My main problem is that I get few orders from within New Zealand. Most of my customers are from overseas, which is great, but why am I not reaching my local market?
– Jean
Books’n’Print
Hi Jean,
I don’t know much about the used book business or New Zealand, so I am really stretching here. My guess is you’re not doing anything “wrong”, you are just experiencing the “Law of Large Numbers” in reverse. Population of New Zealand is about 4 million, population of world is 6.3 billion. On average, you are just going to see more sales from everywhere else but New Zealand – if all your promotional efforts are on the web. A second, wild guess is this: if most of your books come from New Zealand, then perhaps the rest of the world finds them more interesting than local folks who have already been exposed to them!
There’s a way to try and put some numbers behind this guesswork – do you have web site traffic stats? What I would do is look at the *ratio* of sales to traffic for each country or region of the world, and see if anything looks strange. If 30% of your traffic is from Europe and about 30% of your sales are from Europe, that looks OK, and you are probably just seeing the Law of Large Numbers at work. If 30% of your traffic is from New Zealand and none of your sales are, *then* I might start to worry about something unusual going on.
– Jim Novo
Jim Novo has nearly 20 years of experience using customer data to increase profits. He is co-author of The Guide to Web Analytics and author of Drilling Down:Turning Customer Data into Profits with a Spreadsheet. If you want more visitors to take action on your web site, try using the free conversion metrics calculator, downloadable here. If you need to sell more to customers while reducing marketing expenses, get the first nine chapters of the Drilling Down book free at http://www.drillingdownbook.com.
