Deep Insight Paper. By: Raj Subramanyam. Deep Insight Paper DI Setting up the back-end for your ecommerce business.

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1 Deep Insight Paper Setting up the back-end for your ecommerce business By: Raj Subramanyam Page 1

2 Your ecommerce back-end Key Findings: To harness the scale of the internet, you need to be constantly engaging your audience Your inbound communications channels have to be open, to project a business that cares and listens to customers To generate revenue you have to be putting out products/services for sale Providing after-sales support, processing refunds and addressing questions require strategic setup of multiple digital components We Recommend: Strategic setup of your digital components such as mailing list manager, WordPress, social media, payment gateway, etc. Constant and consistent engagement of your audience with blog posts, useful tools and links, surveys, competitions, etc. Well-tested, reputed sites for listing your products Solid affiliate programs that provide a vast array of products and also a trusted payment system Business Impact: A robust, well-tested back-end positions your site for high growth. Whether you are setting up a marketing campaign to attract new subscribers, launching products through your distribution channel or cross-selling affiliate products to your existing customers, this back-end makes these processes efficient and quick. FACT: A solid back-end provides great efficiency and speed in carrying out routine transactions. Build once, use often. Page 2

3 For the purpose of this Deep Insight paper, back-end is the term used to describe all the digital infrastructure components that must be in place to ensure smooth and efficient operations for your site. Some authors such as Brendon Burchard (The Millionaire Messenger) and T.Harv Eker (Secrets of the Millionaire Mind) have given away their books and live event tickets for free to increase the sales of other products. They refer to the sale of other products as the back-end sale. The book or the live event ticket that was given away for free is called the front-end. We consider this front-end free giveaway leading to back-end sales as a part of marketing. Again, in this Deep Insight paper, we refer to the back-end as the digital infrastructure required to be set up before you grow your blog or ecommerce site to the next level. Page 3

4 Your blog/site objective: For the most part, your blog or ecommerce site s primary objective is to generate revenues. For achieving this, you need to work on (first) getting the interest of casual surfers, (second) getting some of the surfers to subscribe to your list and then (third) to convert some of the subscribers into paying customers for generating revenue. To achieve this objective, you perform the following tasks: a. Set up all the required components for your site (the back-end) b. Publish content to attract surfers, get subscribers and gain customers c. Release products through the distribution channel d. Receive payments and process refunds e. Provide customer support Page 4

5 The components set-up In the book, How to Build a Blog That Counts, I have depicted the ecosystem of an effective blog post. Page 5

6 Components for a blog or ecommerce site: A number of components go into building your blog or ecommerce site. If you are building a site that will earn revenue, then you must have the following in place: a. WordPress or other blogging platform. This is the site-builder which integrates most of the components and presents the site s face to the online user. This is the place where you write and publish your blog, collect and showcase testimonials, display your credentials in the About Us page and also present a sign-up form to the casual web-surfer to join your mailing list. For the WordPress platform to be actively available on the internet, you need a hosting provider and a valid domain name. These are background subscription activities. Hosting provides the foundation on which your WordPress settings, all plug-ins, and files are stored. When someone reaches your site on the internet, the hosting service delivers the information. A valid domain name is to an internet site, what a mailing address is to a physical location. b. Social media. Social media helps you engage your customers, both current and prospective. A large part of the internet s scale is provided by social media. All it takes is one video or blog post to go viral, and your site can attract a huge amount of interest. Social media helps you get subscribers to your mailing list, helps marketing or launching your product and also acts as a forum to interact with your customers. It is not uncommon for some customers to use your facebook page as a support tool (to log a support request or ask a question) or to submit their comments. Your social media page should tightly integrate with your WordPress platform and your mailing list manager. This means that you should be able to publish a blog post in your WordPress or fire off an campaign from your mailing list manager, and both should show up in your social media. Page 6

