Christian marketers and retailers have a lot to learn from their secular counterparts in my opinion. I look at Christian retail and service related sites daily and in most cases, their marketing methods and strategies just don’t match up? Why is this?

I think that a “Greed Gap” exists that puts Christian retailers behind the 8 ball.

Secular sites are in the game for the money - pure and simple. They embrace that and work to get every possible penny out of their marketing efforts. It’s pretty commonly accepted that most of the innovation in online marketing (that doesn’t come from Amazon) comes from 2 areas - Adult (porn) and Gambling. Why these two verticals? Because the money is HUGE… mind bloggling infact.

Because of this, players in these spaces focus on conversion… they want to convert every visitor into a subscriber, buyer, or player. Each half a percent of their visitor base that buys additionally or doesn’t buy, means a swing of thousands or millions of dollars of revenue. So they watch their metrics, and tweak, and tweak, and tweak constantly to get it right.

We tend to focus more on the ministry aspect of “retail ministry” and miss out on being as aggressive as we possibly can at converting visitors to buyers. A buyer or a member for a Christian retail site, or dating site, etc is a person who can be ministered to by your team, or that you can minister to others as well.

We’re in the “Conversion” business as well… but our conversion has a higher reward.

So let’s all ramp up our efforts and take some inspiration from the “World” here and really look at our sites and our affiliate efforts in 2008 and see where people are falling through the cracks on our sites. And let’s learn from the secular retail world and use that knowledge to impact more people for Christ.

Find some of the leading secular sites in your space and compare how they treat visitors to the way you do. Learn what they do better, make the changes and see what happens.

The payoff will be amazing… and eternal.

God Bless,

Wade Tonkin