The Ten Reasons Every Business Should Think About Having A Website

Online Marketing, Web Design No Responses »
Mar 242011

Any business will no doubt get phone calls every week from web design companies telling them they have to have a website because they are missing out on customers. Whereas this is undoubtedly true, it can sometimes take more than a sales call for the business owner or manager to really catch onto the fact they do need a website and actually take the plunge and get one.

Although there are many reasons why you should have a website, below we look at our top ten reasons why you simply must have a website for your business.

Online Marketing – The Internet has opened up a new audience that can be contacted within seconds, rather than waiting for your newspaper advert to appear or your mail shot to be delivered in the Post. Within 20 seconds of sending an email you can have people on your site or as soon as you update your Facebook page you can direct people to your new product within seconds; no other form of advertising is this immediate.

Customer Service – A website allows your customers a much easier route to find out more information about you, your company and your products and also allows you to offer an immediate point of call for any customer that has previously purchased from you or might want to buy from you in the future.

Repeat Business – With high street shops, you might only use them repeatedly the next time you are in the area, which means that although you will undoubtedly get repeat business, this can be very infrequent and adhoc. When using the Internet, you can be on a site for a business you know and trust within seconds of opening your laptop, which means business can be much more repeat and return than the average high street sale.

Accessibility – Your website is a shop that is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no closed signs or lunch breaks needed. This means that you are practically allowing your customer’s access to you and your business all of the time, rather than forcing them to come back during opening times or when you have “staff” on your premises.

More Product Focus – Compared to the high street, your website can be packed full of information about the products on offer, rather than just a small label with bullet points and a price. Your website allows you to sell the product in full, with lots of images, examples, descriptions and FAQ’s, something a shop with all the staff in the world simply could not do.

Increasing Audience – You have two audiences, one that shops in the high street and one that shops online, but with the Internet, these two often cross. Even if you do 90% of your shopping in your local town or city, you will still end up doing the remaining 10% online in most cases, because you know that things are often much cheaper online or you have more of a choice. If you do not have a website then you are missing out on millions of people that either need your services or want to buy your products, as they will only go to your nearest rival or competitor that does have a website.

Personal Approach – Your website allows people to get to know you; no matter how high you are in the business or how often you actually work in the shop. For example, you can let your customers know all about your team, staff, directors and even the company dog and this in turn allows your clients and customers to really get to know you and trust you.

Expectation – Generally, people expect you to have a website and often think that if you do not, you are not a big company or that you are slightly behind the times when it comes to product range. When there is a level of expectation, no matter how hard you try to fight it, you sometimes have to just go with the flow and try to make sure you match this level of expectation for your customers and clients.

Reduce Overheads – A website can cut down on the amount of staff you need to run your business and also can reduce things like shop rental fees, business rates, utility bills and the list goes on. Although you should never cut all your ties, you can really look at running your business much more efficiently because you can focus your money in other areas, rather than fighting fires you might not need to have fought.

Future Proofing Business – Where as the high street might be dying a slow death, the Internet is continuing to grow in terms of usage, age range and locations, which means having a website pretty much makes sure that you are the forefront of the future when it comes to marketing and advertising your business. With more and more people going online to find a plumber, order their groceries and book holidays, no matter what your business offers or sells, having a website is the only way to make sure that you going to catch this ever increasing audience.

 

Posted by adminian at 9:27 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

Why Use An Email Sender To Send Your Email Marketing Campaign

Email Marketing No Responses »
Dec 222010

Email senders are online service providers that allow you to upload your mailing list, insert your email template and then send your email campaign to all of your subscribers. Most people have tried sending emails from their own computer and either had to give up due to frustration or been told off by their ISP for spamming, which has made the use of email sending services even more critical in this day and age.

There are loads of email senders now online, some of them charge a one off fee for so many credits or emails and others charge a monthly fee with no limitations, so it’s important to choose the right one for you and the one that suits your budget and your requirements.

