customers from spending time on your site or from repeat visitation. We can also add numerous features and forms to your site to greatly increase your site's stickiness

Sampling of the Customer Retention Strategies We Offer:

• Create mailing list so can e-mail newsletters and sales letters
• Setup autoresponders for various purposes
• Build chat room
• Build bulletin board
• Add personalization features
• Online survey
• Newsfeeds
• Extranet
• Administrative tools
• Content Management Application Development
• Loyalty Programs

8. What benefits can you expect from a higher retention rate?
The lifetime value(LTV) of each client improves dramatically when a site starts retaining more and more loyal customers that buy more, more often and refer others. One should also keep in mind that it costs 7 times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to retain an existing customer.

9. How can we calculate your website's retention rate and/or LTV?
We track your retention rate mainly in terms of repeat actions(i.e. purchases). If we are given more insight into your organization and if efforts are made to track business from referrals(for example, by giving referral fees through an affiliate program or a formal reseller program) then we can also calculate the life time value(LTV) of each customer in terms of referral business and thus get a more accurate feel for the true life time value in terms of repeat business and referral business that each new customer will generate over the course of your relationship.

To calculate a customer's lifetime value, you need to know:

• Amount customer has spent
• Cost of goods that the customer bought
• Cost of marketing to reach the customer

Cost to acquire a customer = cost of reaching a prospect /average response

Profit margin on 1st sale = average 1st order repeat sales x average margin

1st investment = customer acquisition cost - profit margin on 1st sale

Lifetime ROI = Present value of future profit - initial investment to acquire customer

To factor in value of referral business also over a customer's lifetime, assume the rate is the same as the increased response rate. For example, if 10 out of 100 customers respond (10% response rate) and 3 out of 100 customers refer a new customer(3% of customers) then this should be considered equal to a 13% response rate.

FAQ regarding internet marketing strategies

10. How long have we been in business?
Our marketing team has performed search engine optimization and other internet marketing services for over 100 clients in the last 3 years. Our web design team has built websites for over 30 clients in the last 5 years. Troy Wilson has been offering Internet marketing services since 1998.

11. What are the most cost effective ways to drive quality traffic to your site?
Keyword targeted online media buying on a cost per click basis (most companies should only pay $.05-$.40 CPC) works the best for most industries. Category targeted online media buying (newsletters, banners, popunders, email) can also work well as long as the cost stays below $.30 CPC or $2 CPM for profitable sites in most industries.

12. What forms of marketing should you avoid?
We recommend steering clear of any media that cannot be tracked such as offline marketing and any form of advertising that does not yield a positive return on marketing investment. Spam email, banner exchanges, search engine mass submission services, link farms, and any banner campaign costing over $3 CPM should be avoided in general.

13. What internet marketing services do we provide?

14. Why are we different?
We are a new economy, hybrid solutions provider incorporating the best practices of them all. We offer internet marketing, copywriting, usability engineering, web design, custom application development, graphic design, and hosting all under one roof so that our valuable clients have a total solution they can rely on. Our integrated approach allows us to deliver numerous time and cost efficiencies to our clients. Next Wave Marketing Strategies' focus is on driving traffic through a much wider diversity of cost effective marketing strategies as well as seeing that websites are then able to receive optimal results from the traffic by using proven strategies for improving website conversion and retention rates.

15. How much will you pay for our internet marketing services in terms of Cost Per Click (CPC)?
We tend to only offer internet marketing services that can generate traffic at less than $.50/click with us able to get all the traffic clients in most industries need for under $.30 CPC.

16. What Pay Per Click (PPC) search engines do we deal with?
Overture(Goto) is by far the largest of the Pay Per Click Search Engines. Overture can deliver you the most traffic but it will also cost you more than any of the other Pay Per Click Search Engines. Overture bids can be anywhere from $.05 - $10.00/click depending on the keyword's competitiveness with Overture recently announcing their average bid was $.19 in September, 2001.
The other Pay Per Click Search Engines we like to use are FindWhat and
Ah-Ha. Bids on these can be anywhere from $.05 - $.50 with most keywords available for $.05-$.10 per click still.

17. What is your directory enhancement service?
We submit your site to Yahoo using their $299 Annual Express Submission service, to Looksmart using their $299 Express Submission service, and to Open Directory using their free Add URL service. Getting listed in the directories is very important because you can get a lot of traffic from the directory listings themselves, from the search engines that display directory listings alongside their own listings, and from search engines giving a rankings boost for link popularity as major directory listings represent about the most valuable incoming link a site could have. Submitting to just the right category with just the right description and with the site being designed just right at the time of submission requires a lot of expertise. Failure to perform any of these optimally can lead to rejection of the site or can lead the directory editors to list your site but change the category or description you asked. This can be worse at times than rejection since requesting changes to your listing is extremely difficult.

18. What are the costs of the media buys we commonly make?
Most media buys we make are in the range of $.20-$.50 depending on your industry. You just tell us how much monthly keyword targeted traffic you want and we will get it for you at below the average cost per click rate you determine you can afford to pay.