Review of “8 Ways to Sell More Stuff”

October 26, 2010 · Posted in events, Guest Blogger  · Posted by IIA

Jenni Timony of Exponentially.ie attended “8 Ways to Sell More Stuff”, our recent conference for online retailers. This is her review of the event. We always welcome reviews of our events from attendees so please contact me if you would like to write a post about an event you attended. So over to Jenni!

I was looking forward to this conference and it did not disappoint.

Apart from the sales pitch from An Post, it was a relevant , insightful and engaging line up. [Ed: An Post were launching their new service www.iloveshopping.ie]

I got the most out of the Entrepreneurs – Mike Kane from Curiouswines.ie and Andrew Draper of Manpacks.

My key takeaways from Curiouswines.ie

  • Interesting to note that they had NO marketing budget. All of their efforts are focussed on Social Media and email marketing.
  • Mike talked about acquisition versus retention using the acronym AIDA. It’s about creating Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. Patience clearly required !
  • Mike talked about discounting and how he would not do half price. Customers will think the product was either too expensive in the first place or you are selling at a loss. 5% no good either. Recommends a meaningful time limited discount of 15% plus.
  • Love this one: Curiouswines sends a little welcome/ thank you token (such as a branded corkscrew) to new customers. In the post – not on Facebook or a blog. “ Just between you and me”. Personalise it.
  • Regarding Marketing efforts. “Layer it, integrate it, repeat it.”
  • Mike mentioned a white paper called “ The Darwinian Gale”, which I’m reading. It’s about recession relevant customer trends to drive loyalty and retention.
  • Harvest the power of crowds and networks. Something like, “This deal is 25% off provided 150 people sign up. Any less and the deal is off.”
  • Mike distilled it succinctly when he said that acquisition and retention is the real acid test.

Later came the chilled and charming Andrew Draper from Manpacks. I must confess that I had a particular interest in this as I’m launching a site called Frankley.com in January also targeting the North American market. It is a similiar concept but aimed at women, men and kids!

  • Manpacks was launched quickly and the model is based on iterating from real world data.
  • Makes a change to the site every day to increase conversion.
  • Modeled heavily on Basecamp. But its PaaS instead of SaaS. ( Product as a service versus Software as a Service.)
  • Things went mad when they got featured on Springwise.com, Inc magazine and more.
  • 2000 tweets about Manpacks over nine months. Nice !
  • The site gets great traffic but has a low conversion rate.
  • They claim to have no outreach for PR. Hmmmm…
  • Manpacks push the service, not the product. They keep a small range of stock as ‘men don’t like choice’.
  • Half of their customers love to modify their order, the other half don’t.
  • Big focus on user experience. “Don’t make me think”. They are making the site as clean, simple and intuitive and constantly tweak to achieve this.
  • Also on UX (user experience) – they ask themselves “Is it usable? Is it useful? Is it credible? Is it desirable?”

And my favourite…

  • “ The most important thing we did was LAUNCH. Be awesome and good things will happen.”



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Comments

5 Responses to “Review of “8 Ways to Sell More Stuff””

  1. Rob Leslie on October 26th, 2010 7:39 pm

    Just wondering if anyone else feels that the sooner authenticity, trust, or credibility of your site is established the more likely you are to make a sale. I’d be interested to know what others think. i.e. whether establishing trust with your customer as early as possible in the engagement is a determining factor in making a sale??

  2. Roseanne Smith on October 27th, 2010 9:09 am

    Hi Rob,

    Thanks for your comment and question. I would agree with you that trust is very important. When the bricks and mortar store is missing the smallest thing can lose that trust and therefore the conversion: the design of the site, an unexpected event during checkout, bad spelling or grammar, inappropriate use of media or no use of social media as examples. If only we could ask the non-converters why they gave up! I recently read a nice short post on the OnePageCRM blog about handling customer objections which I thought put it succinctly. I also remember the time that I put a bunch of products in a shopping cart on a shoe site and then was distracted and never completed the sale. I had previously purchased shoes from them and shortly afterwards I received an email which asked me in a very nice way what had happened. I was happy to reply but the small discount code included made me happier again. Between the excellent service I received from this company previously and their follow up I would definitely say that I trust them.
    Roseanne

  3. Niall Harding on October 28th, 2010 11:01 am

    Hi Jenni,

    Thank you for your review of “8 ways to sell more stuff”. It is interesting because you have summarised the presentations and lessons to be learned very well indeed. It would seem to me that you enjoyed the day and enjoyed writing your review even more. I almost missed the value of your excellent review, your passion for the industry and your obvious understanding of the web because of how you dismissed the An Post “sales pitch”.

    In my view the An Post presentation was informative, entertaining and extremely relevant to all the clients we have in “town.ie”. Mr. Brigdale’s delivery was entertaining, he departed from the usual power point type presentation and instead used imagery and audio. What I found even more encouraging was that An Post has been able to come from a dated and lack of progressive thinking to a place of new thinking and modern approach. An Post has shown leadership by recognising that the market they wish to serve needs to be helped to grow and they are prepared to gain only a share of this expanded market. Hats off to Mr. Brigdale and his team for their vision, action and success in bringing this service to market from the old image of An Post.

    I say thank you to An Post for thier sponsorship which facilitated the relevant, insightful and engaging day we all enjoyed.

    Thanks again Jenni, I enjoyed your review and find it very helpful.
    Niall

  4. Jenni Timony on October 29th, 2010 7:38 am

    Hi Niall, thanks for your kind comments ! I agree with you on An Posts progressive thinking and look forward to checking out their new service.
    Jenni

  5. Andrew Draper, Co-founder Manpacks.com keynote speech (Podcast) : Irish Internet Association blog on November 16th, 2010 11:22 am

    [...] a conference specifically aimed at online retailers called “8 Ways to Sell More Stuff” (read a review here). The feedback was very positive and we hope to produce more events in this style in [...]

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