SimplyAudiobooks.com tells a story about the future

After achieving 247.5% sales growth in 2005, SimplyAudiobooks.com is not resting on its laurels. The e-retailer is pushing hard to increase the efficacy of its pay-per-click and conversion efforts by 50% in order to continue its considerable growth.

The company is using landing pages more effectively, bringing pay-per-click bid management in-house and creating multiple domains that specialize in each of its product lines, says Sanjay Singhal, vice president of marketing. “As for increasing site conversion, we are converting our entire site to cascading style sheets to reduce load times, applying the latest human interface research and implementing covariant A/B analysis.”

SimplyAudiobooks.com, No. 489 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide to Retail Web Sites, is performing the vast majority of changes and enhancements in-house. “We have found in general that we get far better results on all e-commerce marketing initiatives if we hire properly and bring the functions in-house rather than contracting them out,” Singhal says. “This applies to affiliate marketing, Internet ad creative, public relations, pay-per-click bid management and search engine optimization. In each case we tried outsourcing and were disappointed. Then we brought them in-house, results improved and our costs were cut in half.”

Future plans have been based in part on lessons learned last year. Singhal is blunt when it comes to assessing past efforts.

“We’re continuously surprised at how stupid we were two weeks ago, let alone a year ago,” he says. “For example, we learned that banner ads on the web are indeed useless for customer acquisition, plaintive and funny pitching is the best way to get media coverage, shoppers use live chat service but not enough to be worthwhile, although we have 32,000 keywords a mere four produce 80% of all our traffic.”

The company reached sales of $4.1 million in 2005 compared with $1.2 million in 2004.