The coupon code box you have in the checkout process of your e-commerce store is a disruptive psychological trigger. Only customers with a coupon code in hand will sail easily through that part of your process. Everyone else is headed for trouble.

When customers don’t have a coupon code, it causes them to pause. “Why don’t I have a coupon code? Am I missing something? Who are these special customers that get coupons when I don’t?”

All these questions are raging in the heads of your customer and they create an unsettled state of mind. At this point your customers may do one of these things:

• proceed to checkout because they just don’t care about price
• proceed to checkout anyway, but just a little more displeased than before
• leave your site and go somewhere they know they can get a discount
• go search for coupon codes and return and use one they found via Google

Many of these outcomes mean you sell your product and get paid. But at what cost?

Some of these results mean you get paid less than you were originally going to get (and what the customer was even willing to pay) before you provided the confusion of a coupon code box.

The Get Elastic e-commerce blog also points out that when people search for coupon codes online, the resulting sites often sneak in an affiliate link so you not only lose the price of the coupon but you have to pay out a commission that wasn’t necessary.

To counter this, the Get Elastic folks recommend using custom URLs that don’t require people to enter coupon codes or that selectively show the coupon code box. The discount shows up when appropriate and doesn’t confuse people when not applicable.

Customer perception of your product or service is all relative. You need to identify the customer’s point of reference to be effective in your marketing and selling efforts.

Many customers will shop based on price or feature comparing your product to your competitor’s offering.

Other times your customer is only comparing what they currently have with what you are selling.

Let’s look at an example.

A while ago, I mentioned that we had an old TV that needed a converter box to receive the new digital TV signals. Ironically, that same TV started sparking and smoking about a week after we bought the converter box.

With the television dead, it was time to search for a replacement. Because our current TV was so old (over 9 years), any current television on the market looked really good.

Since my point of reference was based on a out-of-date experience, any new television would probably work as long as it fit in our cabinet.

When customers come to your store with this mindset, you need to work overtime to convince them to buy that fancy, huge, feature-rich, and pricey system you want to sell.

Not all people care about the top-of-the-line version of your product. If you want any chance of upselling the customer, take a step back and explain the basics and benefits of what you are selling and why they’d need it.

Customers will compare the products you sell side by side. If you can’t differentiate between them in words and benefits the customer cares about, they will either walk away with nothing or buy based on price.

The concepts and principles that Claude C. Hopkins teaches in his Scientific Advertising are so relevant and timeless that you’d think they were written this year. In fact, Hopkins penned his book at the beginning of the 20th century.

The only thing out of date in this book are the dollar amounts he mentions in his examples. Of course there was no Internet back in Hopkins’ day, so his advertising examples are based primarily on direct mailings.

Hopkins covers the vital importance of testing everything you do. What is working? What do customers prefer? You’ll never know until you test.

The author also reminds us that we need to track the results of our advertising and campaigns. Shotgun blast broad mass media isn’t effective. We need to target our specific customer by only serving our message up to them and writing the headline and ad such that it speaks to them alone.

His chapter on samples was very interesting to me. After I read his book, my eyes have been opened to all the companies around that are wasting money on ineffectual giveaways and promotions.

A lot of what Hopkins teaches may sound familiar. It should! His work is the basis for most modern advertising and marketing. If you take his book and apply the principles therein, you can save a lot of money by not having to buy the latest and greatest from marketing gurus.

Should You Read Scientific Advertising?

Buy the book – If you are involved in any way in crafting the copy writing of advertisements or anything that a customer will see, you need to read Claude Hopkins’ Scientific Advertising. It will establish a firm foundation and mindset for effectively using your ads and even business practices to get the best return on investment possible.

In the world of e-commerce, customers expect instant and accurate updates of their order.

When there is a void of information, customers start to fear something may be wrong.

After a recent purchase from Costco’s website, I received a series of email updates on my order:

1. order was received
2. order was sent to fulfillment
3. order was shipped
4. order was delivered

The consistent status updates of my purchase never gave me pause or reason to worry.

When a customer orders from your website, do they immediately receive an email confirmation that the order was received? What happens after that?

When your email notifications aren’t in sync with the real world, customers are either left in the dark or wonder why they should trust your system again.

We ordered a replacement part for our dishwasher from the Sears website. The order went fine and the part arrived as ordered. However, a week later I got an email saying that my order had shipped. A week after I got it!

Trust is hard to gain and easy to lose. Keeping your customers in the loop on their order process helps set delivery expectations and bridge the shipping gap that exists in e-commerce orders.