No 1 Solution for Growing Businesses

If you are like almost every business in the UK, you are probably looking for ways to cut costs in 2012. What are the best ways to cut costs? We don’t know for certain, because cutting costs always involves taking a hard look at your business.

A good starting point however, is considering how your business takes and processes orders.

If you take orders over the phone, a great opportunity exists for you to save money by making more effective use of your website.

Here’s why.
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The Christmas period is a time when smart businesses review the year, and make plans for the next. As you know, every business suffers from two limiting factors – time and money! Sadly every plan you make comes with an opportunity cost – the cost of NOT being able to do something else.

Never is this more true than in a recession.

The question then, is what should you spend your marketing budget on in 2012? What is likely to bring you the best return on investment?

Well, we don’t know for certain. It depends on what marketing you already do, and what your business objectives are. Whatever you are doing at the moment however, we DO know two things that will help with your marketing:
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Has your business ever run a pay-per-click campaign? We would be interested to know, because in nearly every industry we have studied we have discovered the price of a click is rising.

If you have never run a pay-per-click campaign, we are discussing the placing of ads at the top and on right of the search engines to drive when peoples searching for particular terms. We are yet to meet a business that does not want more visitors to their website, and buying clicks is the fastest way to increase these visitors.

Buying clicks however, is becoming expensive. When Google first introduced Google Adwords, you could buy clicks at a on competitive rate of  5 or 10 pence. Now, bidding on the term ‘email marketing’ for example can cost over £10 per click!
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Our last post looked at how to get your emails opened and read; not always a simple task! Today’s post looks beyond opens and clicks, at how combining this information with other customer data can give you an invaluable advantage.

Your marketers have spent time preparing your eshot, carefully crafting the subject line, message and audience. Amidst much fanfare, the email was sent, and a handful of responses and leads trickle back. Not as many as you were hoping for.

While your email didn’t directly generate many orders, you could be building a valuable bank of customer information…
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As I explained in the last article, getting your emails delivered is only the first piece of the puzzle. With corporate email users typically sending and receiving around 110 messages a day, getting your emails opened and read is a difficult task!

Because of the volume of email we all now receive, the way we read email is changing. We no longer read every email, but scan a number of key elements to decide what gets opened and what does not.

What are these key elements?
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If you’re like most businesses, email is already a key part of your marketing strategy. However, if you send a lot of emails you may be sitting on a ticking time-bomb…

Sending emails from your own ISP (Internet Service Provider).

If you mailmerge your emails through Outlook, then you are sending emails from your own IP address. This can cause big problems for you down the road.

Each email you send through Outlook contains an ‘email header’ which contains information such as the subject, sender and recipients. The header also contains a series of
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Email volume (click to enlarge)

Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Google Plus… the list of places to promote your business online is getting longer. So as a business, what is the most important skill you need online?

The ability to use email effectively.

Why?

Because the number of emails – even excluding spam – outnumbers Facebook posts, tweets and webpages four to one. Take a look at the image on the left (original image from www.readwriteweb.com).

Most of your competitors are lousy at email. Because email is free, the same incentive doesn’t exist to carefully segment your lists.
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If you have never heard of a ‘content management system’, think it sounds scary, and don’t really know HTML, today’s post is for you. I won’t be teaching you HTML, or explaining how to use templates or CSS.

I will however be explaining how a Content Management System (CMS) can generate:

• More leads and sales enquiries
• More sales if you have an eCommerce store.

Let me explain.
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“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

John Wanamaker, 35th United States Postmaster General

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You can learn a lot from a good quote. Amazingly, the quote above is still largely applicable over 100 years after John Wanamaker first made it.

However a shift is currently happening in marketing. While studies have suggested that less money has been spent on advertising as a whole in the last couple of years, some forms of advertising are seeing an increase in spend. What do the following have in common:
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If you use Google Analytics, monitoring your traffic sources is a great idea. And if you only have one domain, Analytics works fine out of the box.

You start to run into problems however, when you operate multiple domains or subdomains. By default, Google Analytics tracks each of your subdomains as unique, so when a visitor comes in to your site on subdomain1.yourwebsite.com, but then clicks on a link to subdomain2.yourwebsite.com, their campaign information gets overwritten – so the visitor looks like a referral from your first subdomain.
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