Advertising is the key to any successful jewelry business, well, that is to say the advertising needs to be successful in attracting customers. Only then will the willing customers come.
Retail jewelry stores are familiar with traditional media advertising, that being newspapers, direct mail, radio, TV and billboards. Thousands of books and training courses have been written about the good and bad ways to advertise with those mediums. Of course many people simply approach those advertising methods with a trial and error approach too. A lot of money is spent until you learn how to target the right consumers with the right advertising.
When it comes to traditional media advertising you can save a lot of time and money by attending jewelry trade shows for training, or at least reading a few books on advertising. I'd recommend any book by Ted Nicholas (www.tednicholas.com) to learn about direct mail, newspaper or magazine advertising.
There's no difference between internet marketing and traditional media. The rules of advertising haven't changed, only the way you publish your ad.
In the past you would publish your ad and then wait patiently for customers. With the internet we don't have to wait too long to figure out what's working and what's not. The tool to use is Google Analytics.
Go to www.google.com/analytics to sign up for your analytics account and have your webmaster add the settings to the footer of every page of your site. You'll need a Google account to sign up for the service, but it's free.
Once installed it will start tracking activity on your website immediately, and you can see real comparative results in a few days. Many jewelry website owners have heard of analytics and website tracking, but in my experience very few of them take the time to learn how to use this valuable data.
Analytics allows you to see how people are using your website. Here's some things you can learn from analytics:
What they are clicking on
What colors work best
If your jewelry photography effective
Which headlines work best
With analytics you can change facets of your website until you achieve the highest rate of return, or sales. You simply have to test your changes until you find what works best for your jewelry store.
Highly successful jewelry stores usually see analytics and testing as a high priority. It's a key difference between winners and losers in both online sales and increasing foot traffic to the store. Let's be very blunt and say that you will never make any money through the internet unless you do some form of testing on your website, and analytics is the key to reading your test results.
