How To Inspire Your Intuition
The concept of intuition can be a little bit difficult to pin down. It can also be a bit difficult to recognize when it occurs as well.
You have probably had the experience of being stopped in highway traffic due to an accident ahead. The radio traffic channel advises alternate routes but you just do not think that is a good idea. You decide to stay on the highway and later find out that you got home way ahead of your co-worker who took a detour and got caught in worse traffic. Were you psychic?
Probably not. It is more likely that your subconscious was sorting through the twelve other times you encountered this problem on your drive home and weighing the severity of the accident against the traffic at this time of day and the day of the week in order to figure out whether or not the detour would be a worse alternative. You did not consciously work that out; you just had a gut feeling.
Intuition is often defined as this apparent ability to acquire knowledge without the use of reason. However, in reality, intuition is a highly evolved function involving the subconscious. The subconscious not only records all of our experiences, but also sorts, categorizes and interconnects pieces of information to form a web of patterns that become a referral network for new experiences.
Many researchers and thinkers about brain function suggest that while intuition is something of an unconscious process, it is possible to treat it as a skill that can be improved and called upon to assist in creative thinking.
One of the first ways to work with your intuition is to recognize when it is working for you. For example, some people get a visual flash of the answer they need. Others hear a voice in their head or feel physically pulled in a direction. Yet others simply feel absolutely rock solid sure that they know what to do. Once you have a sense of how your subconscious signals you, you will be more open to acknowledging intuition rather than dismissing it as irrational.
You will also know how to summon your intuitive sense. If you hear it, ask a question in your mind. If you see it, write the question on a bulletin board in your mind or create a mental image of the problem. You can also use associations. For example, when you sense an intuitive thought, acknowledge it with some physical movement such as clapping your hands or squeezing your toes. Then, when you want to evoke your intuition, try to do so by using the same physical movement.
Many people believe that you can more easily listen to your subconscious and free your intuition to work if you quiet your conscious mind. One of the best ways to do so is to learn meditation techniques. Pose questions to yourself then meditate for a time and you may find new insights.
Help yourself make connections by brainstorming. Try writing down your problem, issue, goal in the middle of a piece of paper. Start drawing lines and writing thoughts about that central issue in connected balloons. Let your mind take you from balloon to balloon drawing new lines and making connections where they make sense. This exercise can often show you a different way to think about something that leads to intuitive insight.
Do not ignore the data that you have. It is all useful, it all builds connections. But, push the data as far as you can. Take a piece of information about the drop in purchase of luxury items, for example. Push that information. How far will purchasing drop? What will people buy instead? Will there be a new generation of high end purchasers? What forces will allow that to happen? What would the new purchaser want that is different from the old purchaser?
Look at your situation within a much bigger picture. Describe your problem or goal. Then write down as many major trends as you can think of and think about how each affects your issue both negatively and positively. Then think about what you can do to minimize the negatives and capitalize on the positives. Are there any themes that emerge? Do you see where you should be taking your business based on this macro analysis?
Think globally. If your product or business is focused in one country, think about what is happening in other countries.
Think across industries. How are businesses in other industries dealing with this issue?
Think about your customer. How is your customer changing in response to the issues you identify? What does that mean about their wants and needs? How do you adapt your products to ride those emerging trends?
You may not be able to control your intuition but by challenging yourself and your thought process and training yourself to work with your subconscious, you may well be able to inspire regular flashes of insight that you can trust to be a benefit to your business and your life.
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Online Shopping Making Strides
How is your online shopping site doing? Are you faring better, worse or about the same as your competitors?
Forrester Research Inc. conducted a survey of online retailers on behalf of Shop.org and they found that most online retailers are doing better in several ways.
- Forty two percent of online retailers increased their online visitor to order conversion rates during the first half of this year compared to the same period last year leading to an average conversion rate of 3.4 percent.
- There has been an average growth rate of 18 percent in 2008 web sales over 2007.
- Fifty percent of online retailers surveyed during the first half of 2009 said they expect sales to be better than initially expected during the next 12 months.
- Eighty seven percent of online retailers said their e-commerce operations were profitable last year.
Online retailers are also getting cautiously more optimistic about the future. Seven percent of those surveyed said they expected sales to be substantially better than projected, forty three percent said slightly better, thirty three percent said the same, and seventeen percent said slightly worse.
