Winning Ware
I’ve been meaning to write this review for a while, but unlike most cheeseball marketers who just use “canned copy” provided by the product owner and try to pass it off as a “review” in the name of making a few bucks affiliate commission, I needed to find the time to actually do a detailed review of what is a very comprehensive and powerful product.
So what is Sales CSI?
Sales CSI
Well, the product creator, Rick Braddy, has taken the “CSI” detective theme and applied it to e-commerce. You become a “sales detective” during the course. In his product, CSI stands for “Conversion Success Investigation”. Basically, the course is for people who are making sales and want to identify ways to improve their conversion rate by reverse engineering the source of the sales (both the referring website or search engine keyword and the content they views on your site) and using that knowledge to generate more sales. While these are advanced Internet marketing strategies, they are worth learning and applying as soon as you start making sales because it’s a lot easier to improve your conversion rate by a percentage point or two than it is to double or treble your traffic. Let me illustrate with an example…
If you get 1,000 visits per month at a 1% conversion rate, you make 10 sales. If you improve the conversion rate to 2%, you’ll double your sales to 20 per month. If you went in search of more traffic INSTEAD of improving your conversion rate, you’d have to double that… which means getting 2,000 visits per month instead of 1,000. Ouch!
In order to improve your conversion rates you need to install tracking tools to let you measure what’s happening at your site. “You can’t improve what you don’t measure” is an old marketing axiom.
The course is delivered as a series of online videos, along with the MP4 video files to download if you wish. It would’ve been nice to have PDF transcripts and perhaps the slideshow slides, but as a video course, it works just fine.
Sales Detective
Module One consists of five videos and explains the “nuts and bolts” of tracking, including how to install both Analytics and Adwords to track signups, leads, conversions and sales. From what I understand, you can use Analytics or Adwords, you don’t have to use both. Further tracking tools such as Open Tracker and Affiliate Prophet are covered to go “way beyond” Google Analytics and track real-time visitor actions on your website including the path they take through your site and their site interaction metrics. I like how Rick takes you through actual data from his main websites… there aren’t many Internet marketers willing to do that. A good example is the attention and conversion stats from his Affiliate Prophet account, which illustrates what you can do with the tool.
Module Two consists of four videos (almost another hour of tutorials!) and goes into far greater detail for Analytics (goals and funnels, big picture and segmented views), Affiliate Prophet and Open Tracker for detailed analysis.
Once you’re able to gather all your data and know how to generate the most useful reports, the five videos in Module Three take you through “forensic analysis” of the data you’ve acquired to back-track from the sale or lead to the source of the sale or lead such as how they found your site and which content they viewed, so you can determine your most effective marketing methods. When you’ve identified what piece of content resulted in a “buying decision”, you can focus on that as your primary content creation method and also direct other traffic on your website to the pieces of content that generates buyers. Similarly, you can see which pieces of content don’t result in sales, and down-grade your use of that content.
Module four is just one important video which takes you through the important decisions you can make based on the data and analysis you’ve done so far. As I said above, you can amplify, reduce and another option, fix (for if something is discovered to not work properly on your site).
Module five (three videos) takes you through the fine-tuning of your decisions and re-evaluation of the effectiveness of your decisions. These modules also walk you through using Google’s Website Optimizer to do A/B and multi-variate split testing.
Finally, Module six (two videos) look at the best practices associated with increasing conversions such as modelling the best practices in your industry such as your competitor’s homepages and squeeze pages and the key elements on those pages that most affect the conversion rates.
Overall, this is a very complete course for intermediate and advanced Internet marketers who want to learn how to increase the conversion rates of signups and sales. It’s an easy-to-follow set of videos done by a conversion expert who explains advanced concepts easily. I highly recommend it.
Click here for more information on becoming a Sales Detective with Sales CSI!