No 1 Solution for Growing Businesses

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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I recently had to make a trip to Halfords. Not a trip I make on a regular basis, and for that matter not a trip that anyone I know makes on a regular basis!

Normally, I would only go to Halfords when something breaks, for example when a bulb in my car goes (which is what prompted my most recent visit), or on the rare occasion I might want to sit on a push bike.

So for my recent trip, I made my way down to my local Halfords. I knew I was looking for a specific set of bulbs, so I headed straight for the car section where the bulbs were on display. I spent maybe two minutes finding the correct bulb, paid and then left.

This is what most people experience when they go to Halfords; they are fulfilling an immediate need and are not interested in browsing the other products on offer.

Taking this into account you would not expect Halfords to have much scope for an online store.

Let’s consider eCommerce…

According to the ONS (Office for National Statistics), in June 2011 online purchases made up almost 10% of the UK retail spend, this is up by 50% compared to the same time in 2010. This is a massive segment of the UK’s retail spend, which is still growing. So it makes sense that businesses big and small are looking to get involved in this opportunity.

However, many businesses today are too quick to assume their business is not suitable for online selling. Remember what I was saying about Halfords? They did not appear to be a business who could feasibly operate in an online environment…

A recent article in ComputerWeekly.com looked at how Halfords has managed to launch a successful webshop, which has been successful while in-store sales are faltering. Back in 2008 Halfords invested in their eCommerce store to make it easier to use and more accessible for their current and prospective customers.

Since then they have not only managed to create a successful online store but one which is continuing to grow. This is during a time when their retail stores are operating in, as they put it, “a difficult environment for UK consumers” yet they are seeing growth in this new area of their business.

This highlights that, even a company which would not seem a very suitable candidate to sell online, can be hugely successful and attract a wider variety of customers through an eCommerce store.

Halfords of course are a big company and have a big budget to invest, but this is not essential for online business success. What would you say are the key features of an online store?

1. Integration into your accounts system to avoid rekeying of orders
2. An easy to use order process to encourage customers to use it
3. Special pricing for trade or regular customers (from the accounts system)
4. Easy to manage and update

You can have all of this and more with ProspectSoft Easy eCommerce. Our Easy eCommerce solution is designed to allow you to get up and running with a fully integrated eCommerce store quickly, and for a reasonable price.

To find out what we can do, please take a look at:

www.prospectsoft.com/easyecommerce

P.S. Want to learn more about eCommerce?

We run regular events up and down the country focusing on a number of different topics. Our next eCommerce event which will be held in Yorkshire on 29^th September, where we’ll focus on eCommerce and how it can work for your business.

We aim to cover a variety of different areas to give you a full understanding of online selling. This will allow you to make an informed decision about what is best for your business.

At our last event we covered:

• The ‘Long Tail’ of eCommerce – why you don’t need to compete with Amazon
• How to sell ‘real’ products and services; products you may not think can be sold in an online environment
• What information your eCommerce portal is going to need, and how to make this a source of competitive advantage
• How eCommerce done correctly can save you money, as well as increase revenue
• Case studies of real SME’s adding six figures plus to their bottom line

You can find more information and registration details at http://www.prospectsoft.com/free-events.

Year: Circa 2004. Before Microsoft Outlook introduced the email preview pane…

You suffer a mini heart attack when you come into your office after a week off work, and find 44 unread emails waiting in your inbox. So your first hour back from your holiday you sit slowly and laboriously opening each email to see if it is of interest or importance.

Year: 2011. After the email preview pane

After the same week off work, this time you return to find 156 unread emails in your inbox! This time however, help is at hand. Not only have your corporate SPAM filters eliminated the majority of nonsense emails, but instead of opening each one individually you quickly scroll down the list looking in the preview pane and deleting all of the emails which are of no interest at first glance. While you’re at it, you also delete all emails where the images haven’t loaded, and make a mental note to set up a separate folder for emails where you have only been CC’d, as you never read them anyway.

Sound at all familiar?
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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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