15/01/2019 No Comments  

Why do online stores fail?

“It’s Fashionable …”, “It Seems Easy …
“Come on, this is going to be a shot …”

“I set up an online store and I’ll be mounted on the dollar.”

Every day more statistics are released by experts on the growth of E-Commerce. The idea seems logical, there are less costs, I do not have to have commercials. Anyway, everyone talks about it. It seems easy.

An Online Store has to be easy, right?

Every day that goes by it does not stop surprising me the amount of people who start to create online stores thinking that it is easy. Let’s leave one thing clear. Any business is hard, requires persistence and clear ideas.

In many cases critical knowledge that is essential for the launch of the business.

The question is: Business or Hobby?

If it is Business …



A minimum level of knowledge of Online Marketing is absolutely essential if you want to have an online business. In an Offline business you can be located in a mall and have a good product and the business is almost alone. Online NO. The reality is that most fail. They have no traffic, there are bad conversions, there is a lack of control of the metrics that drive the sale.

How can you hire Online Marketing services if you do not know what you are hiring?



This is an industry full of scammers willing to charge you for SEO when what they really do is take your money every month and they are not doing anything for you, taking advantage of your lack of knowledge.

Community Managers taking advantage of absurd fashion… And even the neighbor next door is a community manager, with a license to sell smoke.

And when you ask for tangible results, you only hear: “… No, no, social media does not measure ROI, it is measured by engagement, community …”. In short, and many other words.



You Need Knowledge

The other day a person interested in working with my agency told me: “In my online store there will be music, it will be different”.

I told him: “In your online store what there must be are sales. First, sell and then, if you want, we’ll talk about music. “

When you are not clear about what works in Online Marketing, it is very easy to focus on elements that are not important, sacrificing what really is important. Many mistakes are made with online stores. Here you have 10 of the most frequent errors that I see.

1. Do not work the sales and navigation process

Before putting on music, before creating carousels with beautiful images … Get to optimize the sales and navigation process. Use some Analytics with a behavior code like Crazy Egg and see what your website visitors do based on the heat maps.

Define a clear objective and optimize your metrics. It’s about selling, and when you have this before you can start buying traffic to scale your business.

2. Your home is to sell not just an image

The home of your online store is a showcase. Many entrepreneurs of online stores believe that the function of the home is to show how beautiful your website is. Bad idea … The function of the home is to sell. Be clear, in exact steps, what you want people to do when they go to your website.

3. Think you design once and never again

99% of the owners of online stores believe that the work is done by activating the online store when, really, you launch an online store and, depending on the feedback on sales, conversions and interaction with the web, now you must be doing redesigns to optimize your website.

4. Not having a plan to optimize the store

A good optimization plan can be one of the most effective and cheapest Online Marketing weapons for an online store. Most people who launch a website do not take the time to follow a plan that, month by month, allows optimizing the web to increase sales. They become obsessed with more traffic instead of, before, optimizing conversions.

5. Wait until the organic traffic arrives

SEO traffic takes. Also, it’s a very bad idea to rely 100% on free traffic. Online entrepreneurs ready, they diversify the risk and do not depend only on a source of traffic, but they work more traffic weapons.

6. Do not understand that the texts are the commercial ones of the Online Store

It may be that you do not have commercials in your online store, but the texts are the same as your commercials, and they sell to you and your product. You have to put a little heart and good copy behind … It is not to be taken lightly, because it can be the difference that you sell or not.

7. Being without a plan to segment the database between non-buyers / buyers / and product segments

The E-Commerce business is in the list of emails; Therefore, the better the segmentation, the more sales you will generate. There are many who set out to create an online store business without taking into account that the key is in its list of non-buyers and buyers, its most important asset.

8. Create more steps than necessary in the purchase process

In your offline store would you put obstacles before going to the cashier? This is just what many do in their Online Store. They create a lot of obstacles that lower conversions. The idea is to make it easy, not difficult. Analyze your sales process and ask yourself: Could a 6-year-old boy navigate here? If not, make changes.

9. Not having a long-term strategy to acquire clients

It is always easier to sell to a happy customer than to capture a new customer. The E-Commerce business is in acquiring clients. The more customers you have and the more repeat purchases you have, the more solid your business is. Having this clear, incorporate the metric controls to go measuring these two data is essential.

You must be willing not to make money in the first transaction and then recover it in the following transactions.