7 c. Mailing list manager. A mailing list manager is a key component of your ecommerce site for systematically growing your subscriber base. A mailing list manager gives you the ability to systematically bring in subscribers and customers (through sign-up forms), organize your customers (both current and potential), surgically reach out to small groups or even each one (through segmentation), and get deeper insights about your paying customer. In other words a well set-up mailing list with appropriately segmented customers is like a well-oiled distribution pipeline. d. Membership manager. A membership model is the holy grail of an online business. In such a model, a large part of your customers (stable set of members) pay periodic fees for regular consumption of goods, services, information, license to use a software, or a combination of all these. A membership model provides predictable and consistent revenues. To effectively deliver on a membership type of blog, you need a membership manager software (such as S2Member, WishList member or Digital Access Pass (DAP)) to manage various membership levels and the delivery of member-only assets. For such a model, all subscriber and customer activities affect the mailing list manager, the WordPress platform and the payment gateway. These activities, such as signing up or unsubscribing, delivering content, product or services and managing various membership tiers are controlled by the membership manager. Activities such as payments or refunds, reported from the payment gateway (such as Clickbank or Paypal) are received by the membership manager, which then adjusts the customer s membership tiers accordingly. Page 7

8 e. Product listing platforms. As you build products, you will have to find appropriate listing avenues for your products. ClickBank (for informational products), Amazon (for almost anything), itunes, etc. are some of the listing avenues. The listings should then be connected to your WordPress (for delivery of the product, if informational) or your order-booking system and to your bank account or PayPal account (for receiving payment). f. Payment Gateways. Of course you need to receive payments from your customers. One popular tool for achieving this is Paypal. You can also use other solutions that enable you to receive payments from your customers. While security of the customer s financial information is of primary importance, you also want to keep an eye out for cost of using the service, credibility in the eyes of your customer (most people are wary of putting card information online) and the hassle of managing such information. The best way out is to borrow the credibility of an established and trusted service, such as Paypal or Clickbank. g. Marketing and marketing automation services. For marketing your online business, you want to reach out to your prospective customers, existing interested people on your subscriber list and even your paid customers (for additional sales). The distribution pipeline consisting of your mailing list manager, social media and WordPress platform help you to effectively achieve such marketing activities. Moreover, if you creatively set it up, your mailing list manager can also send out periodic canned messages triggered either by the happening of a readerdriven event or by passage of time. Such periodic messages work towards marketing your site and even generating revenue. Sophisticated mailing list managers such as InfusionSoft and AWeber are capable of controlling and transmitting your messages with very granular business rules. Page 8

9 Attract surfers, get subscribers and gain customers Deep Insight Paper A blog or an ecommerce site is effective only when it attracts attention of people that are looking for information, products and services on the internet. You want people to visit your site, check out the content and then share it with their friends and contacts. The activity of attracting and engaging visitors on the internet should be as much a marketing exercise as it should be a self-propagating one. The quality of content, consistency of publication and variety of forums in which you publish become important. Check out this Deep Insight paper for a strategic approach to create impactful content, consistently: Once you accumulate say, 25 or 30 posts, then inter-linking the posts sustains peoples interest. They begin spending more time on your site. This is when you want to convert the surfer from casual to captive. You want them to sign up to your mailing list. Having them on your list allows you to alert them whenever you publish a new post. The web-form, designed using your mailing list manager provides effective sign-up forms to invite people to subscribe to your list. You can leverage Search Engine Optimization to increase web traffic to your site. This means more surfers, and consequently more people can be expected to subscribe to your list. You can also make it more attractive for people to sign up to your list by offering a giveaway product of high value. Just as a sample offered in a grocery store for tasting, induces you to then purchase the food item, the giveaway product works in exactly the same fashion. To achieve this, you need the mailing list manager (the web-form part) to be connected to your WordPress or social media (where the form is placed) and to the media in WordPress or the file storage system (such as Amazon) which stores and delivers the giveaway product. Page 9

