Bootstrapping Laserfit Clothing

W/E August 28

Our website visitors have continued to increase as our Google Adwords campaigns become more efficient.

The blue line represents visitors to the store and the pink represents visitors to the website. We have stablised the ratio between website visitors and store visitors. This was falling and it was difficult to understand what was driving this behavior. Still don't know but it looks like we are doing something to arrest the fall.

We have three different Google adwords adverts running at the moment.

Here are the stats for August.

Headline	Impressions	Clicks	CTR	Avg Position
Made To Measure Suits	2692	52	1.90%	6.5
Suits, Top Quality & Fit	2375	41	1.70%	6.4
Made to Measure Suits	2314	34	1.50%	6.5
	7381	127	1.70%	6.5

Now I need to try and optimize this performance with a bit of tweaking.

Always something to do........

Spread the Word

The suit is excellent, fits very well - happy to tell others how good!

I will take it with me on my next tour around the capital cities - I will be in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth over the next 4 weeks - I should be on a commission if it works out for you!!

I have left feedback on eBay as well.

David

W/E August 7

We have finished July basically on budget. I was listening to The Marketers Podcast the other day and the two podcasters, Alan Stewart and Andrew Winter were talking about the optimum sequence in which advertising on line should occur. The source of this sequence is Internet veteran Jonathan Mizel. It goes something like this:

1. Google Adwords
2. Search Engine Optimization
3. Overture Advertising
4. Other pay per click (Find What)
5. Email Marketing
6. Affiliate Programs
7. Press Releases
8. Direct Marketing
9. Print Advertising

Having listened to this I have deferred my postcard campaign until I am further down the list.

I have fine tuned my Google Ad words this week by including some negative words so that I can increase my click through rate. I have also increased the daily budget for the campaign that is working the best.

I have started an account with Overture to see what that does and I have used the learning's from the Google campaign in this trial. The next stage will be to start something with Find What.

Lets see where this takes us??

A Happy Customer

Alex,

Suit arrived at 8am yesterday. Great timing and well packaged and presented. The fabric is great and the fit is 99.8% right. A truly amazing effort given that the tailor hasn't seen my out of proportion body!!!! Thanks for a great suit. I will certainly be recommending your service to my friends.

Regards

Graham

SMH Icon August 6-8

We received some coverage in the Sydney Morning Herald's Icon section

Icon Home Page

Listed below is an excerpt from their Launch Pad column.

Laserfit Clothing
Made-to-measure suits that
you can bid for on eBay.
Supply your specs then send it
to Laserfit. The company uses
eBay's Store facility to manage
the orders and receive
payment, then tailors the suit
to your measurements. Clever.

W/E July 24

Well we hit a milestone this week our 7 day average visits have exceeded 40 for the first time. Also the number of web sessions has spiked twice from being hit by the indexing robots from Google and then AOL gathered information about the site. Have a look at the graph below for at the detail.

The sales continue to flow into the system and we are continuing to offer our referral bonuses to drive sales higher.

I have decided to do our postcard trial in a small area of our home state to see what sort of results we get and how many conversions that we make. I will post the design of our card on the site once I get it back from our graphic designer.

On the Radar

Read an article on the weekend about the search engines that are struggling to keep up with the massive task of indexing blogs on a timely basis. While I have been extensively using the normal web search engines I must admit to being blind to the blog search engines Technorati Feedster and Blogdigger. I searched on Laserfit and to my surprise got a number of hits back to our site based on the conversations (is "conversation" the right verb to use when on line?) between myself and John Jantsch at Referral Flood. This just reinforced my thoughts about the power of being a "transparent marketer". Using the power and the immediacy of on line communication I can ensure that our customers can be fully informed and empowered to make a considered decision.

Jim Turner over at One by One Media posted a note on his blog about our use of blogs as a marketing tool. I have not had a chance to view his site in detail but a cursory look indicates that I might be able to learn something and maybe also add some value. Certainly worth at least 30 minutes of time. I will post later on what I have learnt.

Alex

W/E July 17

Had a telephone conversation with Alan Stewart from The Marketers Podcast during the week. He gave me some insight into A/B split testing of Google Adwords headlines to see which headline works better. He also mentioned a free tool on the web Split Tester which you can use to do the statistical differentiation. I have briefed Teresa our web mistress on this and we have now two ads running and will test them for performance parameters.

During the week we had someone try a "con" us via eBay using a fake address and  promising to pay via money order if we sent 3 suits to his wife in Nigeria. I guess we twigged when three sales went to one customer and it was a present for his wife. I am not sure what his wife would have thought of 3 men's suits as a present???

Traffic on the site is growing again and the number of different referral sites is also growing as our link is put on more and more search services. In the last week there have been spiders from Inktomi, Google and MSN crawling over the site. Hopefully this will result in even more traffic.

I am going to put in a concerted effort to get our referral system up and running over the next few weeks. I recently purchased an ebook called Referral Flood by a fellow named John Jantsch. He has a blog at Referral Flood and I am sure that I can use some of his expertise in building my system. The concepts are straight forward and he includes a lot of real world examples. His site is certainly worth a look.

We have a number of suits in production now and picked up another order during the week for an Australian customer. So things are moving in the right direction.

Podcasts

Came across an interesting podcast on marketing the other day. Its called The Marketers Podcast and presents some in depth insights into various aspects of marketing. I will be using some of the learning's from The Marketers Podcast when I am doing my postcard marketing program. In their last program (4 I think)they mentioned Alex Mandossians Marketing with Postcards website which has some tips on putting together a campaign. I have downloaded his free chapters which were on offer to pick up any tips.

W/E July 10

We are now looking to do a few off line advertising trials as the traffic to the website has stalled a bit. Here is the report for June and it shows that from about June 20 most of the key stats have plateaued somewhat.

Download monthly_stats_june.xls

I am thinking of putting a postcard direct mail program together as we know what areas of Sydney and Melbourne have a high concentration of our target market.

I have bought some great images from iStockphoto for $25USD which gives a license to use in most advertising mediums. I can remember when it used to cost hundreds for library photos, I guess this is just another industry that has been radically changed by the Internet. The next step is to get some data from Australia Post and a postcard printer to complete the plan.

Will give more details on this next week.