And The Most Important Error

10. Not having a Marketing and Investment Plan to start the store

Having an E-Commerce business that works is a serious business, it’s not a hobby. If you are not willing to create an online store in conditions, with a design that sells, an aspect of branding and an investment in the launch, better not do it. Yes. You have to invest in SEO, in Adwords, in having a CRM, and whatever it takes to make the business work.

When you tell people that they have to invest in Online Marketing to make their Online Store work, it bothers them. They tell you that you do not know… That there is something called social networks and that this does not require investing.

If your intention is to launch an online store and wait for them to come… Of course they can already accommodate themselves, because they will wait a long time.

It’s a bad idea to go against the laws of gravity. To think that you can fly does not change the fact that, if you jump from a skyscraper, very, very bad things happen.

This is not complicated. It’s not much different than an offline business. You have to invest, you have to sell, you have to measure your ROI, look at the numbers. And you must scale what works.

And you, do you want to have a successful online store that generates constant sales?

06/02/2017 No Comments  

The 5 mistakes with which brands and companies are killing engagement

THE ENGAGEMENT IS NOT THE ANSWER THAT IS ACHIEVED WITH TRADITIONAL ADVERTISING AS THE CONVERSATIONS OF THE NEW ERA OF RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONSUMERS AND COMPANIES

One of the buzzwords of recent times is engagement. The engagement has become the term used to talk about what matters in social networks and what should be measured (compared to numbers). It has also become the key to explaining why one thing becomes viral and another does not. And it has also become the key to understanding why there are companies that manage to establish solid relationships with their customers, when others do not achieve it as much.

But getting that engagement is not so easy. The brands and companies expect consumers to respond to what they are doing and to connect with them, but sometimes they make big mistakes in their marketing strategy at all levels that makes that response not occur. From the outset, they forget one of the key points to understand how this engagement works. To achieve this, marketing does not matter as much as knowing how to create solid and lasting relationships. Engagement is not so much the response that is achieved with traditional advertising as the conversations of the new era of relations between consumers and companies.

They are only selling, when they should be giving

Brands and companies expect a ultra-responsive response from consumers and seek that they are able to create high-quality relationships with them. They want them to respond to what they are doing, forgetting many times that this response is very marked by what is done and said. There is more to think about the conversations we have with other people in our day to day. Are we the same talking to everyone? Do we respond equally to everything they tell us?

As they point out in the analysis, to understand where the failure of brands is, you just have to open the email inbox and analyze the mails that the brands have sent us. Possibly, most of them just try to sell us something. This type of content is not really what generates engagement or what makes it always work. To achieve this, we have to go a step further and offer added value. It is not only about selling, but also about giving.

The product is enough (and it is not)

Another of the big mistakes that weigh on the relationships between brands and their consumers is in what one expects from the others and what they offer. Companies tend to think that what the consumer is looking for is their product or service and that is more than enough. However, what they should be seeing is the photo as a whole and reality as a much more complex element. Consumers not only want to get hold of that product at that time, but they also expect a deal that covers all stages and that is always positive and good. A study recently pointed out that 81% of consumers find their dealings with the company frustrating, which is a very serious problem.

Actually, brands and companies are not trying

At this point, the analysis points to a very interesting element and one that invites companies to examine their conscience. Are you really trying to position yourself and get that engagement so talked about and analyzed or are you just getting carried away by the market itself? As they point out in the analysis, if you analyze what brands and companies are doing you can conclude that, in general, they are doing things simply well enough. They are in the middle. But the average does not seem enough (only 22% of consumers consider themselves loyal to a brand).

This is a problem. Brands and companies capture the consumer when he makes a purchase, but then do not work to maintain that relationship, so that it becomes solid and durable and can therefore provide benefits in the future.

They abuse their privileges

Possibly every consumer who has had to face a telecommunications company at some point in their life will feel very close to this point. There are companies that simply use their dominant position as a lever to connect with consumers and that may work in the moment, but it does not help to create solid and sustainable relationships with the passage of time.

In social networks, for example, the question is how the brand faces the different content dynamics. Publishing offers and product information over and over again, for example, does not help to create engagement, but rather makes the situation a bit annoying. The company becomes one that is filling the timeline of the social network with very little relevant information. The important thing is not so much how and how much is published, but rather to do it with what the consumer needs and when he needs it.