Using benchmark data
This data and other data points from the Forrester survey can help you think about your own website and sales. Here is how to do turn data into meaningful information for decision making.
Shopping cart abandonment
Retailers described a fifty one percent shopping cart abandonment rate. Anything other than a zero rate of abandonment is difficult to accept since it represents someone getting all the way to a shopping basket with items in it then leaving. However, zero is unrealistic; many shoppers say that they do shop all the way to the shopping basket stage in order to do comparisons among pricing and shipping options, i.e., they intended to leave that cart anyway. Secondly, the research says that some shoppers return to finish shopping at another time.
If your abandonment rate is higher than the average reported, look at these factors:
- Are these shoppers returning later to finish? If yes, that is positive although you should remember that the average number does not exclude those returnees either.
- Do shoppers leave when they see the shipping costs? If yes, you need to look at how to ease that sticker shock.
- Do shoppers show a pattern of confusion then leave? Take a good look at how easily your shopping cart function works, e.g., is there a bread crumb trail to work backwards, does the cart retain information and so on.
Anything you can do to reduce shopping cart abandonment is money in the bank.
Repeat customers within a year and overall
Online retailers report that twenty four percent of their customers buy again within a year and twenty eight percent buy again over a longer time period. This number is affected by the type of products you are selling. Consumable should inspire much more frequent customer return than long term products such as furnishings, for example.
However, return customer rates are also a function of how well you stay in touch and attract shoppers with additional value. If your rate is lower than the average, look at your email campaign and your customer loyalty programs.
Benchmarking data can be a bit hard to apply to your own situation but if you take the time to think about how to use it constructively, benchmarking data can lead you to positive improvements in your site.
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A Coupon Lesson From Grocers For Your eCommerce Store
Even though the online retail world has made enormous changes in the way that business gets done, there are some strategies from the bricks and mortar world that can be easily and profitably adopted in the ecommerce world as well.
You probably already know that coupons are a huge draw both offline and online. According to Comscore, a leading marketing intelligence data collection service, ’27 million US Internet users visited coupon sites in October 2008, up 33 percent from a year earlier (that is 18 percent of the 148 million Americans who use any coupons in a year). The number of searches conducted using coupon terms also increased by 100 percent from January to September of 2008. On a global basis, there was a 42 percent increase in the number of pages viewed at coupon sites.’
Hopefully you have already implemented a coupon strategy on your own site, including registering your coupon or coupons at one or more of the dozens of coupon consolidating sites available. If you have not read the latest research on coupon usage, you should know that you are better off providing a long redemption period. Even though basic sales strategy suggests that you close the gap between getting the coupon and taking the purchase action, the latest research says that many more coupons are redeemed if they are given about a nine month usage life.
Terrific, now that you have done that, you are ready for the second half of the coupon strategy: accept competitors coupons! This is a tried and true strategy in grocery stores, grocers encourage people to simply bring their fist full of coupons cut out from the newspaper and use them all in one store. This is especially helpful in this multi purchase setting because once someone has crossed the threshold, they will probably buy more than just those items that have associated coupons.
In the online situation, since you cannot necessarily count on the overall boost to sales, you need to do a bit of analysis before you adopt this strategy.
You need to be sure that you can still do okay at the lower pricing. If your competitors coupons are at about the same discount as yours, no problem at all. If they are much more substantial, either they are buying a lot less expensively, they do not know how to manage themselves or they are desperate to get people to their site for more business (possibly because of an inventory problem).
Obviously, if the discounting is too substantial for you to make money, this is not a good strategy for you, although you may want to try for a limited time and see how that group of buyers works out, e.g., do they buy more or return frequently making the initial discount worthwhile?
You can find competitor coupons by going to any of the coupon consolidator sites. Once you find them, add those codes to your shopping carts list of acceptable codes.
Then, advertise your policy. Send out a press release or make the policy part of your pay per click ads.
Finally, analyze the results to be certain that it is financially worthwhile to pursue this strategy.
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How To Find And Contact Your Market On Social Networking Sites
Let’s start at the beginning. Before you can find your customers on a social networking site, you have to be involved in that social networking site. So, have you:
- Established a page on Facebook, My Space, You Tube, Twitter etc?
- Added a photo or avatar so people get a sense of who you are?
- Introduced yourself, your interest and your business?
Great! Now you have to start hooking up with other people. How do you do that? Try:
- Letting the site go through your email list and see who else that you know or have had communication with also has a page on the site. You can then decide if you want to link up with that person.
