How a Live Help Support System Can Increase Your ROI Dramatically
Author: Eva Browne-Paterson

Many Internet Marketers spend a considerable amount of time and money promoting their businesses online. What percentage of those marketers do you think track their ads? Perhaps 20-40%? What percentage do you think analyze the results of their campaign and actually formulate pro-active steps to take to rectify the identified issues and hence, increase sales? Much less than 20%.

The fact is that many Internet Marketers are wasting their time, efforts and money by promoting without a plan and taking 'pot luck'. Then they wonder why their product isn't selling...

This report will bring your attention to marketing issues that should be recognized and show you how to increase your percentage of sales dramatically by using a live help support system.

Planning

It is imperative that you endeavor to formulate an advertising plan when promoting a product. It may take time to work out at first, but once it's done, you can simply add new products to the plan as you join new affiliate programs or release new products.

Now of course affiliates would have a much larger range of products to promote than the general business owner who usually focuses on their own products, with possibly several other good income generators as well. The intention of planning in the first place is to organize your marketing efforts and carry them through to the end -- which is after the sale is made and you work out the percentage of sales for your campaign.

When formulating a marketing plan, the following should be taken into consideration:

• Ad campaign type: e.g. ezine ad, full page pop-under, banner impressions, text email campaign etc.
  
• Budget: Work out how much you can afford, even if you have no money (then it would be $0).
  
• Run Dates: Find out the availability of the ad campaign and fill out when it needs to be submitted by and when it is due to run.
  
• Results: This is where you would add the click thru rates and sales numbers.
  
• ROI: This figure is reached by a simple calculation shown under "Do Your Maths".

Ad Tracking

It is a well recognized fact that if you want to gauge how well an ad campaign performs, you must track your ads. It is essential that you have a quality ad tracking manager that makes the tracking process quick and simple with statistics that are easy to understand and translate.

I highly recommend Add2it Go-To as a robust system that is easy to install. You can see the full list of features and download a free trial from here:
http://www.add2it.com/go/to.pl?l=Go-To

Plug the statistics from your ad campaign taken from your ad tracking service into your plan after the campaign has been given sufficient time to run.

Do Your Maths

Do your mathematics for each advertising campaign. Calculate the cost-per-visitor, cost-per-sale and return-on-investment ratios.

For example: If a website charges you $20 per thousand impressions ($20/CPM), and you get a 2.0%
click-through (20 visitors), your cost-per-visitor is $1.00 ($20 / 20 visitors).

And if 1 in every 10 visitors buys your product, your cost-per-sale is $10.00 ($20 / 2 sales).

So if each sale of your product produces a gross profit of $15, then your net profit per-sale will be $5.00 ($15 gross profit - $10 cost-per-sale).

Your return-on-investment (ROI), before non-marketing expenses, is 50.0% ($10.00 total net profits / $20 investment). This campaign is profitable!

Try advertising on different sites to find the winning combination(s) that can yield the highest ROI. Comparing Deal A which yields an ROI of 20% to Deal B that yields 60%, your advertising dollars work three times harder (and profitable) with Deal B!

Correlations & Analysis

It is important that you make the most of the statistics accessible through your tracking service and figure out why you received that particular percentage of sales. You should always aim to increase that percentage as it just makes good business sense. Try to look at your site from a customer's point of view and make the required adjustments.

Issues

There is a need to be able to identify the issues that are making people leave your web site before purchasing the product. But how do we do that? Wouldn't it be great to be able to stand at the doorway to your web site and ask each person this question as they left your site? "Excuse me. Would you mind telling me why you didn't buy my product?"

Now some people actually do that on their web sites by utilizing an exit popup window with questions and a feedback form. What an excellent idea. I wonder what percentage of people fill them out? Possibly 30-50% I would imagine? It would depend how serious the person was about considering your product as to whether they would provide feedback.

Some of the issues that we could expect to be included in feedback from prospective customers would be:

• Too expensive...
  
• Couldn't find the product I was looking for...
  
• Doesn't have all the features I thought it would...
  
• Doesn't have a particular feature that I was after...
  
• Not sure if I should buy it or not... I can't decide...
  
• Not sure if it does everything that I want it to do...
  
• Does it really do all that it says it will? I want to speak to someone who's used it...
  
• The web site was too bright with tiny text that hurt my eyes!
  
• The purchase link didn't work... It displayed an error page.
  
• I don't have a PayPal account. Can I use an alternative payment method?

Once you know more about what your prospective customers are thinking, you are in a better position to make the necessary adjustments to your web site to rectify the issues.

Support

The situation for the prospective customer as they visit your web site could be something like this:

They are looking over your web site, possibly thinking some of the comments above and trying to find answers... They will look around your site for the answers and possibly send you an email or visit your FAQ page if you have one. But if they don't find the answer they need -- you know what they will do don't you? Yes, they will just click away in an instant... Probably unsatisfied too.

Are your prospective customers getting the answers they need from your web site, right then and there instantly when they are open and susceptible to purchasing your product? If you said "No", then you should seriously consider adding the power of a Live Support System to your web site.