They are highly secret

Or what is the same: everything is secret and everything is confidential information. Nothing to show how you can do anything in your house and nothing to explain what the keys to the product are. The idea of ​​the secret formula has been one of the recurring elements in brand strategy and in the positioning of companies over decades and centuries. For many companies it continues to work, but for others it will not do so much. Above all, we must bear in mind that the market has changed and that things have done with it. Consumers are increasingly reticent at closed doors and want more and more transparency. The challenge for companies today is to balance the mystery with that need to create trusting relationships based on transparency.

08/06/2016 No Comments  

Businesses are taking advantage of the pull of Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go is making consumers leave their homes and is forcing them to enter certain places and connect with certain spaces.

It’s one of the news of the summer, one of those topics that give thousands and thousands of articles: Pokemon Go, the augmented reality game of Nintendo and Niantic, is being a massive success and everyone wants to play it. Therefore, Pokemon Go is being the protagonist of increasingly eccentric headlines. From the woman who quit her job to become a full-time Pokemon trainer and sell accounts on eBay, to the town hall that includes Pokemon activities at youth parties to those who end up being arrested for chasing pokemons where they should not have gone. It’s Pokemon fever and, of course, the brands are also getting into the fray.

Everyone is trying to use the frenzy for the game in their favor

As often happens with any hot topic and with any element that goes directly to the trending topic, the brands try to get rid of Pokemon Go. The companies try to talk about the pokemon, they try to be part of the conversation and they try to get into the Pokemon fever battle.

Although only McDonalds has become an official advertiser, their restaurants will become pokemon gyms where you can train the characters. The company will do it with 3,000 of its Japanese restaurants, it will sell themed Happy Meals and it is not known how much it will pay for the benefit (although those responsible for the game explained to the economic press that these ads linked to sponsored locations will be charged with a cost linked to the visit. ). What effect did this news have? McDonald’s stocks skyrocketed as the information touched the market, as noted in Business Insider.

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Según estadísticas, la presencia de un Pokemon puede hacer que las ventas de un restaurante suban un 75% (si entran algo tendrán que consumir). El 67% de los hombres y el 35% de las mujeres visitaría un negocio solo con la intención de cazar a un pokemon.

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According to statistics, the presence of a Pokemon can make the sales of a restaurant go up 75% (if they enter something they will have to consume). 67% of men and 35% of women would visit a business only with the intention of hunting a pokemon.

All this has a powerful explanation. Pokemon Go is making consumers leave their homes and is forcing them to enter certain places and connect with certain spaces. They are making consumers visit stores, restaurants and all kinds of spaces, making from the retail to the museums through the libraries have a new flow of visitors marked by the game. And if the consumers are there, we have already managed to comply with at least part of the work and we just have to give them a little push so that they end up buying. They are visitors, you just have to convert them into consumers.

A pizza bar in Long Island City in New York claims that its sales increased 75% over the weekend, by activating a decoy model feature that attracts virtual Pokémon characters to the store.
And that’s why the stores are going crazy to direct traffic and hunt Pokémon hunters in their hunts around the city. Being a Poketop or having a gym (in some you can get things to improve your game and in another compete with others) or have a pokemon has become a blessing of heaven, as explained in Business Insider, in one that stores They chase like crazy.

The stores are directly investing money to achieve this, as they point out in the media, which has analyzed what British small businesses are doing with respect to Pokemon Go fever. Taking into account that Spain arrived a little later, it could be expected that this fever of exploitation by the stores will also arrive a little later.

Cheaper than social media marketing

How are they doing it? Not only do they rely on the luck of having a Pokémon element inside them, but they are also using all possible resources to do so. For example, they are investing in buying lures (‘lures’ in English) that make the quantities of hunting birds grow or improve certain things within the game.

That is, they are investing in things within the game that their clients can use and that are a bait to attract consumers. As explained by a person in charge of a cafeteria, in this case Dublin, Business Insider leaves a decoy every day at the doors of his cafe and announces it on social networks, launching a promotion linked to the associated consumption. Consumers have increased significantly.

The investment cost is not very high (the manager of the cafeteria has spent 99 dollars, that of a clothing store about 66 in a week) and the return is high, since it exceeds in results the campaigns on social networks and It has a lower cost, or at least that is how they see these small businesses that are already using this tool.

Just like promoting your location this close to a gym or pokeparadas you can get more visibility and foot traffic, if you have a good presence in social media.

Niantic, has enabled a web page that contains a form where anyone who wishes can send directions to create new gyms or pokeparadas in Pokémon GO. You will have to visit the Niantic support page and fill out a form to not only place your order but also attach a photo.