- Putting an announcement on your website with your social network site information and asking people to join with you.
- Joining interest groups that have been established on the site that are relevant to your business interests.
Each of these techniques should garner some additional connections for you. In each case, you have a fairly easy entry:
- Your email list will generate a list of people you already know that you can link up with.
- The site announcement gives people the opportunity to be part of your list.
- People who have joined a group have announced their interest in speaking with other people about the subject of the group.
Here is a technique that you may not have thought of that identifies people you may not find in any other way. Use a search query that searches the interests people have identified in their profiles. This information is not easily found in any other way, many of these people have not joined a related group and most would not necessarily be people that you would hook up with in any other way.
The trick is to know how to write the Google search query that will bring you the right list of people. Try the following search queries in Google:
Linkedin
site:linkedin.com inurl:in ‘fishing’
Bebo
site:.bebo.com inurl:profile inurl:bebo ‘gardening’
CafeMom
site:www.cafemom.com inurl:cafemom.com/home/ ‘scuba diving’
Facebook
site:facebook.com/people ‘led zeppelin’
Flickr
site:flickr.com/people ‘@gmail’
Twitter
site:twitter.com inurl:status ‘video games’
MySpace
site:profile.myspace.com inurl:myspace inurl:fuseaction ‘hiking’
Connecting with your market.
The tricky part now is how to approach these folks. You do not know them and they have not agreed to be approached. An out of the blue contact that looks like marketing will be poorly received. You will need to put on your most clever thinking cap and find a creative way to approach these folks with an offer that will make them glad you connected.
If you sell gardening supplies, you may want to try something like, ‘Your profile lists gardening as an interest, me too, I especially love growing delphiniums and belong to the British Delphinium Society, I also sell gardening supplies and just found the best fertilizer I have ever used. As a fellow gardener, I thought you might be interested, just let me know and if you have any tips on slugs, I am all ears!’
Give your social media creativity a try. It will help you build a deeper knowledge of your market, closer connections with potential customers, and undoubtedly higher and repeat sales once you do it right.
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How To Exploit The Power Of Social Media Sites
It is not clear that anyone could have predicted the enormity of impact that social media has had, is having and will have on Internet life. Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and My Space have become a living and breathing part of most peoples lives.
Are you not sure that is entirely true? Jake Hird, a Research Analyst for Econsultancy, has gathered together some information about these social media phenomena that is worth a look. In a July 31, 2009 post he reported:
- If YouTube were a country, it would be the third most populated place in the world.
- 20 hours worth of video is uploaded to YouTube every single minute.
- MySpace apparently reaches 30 percent of UK adults aged 15 to 24. It is been suggested that it is as common to have a MySpace account in the UK as it is to own a dog.
- Over the past twelve months, Twitter is year on year growth rate has broken the 1000 percent barrier.
- One out of every 350 website visits in the UK is via Twitter, but barely 5 percent of users currently go to an online retail service through the medium.
- Facebook has more than 250m active users globally.
- More than 120m users log on to Facebook at least once each day and more than 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day. Combined, more than 5bn minutes are spent on the site on a daily basis.
- The average Facebook user has around 120 friends on the site.
Okay then, it seems like this social media thing has caught on and it is time to take another look, especially since online retailers in general have not yet figured out how to best exploit this new trend (as indicated by data such as the info above that barely 5 percent of Twitter users go to retail sites through that medium).
What can you do? How about establishing yourself on Twitter and tweeting about your business activities?
For example:
‘Just saw gorgeous new heels at great price will buy for shop!’
‘Wow there is a run on my new animalprint ‘skins’ for MP3 players hope I can get more in soon!’
‘Saw Britney Spears wearing my earrings on You Tube I made them with her in mind!’
Or, creating a Facebook page and talking about how you surf every weekend, then spend the week selling surfing equipment, a surfer’s dream come true!
Why not join the You Tube movement with your products? Make a how to video of yourself cooking Julia Childs boeuf bourguignon in the pot you are selling online.
Or, make a comic video of yourself trying to pack your action figures in a box for shipping in a way so they will all get along during transit.
‘Do not worry, Asteroid Man, you will not have to ride next to Starfleet Commander. You are going to share space with LunaWoman! Have a good trip!’
Even if you cannot pull that one off, think about how to make yourself and your products real and authentic by letting your customers in a little closer to your life and your thoughts.
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