Customers from Florida

It looks for me that a big percent of our customers are living in Florida. And every day we are getting several visitors from the different Florida cities. I think that we need to do something to be more attractive for this Florida visitors. For example, we have a very nice testimony from Florida that has such statement " You can see it (i.e flamingo mailbox) is weathering the harsh Florida sun quite well. It seems to be a quality product"

I believe that people from Florida have to see this message. But many, many people open info page, and almost nobody open our testimony page. I think that we need to offer our testimony page more actively.

Confirmation Page

When somebody buy our mailbox he or she will be readdressed to the PayPal confirmation page. This page has a message "your order is now complete " and at the bottom "Continue" button. This button has a link to our confirmation page. Usually users don't click on this continue button, because "order is now complete", correspondingly they are not readdressed to our confirmation page. It was our problem. Using PayPal parameters in the hidden form we changed the message on the button from "Continue" to "Finish your order". After that users started to click at this button. But more clean decision will be to use our own confirmation page instead of paypal confirmation page. I took paypal perl script that has to accept and verify POST from paypal, combined it with our html, put this script in cgi-bin directory and used for the name extension cgi. Then in the hidden form I placed a tag notify-url. I made everything that was described in paypal help and guides, but then still paypal confirmation page was shown. I don't know what was missed. I will try to investigate this issue.

Golf Ball Mailbox

One of our customers was so kind to send us warm words and even pictures of Golf Mailbox Mailbox he've purchased!

Here they are:

The mailbox arrived about ten days ago completely assembled and has been upfor over a week and working fine. I apoligize for not Emailing you soonerbut we were out of town over last weekend. Thanks again so very much foryour diligence in following up on the shipment and seeing that I got what asatisfactory product. You are GREAT!!

O.G. Sarasota,FL

Mailbox Plaza History: Europe orders

January-February 2007 was just empty. We've frozen all PPC .
End of February - March was very strange. There was about 6 cancelled orders in a row!!
Most of the orders were from Europe. Hummingbird Mailbox and Train Mailbox are the most popular in Europe orders. Although we pointed out on the website that shipping out of continental USA includes a fee, customers were pretty surprised to know that the only shipping method is UPS and shipping fee is about $130.

The manufacturer uses UPS only as a shipping method. As far as I understand, because of convenient pick up / delivery service. Now we do PPC in USA only.

Mailbox Plaza History: September 2006-December 2006

End of the year brought more orders. The mailbox manufacturer was overloaded and delayed the orders and sometimes sent incomplete sets! Even more problems we had with our bonus - house number stickers set to attach to these mailboxes. The number sets were wrong, or forgotten almost every other order! E-mail exchange with angry customers took a lot of my time, effort and emotions.

Finally, we made some changes:
1) eliminated bonuses - number sets and screen saver. Number sets, we just realized create too much troubles. Screen saver bonus looked lonely as the only bonus. I consider using this screen saver as opt-in instead of newsletter.
2) we raised the price.
As we see now, both changes did not effect conversion at all, while making our life much easier!

Golf Ball Mailbox or Golf Gift?

I've just did some changes on Yahoo PPC. Most Add Groups have click rate higher than 5%, so I mostly investigated those that are less.

For example, Cow Mailbox and Golf Bag Mailbox have had Cow Gift and Golf Ball Gift keywords respectively. As it might be expected, click rate on "gift" keywords is lower - people who look for cow gift click on mailbox not that often as those who were looking for cow mailbox!

Some of them still get inrterested in mailboxes, so we don't want to loose this "gift" trafffic. On the other hand, I don't want to drop down click rate since it might drop "ad quality", and thus increase click cost.
So, i decided to set separate ad groups for all "cow gift", train gift" etc. this was I can keep my basic ad groups safe, and I can adjust ad text to include the word "gift".

A real photo of Flamingo Malbox

We asked our customers to give us a feedback. Many of them were very kind, they spent time and gave us extremely valuable responses. In general all responses were very positive. Many people wrote that the mailboxe looks very bright. But one customer has sent a wonderful photo of his flamingo mailbox.