You can download a fully functioning free trial here:
http://www.add2it.com/go/to.pl?l=InstaHelp

Consider what happens when you're shopping in a regular offline store and you're looking for something that you can't quite seem to find. What do you do? You find a sales assistant and say, "Excuse me. I'm looking for a pink and green spotted blouse but I can't find one anywhere! You only seem to have pink and white spotted blouses... Do you know where I can find one please?"

Why not give your online customers the very same courtesy and assistance in real-time? Did you know that you can, even if you don't have your own web site? Sometimes it is just a matter of directing the customer to the right place so they can make their purchase.

InstaHe!p

InstaHe!p is a state-of-the-art live support system that you can plug into all of your web sites and monitor from one control panel. Your prospective customers can see that you are online by the graphic that is prominently displayed on your web site and they know they can click on it when they need assistance.

But InstaHe!p has twenty-three EXTRA features that no other support system offers right now.

• Pro-Active Invitation: Unobtrusively invite your customer to chat in real-time. The chat windows slowly slides down the side of the screen with the invitation.
  
• Pro-Active Message System: Send a real-time message to your site visitors. ["Hello, Did you know we have a sale on at the moment?"]
  
• Visitor History: Identify if your visitor has been to your site before with Repeat Visitor Identification History. ["Hello, Welcome back!"]
  
• Enhance your visitor's Live Chat experience with emoticons.
  
• Chat Transcript: Customer has the option to have the transcript forwarded to them via email.
  
• Email Transcripts: Improve quality levels by viewing email transcripts to check that the required level of customer support is being provided to your customers.
  
• Visitor Info: Country the visitor resides in and the screen resolution they are using. ["How is the weather in Australia today?"]
  
• Call Center: Live chat between operators with emoticons.
  
• Chat Transcripts Storage: Basic search transcripts by keywords, start date, end date, start time, end time and visitors IP address. ["When you were here last, you purchased the mailman script. How has that been working for you?"]
  
• Visitor's chat window is fully customizable.
  
• Ability to save HTML files.
  
• Windows based software less than 1 MB in size.
  
• HTTPS support for secure web sites.
  
• Monitor up to 5 external URL addresses. Ideal for affiliates without their own web site. This enables affiliates to be able to provide support to their customers as well and answer any questions that they might have and hence, close more sales.
  
• Information Center: Includes customizable autoresponder field. ["If you click on the autoresponder link in the bottom frame, you will receive all the details straight away via email and you can think about it..."]
  
• Professional Version without InstaHe!p logos available.
  
• Affiliate Program: Refer your friends and make a monthly residual income. Referral ID included on "Powered By InstaHe!p" image.
  
• Timed Popup Chat Window: Configure your chat box to open after a specific period of time.
  
• Email Monitoring: See who is actually reading your newsletter in real-time and their email address.

To see the full list of features, please download the free trial here:
http://www.add2it.com/go/to.pl?l=InstaHelp

Results

So what kind of results can you expect as a business owner or webmaster when you install a live support system on your web sites? Or if you are an affiliate without your own web site and you use InstaHe!p? Now that InstaHe!p is bundled with Add2it Go-To, that means that it is available in both products which is even better and adds more value for affiliates without a web site.

Simply put, you can expect the results to be dramatic. How do you know? By working out the new percentage of sales in your ad campaigns of course.

If you are online a good deal of the time, and your status is set to online, you will be notified by an audible alarm when someone is visiting any of your web sites and you can watch as they browse from page to page on your site. You can pro-actively engage them in conversation and answer any questions that they might have prior to purchasing -- and usually they do. That is the crux of the matter. Solving those unanswered questions that made people leave your site before.

But that's all in the past now. You have two terrific power tools to download and try out for yourself.

Download a InstaHe!p here:
http://www.add2it.com/go/to.pl?l=InstaHelp

Download Add2it Go-To here:
http://www.add2it.com/go/to.pl?l=Go-To

Once you try these power tools, you won't be able to function properly without them. See how they increase your percentage of sales in the future and don't forget to let us know all about it. Add2it Go-To and InstaHe!p would love to include your testimonial on our web page.

[Publishers note: The exit pop-up window system that Eva mentioned and that actually "asks" your visitor, why he or she is leaving, will be part of a soon to be released script called: Add2it WebForms Pro It will allow you to setup the exact same system you can currently see when you leave many of the web pages at Add2it.com]

About the Author: Eva Browne-Paterson publishes EvieB's New-Z and lives in Australia. She has been marketing online for over ten years and provides her subscribers with free and low cost marketing solutions. http://www.evieb.com Eva uses InstaHe!p on all her web sites and believes in the product that much, that she became a partner in the Company. "I knew from experience before that online help is an excellent sales tool. People were always contacting me from my sales page and asking what the next available ad date was. I would often make a sale after chatting with them and frequently give them a discount to boot! So you never know what will happen when you ask an operator for assistance. Using InstaHe!p has only enhanced that experience completely for me AND my customers."