I recently made a purchase on eBay from a seller in Hong Kong, who reminded me of the very first lesson I learned in my college marketing class.
On the first day of the semester (and before introducing himself, taking roll or passing out the course syllabus), the professor asked what was the single most important thing a marketer could do to get people to act.
“Offer an incentive,” someone said.
“Make a strong value proposition,” another shouted, once it became clear the professor was looking for another answer.
“How about, tell them what you want them to do?” the professor asked. “Or better yet, how about, ask them?” he continued as he began a slideshow of poorly designed advertisements that, he pointed out, forgot to inform the audience what to do.
It seems simple: Just ask buyers to do what you want them to do. But don’t let the simplicity of the idea fool you. Making a clear and overt request can yield significantly better results than leaving it up to your buyers’ intuition or relying on an implied call to action.
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Enter Auctiva’s Twitter contest for your chance to win six months of service on our Premium Plan, or Auctiva swag.
To participate, simply:
- follow us on Twitter
- have an active Auctiva account (this includes the Free Tools account)
- have at least five Twitter followers, and
- tweet any message that includes “#Auctiva,” such as, “I’ve been using #Auctiva tools for 3 years.”
Click here for official contest rules. Entries may be submitted up to once a day.
Auctiva’s Premium Plan gives customers access all of our listing tools, 1 GB of image hosting, premium customer support, an Auctiva Commerce Store and much more. We’ll also give out at least four first-place prizes every Monday beginning March 22 until the contest ends April 12. These winners will get their choice of Auctiva-branded swag, including hats, mugs, tanks, T-shirts and tote bags. On the last day of the contest, we’ll announce the grand-prize winner via Twitter. It could be you!
If you aren’t already following Auctiva on Twitter, now is the time to start. We regularly post links to helpful news and feature articles about selling online, marketing your business, useful seller tools and other topics to help you take your business to the next level, and now, we’re giving you the chance to win six months of free service!
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To enter Auctiva’s Twitter contest:
- Step 1: Follow Auctiva on Twitter
- Step 2: Tweet any message including “#Auctiva”
Example: “I’ve been using #Auctiva for 3 years!”
- Step 3: Re-enter the contest as many times as you wish, limiting your contest tweets to once a day
* Entrants must have an Auctiva account (this includes our Free Tools account), be active followers of Auctiva.com on Twitter and have a minimum of 5 followers to participate.
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Search engines continue to be a top resource for online shoppers. In fact, a recent study by Compete Online Shopper, a Web analytics company, found that 61 percent of online buyers use search engines when shopping around for products. The second most popular tool cited among these shoppers was coupon sites, with 35 percent of buyers saying they visit these. Retailer marketing e-mails came in third, with 29 percent of consumers reading them when deciding what to buy.
Buyer behavior does vary from niche to niche, but there’s no denying one thing: Search engines are very important to online shoppers.
This comes as no surprise to Auctiva Commerce Product Lead Chris Eckland.
“People utilize search engines, and Google Product Search in particular, to find the best deal on an item that they’re planning to buy,” he says. ”Often, this activity may be just to confirm a deal that’s available locally is in line with other offers, but in many cases a quick online search can reveal online stores with better deals or specials not available elsewhere.”
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September 17th, 2009
admin
I know the benefits of blogging regularly. Blogs can help boost your items’ exposure in search engines. They’re a great marketing tool, plus blogging is free and easy to do. So why don’t more people (like me) use blogs to promote their items?
For me, it’s a time thing. Sure, it only takes a few minutes to do, but when you have a job, kids, housework—where do you fit in the time? I hardly have time to list on eBay, let alone blog about it.
So here I am blogging about a blog.
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