The Magic Marketing Wand

Epopus clients are always looking for the single element that will catapult their online sales from so-so to stupendous. Unfortunately, there is no magic wand for anyone to wave over your store to make it an overnight success.

Instead, success usually comes from a persistent testing and improvement of every possible aspect of your marketing, content and site design. In fact, it seems to mirror the "tipping effect" phenomenon pretty closely. Create enough positive customer experiences, and at some point you'll see a significant upturn in your business that can't really be traced to any single action.

Last week I tried something at the request of a client that was supposed to be another incremental site improvement, and it generated so many calls we had to temporarily remove it from the site because our call center got overwhelmed. In other words, it appeared as though we'd stumbled on a magic wand that produced a spike in response that doubling our client's advertising spend would not have accomplished, and it was free. I think we simply put the last piece in place to get past the tipping point, but it certainly seemed like magic.

Would this single change work for your store? By itself, probably not. What we did was tied to several other tweaks we'd already made to the navigation and calls to action our client's site, and probably wouldn't have succeeded so dramatically without those things already in place. It did open my eyes to a new way to think about calls to action for an online store--exciting stuff.