To the 3 people that regularly read this…sorry, but it’s another post about my experiences launching and learning with Manpacks!
It’s been a whirlwind 2-3 weeks since launching manpacks.com, it managed to exceed my expections for a ‘launch’ and it’s also managed to reinforce a number of things that I’ve always believed and have long stated but didn’t have my own data to back it up until now.
The short version – I’m not retiring any time soon, nor will I be stopping work for my Hashbrown clients. Sales have been brisk, and topped our expectations for the first month for sure, but that doesn’t mean instant money or immediate returns, there’s a lot of hard work still to be done and I can’t wait to get to it (both Manpacks and Hashbrown and other stuff too!). Also, like anything worth doing there’s been a lot to learn, a lot of surprises, and best of all it’s been an incredibly fun ride so far and I don’t want to get off of it.
So, what were some of the things that have been reinforced to me?
Clean, simple and refined design along with clearly stated copy is an absolute must (I think we almost nailed this one out of the gates, but ended up making some changes and I’m really happy with what we’ve established and where we’re headed).
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Outdated, doesn’t matter, and don’t waste your time (or money) on it except (and these are a must to ensure good search engine results) to write clear, concise copy that states exactly how you want the product/service to be understood and ensure your code is accessible and standard compliant – see? No black magic here. To share a statistic, in the first 2 weeks of launch our total traffic from search engines has hovered around 2%. Rather than spend time on SEO make sure you make your product/service interesting, and tell a story that makes others want to share (and a little humour doesn’t hurt either, but I don’t think it’s required).
One lesson we’re addressing is ensuring a good amount of detail about what you’re selling – prove to the people visiting your site that what you’re selling is worth their time and money. When we launched I created, what I thought were some fun, simple illustrations of each of our products that really fit the feel we were trying to establish. This simply wasn’t enough, yes we got sales that exceeded my expectations, but based on literally 100’s of bits of feedback we should’ve had more. We’re working on that and it’s at the top of our list now to be our next major addition to the service.
Another bit of information I kind of always knew but didn’t entirely have any proof to back it up was that just because you manage to get 10’s of thousands of eyeballs to look at your site doesn’t mean they’re going to buy. I would much prefer 100 unique visitors that are targeted and likely to buy than 10,000+ visitors that are un-targeted and “just curious”. That said, by generating that kind of traffic there is a trickle-down effect that results in a number of sales, but don’t expect to see any great conversion percentages! Also, for the most part people’s first visit seems to be curiosity and/or “research” and then they return to buy, so don’t get hung up on your bounce rate initially (do make changes if it is persistently high over time though!).
Also, remember, a website is not a printed page, nor is it a static screen – it can be, and should be, changed, adjusted, edited, etc. Over the last 2 weeks we’ve made some buttons bigger, changed their colors, changed the text on them, edited some call to actions all of which have almost immediately seen a change in conversion rates – time will tell if these were related or not, but at the amount that these changes cost (especially at launch when you’ve really got nothing to lose), experiment! You can always change back, for the most part people aren’t watching or 100% paying attention to you yet. Just make sure you learn something from any mistake you make!
I think that’s it for now, but I’m sure as this experiment continues I’ll learn a whole lot more and be surprised by what the data ends up telling us – and I can’t wait!
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