Review of “8 Ways to Sell More Stuff”

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.”