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Name: Accepted
Established: 1999
Turnover: £50 million loan applications per month
Nature: Compares over 100 secured loan plans to find the best customer deal from their lender panel.
The secured loans market is one of the most competitive industries online, with some forms of marketing costing in excess of £30 per visit!
Over the course of 4 months Netbasic planned, designed, developed and launched Accepted.co.uk.
We began by focusing on the core customer benefit of Accepted.co.uk - the unique selling proposition - which is to provide a search of over 12 secured loan lenders and built a site design and sales text around the main point of service.
As many industry experts have pointed out, keeping the site design simple is often the best way to achieve the best conversion. And so Accepted.co.uk is very simple in its construction and approach. It is not flashy - it just does what it says it is going to do!
Here at Netbasic we have tried many of the commercially available website tracking & visitor analysis tools, but none ever seem to quite achieve what we need. So we tend to build our own specific to the site in question - which is exactly what we did for Accepted.co.uk before launch.
This enabled us to monitor the activity, cost and earning potential of every single customer that visited the site & the return on investment from all advertising campaigns.
Launch involved the use of a UK-wide cost per click & pay for inclusion campaign across Google Adwords, Overture, Espotting & Mirago. This enabled us to get to the top of many search engines & web properties such as Google, Yahoo, MSN & AOL.
Following this initial launch, we began monitoring the traffic sources and visitor activity on the site. Using our own software enabled to tweak everything from the source of visitors to the design of the website pages within minutes.
Through constantly reassessing many variables, we pushed the conversion rate on the site from a respectable 6% to a massive 20%. This kind of increase in conversion would not be possible without the constant reassessment of the variables using our software above.
However, even the experts have problems! We also launched a search engine optimisation campaign which these days must have a primary focus on Google. However, a new penalty called a Sandbox in which new sites are not ranked for a long period of time has meant that we are still waiting for Accepted.co.uk to rank in Google for our chosen search terms. We're still waiting...
This stresses how important it is to not rely on one source of online marketing. By using a balanced approach we build much more solid foundations to each site as a long term business.
As an interesting aside, MSN have released a preview of their engine to be released next year, and Accepted.co.uk is number 1 on MSN for the keyphrase Compare Secured Loans and number 2 on MSN for the keyphrase Secured Loans. We look forward to that being launched!
We have also managed to achieve the ranking of number 5 on Yahoo for the keyphrase Secured Loans in addition to number 1 for the keyphrase Compare Secured Loans.
We recently moved into a partnership with Netklix, which has enabled us to launch an affiliate scheme paying £60 per secured loan application to all sites that refer visitors to us. As with all affiliate schemes, it is important to have close contact with your affiliates - ensuring they have everything they need at your disposal, informing them of changes and rewarding them for their efforts. After all - it's another part of our virtual sales force!
This strategy will continue, and contributes to our massive growth; Accepted.co.uk now processes over £50 million of loan applications per month!
Name: Novatech
Established: 1987
Turnover: £40 million pa
Nature: Manufacture of their own brand PCs and Laptops. Direct reseller of a huge range of components and peripherals.
Novatech was a well established company with an incredibly loyal customer base. Their long term focus on customer service had set them apart from the competition for many years, but there was only one problem - the website.
Over the course of a year we managed the relaunch and online marketing of a new site. In the first phase (6 months), we provided website usability and ecommerce experience during the site build, working in conjunction with a talented network of programmers and designers.
Within the first two months, the new site recorded an increase of nearly 40% in orders. Our attention to ease of use, valuable sales conversion content and product placement had virtually doubled the number of orders on the website - without any additional increase in marketing spend.
In fact, at the same time as the new site was launched, the number of offline catalogues sent to customers was actually decreased; furthermore underlining its success.
In the second half of our phase we were asked to implement a long term search engine marketing strategy. Through careful keyword analysis, link building and content creation, we provided a massive increase in website visitors which continues to shine today.
While getting Novatech to number 1 on Google.co.uk for the keyphrase "computer supplies", the main testament to our approach lies in the fact that Novatech now receive in excess of 25% of their traffic from the search engines. The majority of this traffic is very product specific, such as "Motherboard Bundles" (number 1). It provides a massive addition to Novatech's bottom line over time for a relatively low initial outlay.