In this new blog series from AEP, “What’s Keeping You Up At Night?, experts offer their advice on the most pressing issues facing the educational publishing industry. AEP members may sign up for a free half-hour consultation with the experts for 30 days after their entry is posted.
The following question was posed to our current featured expert, Ben Weintraub of Merit Software.
Q. I have a great education related product that I want to sell to schools. What can I do to make more sales from my web site?
A. Your web site is your most important marketing tool. Anyone who is considering buying anything from you will spend a lot of time on it. There are many steps publishers can take to make their web site more effective.
- Be different. Start with your “About” page. Use your “About” page to tell visitors who you are, your area of expertise, your unique selling proposition, and how to contact you.
- Qualify your prospect. Show some or all of your prices to give your school customers an idea of what your product costs. If you do not provide some sort of pricing guidelines, a lot of people will waste your time.
- Convey flexibility. Show your guarantee/return policy. School customers are going to pay by with purchase orders or credit cards. In either case, they will have to right to return an item. Your policies need to allow for this possibility.
- Facilitate sharing. Hardly anyone in schools makes a purchasing decision on their own. Encourage group decisions by making PDF friendly versions of your marketing collateral that can be printed directly from your site.
- Strengthen your site navigation. Have many links, in addition your main navigation. Eye tracking studies show that people read web pages like a giant F. Make it easy for your visitors to find relevant links.
- Make communication easy. Provide forms on your web pages instead of email addresses. It’s easier for anyone to use a form to contact you, instead of logging to his or her web email.
- Time matters. Respond quickly and professionally to customer inquiries. Assume that if you are not in communication with a potential customer that they are searching web sites for other vendors.
- Listen to your visitors. We’ve taken the approach that if 2 or 3 people ask a question about something on our site, than 200 or 300 other people have the same question. Use this feedback to help yourself and your audience.
Submitted by Ben Weintraub of Merit Software.
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Ben Weintraub led Merit Software full throttle into online marketing to schools in 1996 after a conversation with high school technology coordinator. Through Ben’s leadership, Merit has achieved high organic search engine rankings, launched several successful viral marketing campaigns, and used various web analysis tools to qualify prospects and close sales. He is happy to share his expertise and discuss how it may apply to small and medium-sized print publishers.
AEP members can submit a question, suggest an expert, and sign up for free consultations.
Thanks for these excellent suggestions. I’ve just created a website for my first product, and also an accompanying blog.
There are several improvements I can make based on what you’ve provided. I think I’ll start with improving the ability to communicate.
Very goo article, eye opener! yes there is what to learn from, well writen and explained.
I’m sure allot of people can learn a thing or two from it as also i did.