Below, we take at look at the main reasons you simply have to use an email sender to send your email campaign.

Mailing List Control – Imagine having two mailing lists, one of 500 people and one of 600 people, in total you have 1100 emails to send out. Now, try doing this from Outlook Express without being banned by your ISP, blacklisted by most of the email providers for spam and then managing all of the complaints and bounces. It is just not going to happen which is why that one of the major plus points of using an email sender is the control they give to you. They handle bounces, unsubscribe, undeliverable email and so much more, meaning that your email campaign is going to be as well run as it possibly can be.

Templates – Quite a few of the email senders we have used offer you a few templates that you can simply go into and then chuck your text straight in and off you go. They might not be the best templates in the world, but as long as they look professional and work for your clients then it might just mean you getting your campaign moving without spending a fortune on an email design.

WYSIWYG / HTML Editor – The majority of the email senders allow you to edit your emails “live” within in the system and then preview and test the email before it goes out. This means that you do not have to have offline html editing software or good coding skills, because the WYSIWYG editor allows you to treat it like a word document or like any other office suite editor.

Email Analytics – Most of the leading email senders offer you a wealth of analytical detail which means you have so much more to learn from every single campaign that you send. You can use these statistics to work out how well the campaign went, which users read the email and who downloaded any documentation and if you tie it up with Google Analytics on your site, the power you then have at your finger tips is honestly unreal.

Spam Prevention Control – One of the best things that the majority of the decent email senders will help you with is the spam issues, mainly how to make sure your email doesn’t get caught in the majority of your customers spam filters. Although you will never get this one hundred percent perfect, these systems should help you identify any major issues and also give your email more of chance of getting through because they will be known as a legitimate sender to the email services.

Unsubscribe Facilities – If you are sending emails to a mailing list then you must have an unsubscribe link, else you actually are breaking some fundamental principles. By using an email sender they will automatically insert an unsubscribe link on your email and then actually unsubscribe the user from your mailing list, which means you do not have to worry about doing this, useful if you have thousands of subscribers.

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Using Affiliates To Sell Your Products

Affiliate Marketing, Online Marketing No Responses »
Nov 152010

As the Internet has continued to grow and grow with an estimated 20 million websites now live on the WWW, it has become even harder to get your product in front of the people who need to see it – the customer. In this age where it can be a constant struggle to even get a small amount of traffic to your site, there are a small band of merry men and women called affiliate marketers who can transform the amount of products you can sell.

Affiliate marketers are people who make money from marketing or advertising other people’s products and usually make their earnings from commissions or split share revenue schemes. From a manufacturers or producers point of view this can be a fantastic way to work, because if the seller fails to sell any products, you owe them no money and it’s only when they start converting do you have to worry about starting to pay them, but by then you already have the money coming in.

The process is really quite simple. Most people use a specialised middle “man”, people like Affiliate Window, Commission Junction and Trade Doubler, because these guys can handle the majority of the in-between work, from handling the tracking all the way through to handling the commission payments on behalf of the merchant.

The person supplying the products for sale is called the merchant and the person actually selling the products is called the affiliate. The relationship between the two has to be solid to really make the partnership work, including decent levels of commissions and regular data and information to allow the affiliate to really be able to promote your product and therefore make you money.

The selling points for any affiliate when considering working for a merchant include:

  • A fair level of commission or rewards
  • A chance to increase earnings, usually a hierarchical tier
  • Reliable, durable and popular products
  • Excellent marketing material
  • Communication when necessary

If you as the merchant can provide these things to an affiliate, then you have a good chance of making them want to promote your products.

Many producers or manufacturers often do not realise the potential of having thousands of commission only footmen on the ground (or on the Internet in this case) promoting their products for them, although the maths is quite simple and the reasons quite obvious when you look into it.