10 Once people sign up, then the mailing manager maintains your list in an organized fashion. This includes knowing which forum people signed up from. Your next activities would constitute sending your content to your list. Now that you have a mailing list, you don t have to spray and pray, i.e. you don t have to just put out your content and hope that it randomly attracts attention of people. The mailing list manager helps you send out a broadcast to your entire list, even if the number is in the thousands or hundreds of thousands. The mails are sent quickly, and designed to bypass spam filters so that the mails land in the subscriber s inbox to the extent possible. Without a mailing list manager, it is just not possible to send out s of that volume. Check out this Deep Insight paper for building a profitable mailing list: INSIGHT: Connecting or tightly integrating one component with another involves entering some value (usually a short piece of html code) into the receiving component s setting. There is no programming complexity involved. Periodically you will engage in some activities to get the attention of your audience. These are required to get their interest in your site, promote certain features, services or products, and gain membership, attention and sales. You would perform the following: a. Generate and publish content such as a blog-post, audio post or even video. b. Share a link with your audience via , twitter or other social media. c. Send out a survey seeking feedback on some service or product, either proposed or already available. d. Promote a new product or service. e. Promote an affiliate product or service. Having the back-end available makes these activities very efficient both in terms of time and effort, i.e. quick and easy. Page 10

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13 Release products through the distribution channel Deep Insight Paper When you select a major listing avenue such as Clickbank to put out your product for sale, you get a lot more! Clickbank has a thriving affiliate program. Any Clickbank vendor can pick up an existing product or service listing and sell it to their list. Just as you can select any product of interest to your membership and push it through your pipeline, other Clickbank vendors can also select your product to push it to their list. Page 13

14 The ability or the setup to reach a large numbers of customers is called distribution channel. The segmented list that you have in your mailing list manager system is a distribution channel. Every time you have a new product to market, you can tap into this distribution channel. Check out this deep insight paper on strategically listing your informational product for maximizing revenue: INSIGHT: Listing on a service such as Clickbank or Amazon, sending to your own mailing list and having effective SEO, are three distribution channels for selling your products and services. Page 14

15 Receive payments and process refunds To effective culminate a sale and get the desired result, as a last step, you must see the revenue in your bank account. To achieve this, your bank account or your Paypal account must be connected to your product listing service (such as Clickbank or Amazon). These services ask for your tax registration, bank information, etc. to ensure compliance with financial regulations. Once these are setup, you can be assured that your revenue proceeds, less any fees, are accurately credited to your account. Using a service such as ClickBank or PayPal linked to your bank account gives you a solid, secure and trustworthy framework. By using these systems, you are implying that you do not store customers credit card and other financial information. This puts your customer at ease from a security standpoint. Page 15

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17 Provide customer support As another component of your back-end, you need to have a support mechanism to solicit feedback, allow customers to log complaints, ask for problems or seek any other information from your customer. To achieve this, you must have a tool that is prominently visible on your software, or even on your ecommerce site. Such a tool helps you achieve the following: a. Improves sales. Prospective customers or subscribers feel comfortable enrolling in your service. The presence of a support forum or desk indicates the presence of an expert team that knows its service or product, and is ready to help out. b. Better customer interaction. Allows you to systematically receive feedback, questions or complaints, analyze each one and respond in a professional manner. c. Better support. You can pass around each ticket between your team members. Some maybe of a sales nature, others could be technical, or simply how to accomplish something. With a database behind any such tool, you can accurately collect such tickets and form a knowledge base for further analyses. After a certain time period, most questions can simply be answered by looking back at the knowledge base, since a similar question would have been answered in the past. d. Product improvement or enhancement. Perhaps you may find a recurring pattern in the tickets, which may point to either a flaw in the software, or a new requirement, both of which lead to improvement in your product. e. Fills a need. If you don t have such a tool, your customers may find other avenues. They may use the contact us or even your social media forum to reach out to you. Page 17

18 Conclusion: To achieve your site objectives you need to increase your subscriber list, conversion and revenue. For this you must ensure accurate product delivery, appropriate customer engagement and secure revenue collection. A robust backend in place ensures that these activities are done quickly, securely and efficiently. ***************** If there is a topic that you would like to see addressed in a Deep Insight Paper, please send it to deepinsight@blogsuccess.com. Page 18