Also he wrote: " You can see it is weathering the harsh Florida sun quite well. It seems to be a quality product, and one Martha and I preferred over the other mailbox offerings on the internet. We appreciated your prompt communications with us when we ordered! Oh, our postal carrier Denise thought it was magnificent and she had to comment on it! "

A problem with the cow mailbox advertisement company

We have a problem with a cow mailbox advertisement company at google adwords. Our cow mailbox link between pay links on the second page. All our other pay links on the first page. I tried to increase pay per click for cow mailbox, but I did not see any improvement, only if somebody clicked at our cow mailbox link on content page we paid more. So I decided to recreate the cow mailbox company. I will wait several days and if it will not help, I will change the description, type of the company or will do something else. Sometimes ago I had the same problem with duck mailbox, airplane mailbox, motorcycle mailbox. But these problems were solved.

Train Mailbox on the first page

If to search in google some our key words, such as: train mailbox, crocodile mailbox, manatee mailbox, whale mailbox, then the correspondent not pay link to mailbox-plaza product pages will be on the first page.

For these reason we decided to pause correspondent advertisement companies. Because if the customer is searching, for example train mailbox, and then on the same page he will see two links to our train mailbox page, then I don't want him to click at the pay link.

Help customers to navigate through dog mailbox pages.

In google adwords each our advertisement company is connected with the particular product page. But we have two different cow mailboxes, three different dog mailboxes, two golf mailboxes and two bear mailboxes, correspondingly two different cow mailboxes pages, two golf mailbox pages and so on.
To help our customers to navigate through our pages, we decided to add links from one dog mailbox page to other dog mailbox pages, from one bear mailbox page to other bear mailbox page and so on. We hope that it will help our customers to find the mailbox that they will like more quickly.

Cow Mailbox in real environment

Novelty mailboxes look even better in real environment than on "marketing style" picture.

It is so funny to find real photo of our mailboxes, like this Holstein Cow mailbox. I like this inpression...

Cow Mailbox page

Lena has just changed Cow mailbox product page to www.mailbox-plaza.com/cow_mailbox.htm from just cow.htm.

We assume that Google will appreciate if our landing page names will exactly match keywords. Cow Mailbox is doing not that good in Adwords as other keywords, so she decided to start with it.
The question is though, if page renaming hurts its rate on Google temporarily, and if yes, for how long? It's maybe a question to IMC forum..

I have to correct Yahoo PPC link and this blog link to cow mailbox urgently!

Mailbox plaza History: July-August 2006

In July 2006, Lena joint me. Well, we both were pretty busy, however, it's much easier to keep being motivated together.
Mailbox Plaza got a new life when Lena started PPC on Google - again, just 15-2o keywords, the basic ones - Novelty Mailbox, Decorative Mailbox, as well as product names - Cow mailbox, Cat Mailbox, Flamingo Mailbox etc.

Wow! we've sold 8 mailboxes in August 2006 and were very exited. Until we realized, that we don't make any profit and are actually loosing money!

See next history posting...

Mailbox Plaza History : 2005 - July 2006

I've started Mailbox Plaza 2 years ago with the help of Internet Marketing Center.
I hoped to have enough time to work on it while still keeping my full time job and taking care of my family with 2 kids -a teenager and a baby. Well, I did a huge effort, found a good niche (2 years ago it was good!) , created a website, and posted about 15 keywords on yahoo overture.

I've put special attention to Train mailbox, even created a separate lo-o-ong sales letter for it!

I really did like the image:

It was small, but full functional "training" project, and I was extremely surprised to sell the first mailbox!
At this point I almost stopped taking care of it, I was too busy with kids and job. Mailbox Plaza was selling about 1 mailbox per months, not making any profit.

See next history posting...

Hello!

Well, we are starting this new blog - Mailbox Plaza Story.

Some time ago I decided to try to build a website selling ... actually, selling something.. anything... whatever...nice and fun though....
I wanted to learn how does it all work, how do I like it, if it can bring any money and/or fun and/or financial Independence, if I can help other people.

I've started Mailbox Plaza, a website selling Novelty Mailboxes - something cool, warm and welcoming. Check it out! There is a lot of nice stuff, my favorites are Train Mailbox and Flamingo Mailbox.

The first piece of luck was to find a great partner - Lena, so now we work together.

Internet marketing is a new world for us, and this blog is our journal of exploring this new world. You are welcome to share our experience - step by step!