If your website attracts 1,000 a month, then you are hitting a tiny, tiny percentage of the total people on the Internet. If you then have 5 affiliates who also have 1,000 a month, you then are getting 6,000 visitors a month who might buy your products, so you have massively increased your potential customers just by asking a few affiliates to promote your products for you.

Setting up an affiliate scheme takes a lot of hard work and some initial outlay, but once all of this is complete then you should start really seeing the rewards of the sales flooding in and the money landing into your business bank account.

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Top Ten Tips For Keeping Your Affiliates Happy And Motivated

Affiliate Marketing, Online Marketing No Responses »
Sep 012010

If you have a product or service you want to sell without having to employ full time sales people, then affiliate marketing is the online version of commission only sales people in the “real world”. By signing up many different affiliate marketers, you can rapidly increase the exposure of your products and start to expand the visibility to a potentially huge audience.

Having affiliates is no different to employing people in the offline environment, you still need to treat them well and offer them the financial rewards for selling your products and increasing your sales.

Below, we look at our top ten tips to keeping your affiliates happy and increasing their effectiveness.

Choose Your Affiliates Carefully – If you offer a good commission and decent products to sell, you will normally be swamped with affiliate applications. We would always recommend checking the affiliates out instead of just approving them, because there are some circumstances where you might want to refuse the affiliate or do not really like how they do things.

Offer A Good Commission Level – An affiliate will expect a fair return for the sales they bring in, so make sure you offer a good commission level to all of the affiliates that sell your products. You can also introduce a tiered commission structure, which means the more they sell the more they get, but your foundation should always be to make sure you offer a decent reward for their work.

Keep The Affiliate Informed – Every time you have a sensational offer, tell your affiliates. One of the biggest let downs when it comes to running affiliate schemes is not passing the information onto your affiliates, so make sure you let them know every time you have an offer that they can then pass on.

Provide A Wealth Of Promotional Material – Following on from the previous tip, send everything you possibly can to the affiliate. New banners, email text, discount codes, product promotional text and indeed anything you can possibly offer. Even if the affiliate re-writes what you provide, it at least gives them a foundation to create content for your products.

Speak To Your Affiliates – Emails are a great thing, but have you thought about phoning them and learning more about what they do? If you have the time to personally speak to your affiliates then you can learn so much about them and also find out what they need from you, which is crucial at all times to succeed.

Offer Rewards – It can always be a good idea to offer your affiliates little rewards every now and then. Things like a free gift if they sell well or maybe dinner for two in a local restaurant of their choice. Even if it’s just a bottle of wine or a free product at Christmas, these things will all be remembered and will stand you in good stead when it comes to the affiliate working harder for you.

Validate Commissions Frequently – One of the main gripes for many affiliates is waiting for ages for commissions to be validated. Once the product has left your premises and the return time is overdue, validate this commission and let the affiliate know they can begin to look forward to their commission.

Pay On Time – Do not keep your affiliates waiting for their commissions. As soon as you can, make sure they are paid because it’s exactly the same as holding onto wages from your employees. If they have brought you in sales and you have received the cash, make sure you pass this onto the affiliate on agreed dates.

Explain Declined Sales – There is nothing more frustrating than having sales declined and just a general reason why the transaction could not be completed. Take the time to explain to your affiliates why each transaction was declined and offer them advice if you can as to how to stop this from happening.

Be Fair – Our final tip and probably one of the most important is treating your affiliates with respect and being fair to them. These are the people who are selling your products for no wage, just commission, so make sure that you give them the respect they deserve, because if you do not, the next merchant that comes along with similar levels of commission will be the time they leave you and go elsewhere.

Posted by adminian at 2:08 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

Using Email As An Effective Marketing Tool

Email Marketing, Online Marketing No Responses »
Aug 192010

Many businesses have found email to be an effective way to sell their products and services. There are however many considerations to be made before you use this method.

The first thing to consider is what message are you trying to get out to your customer? Is it a new exciting offer on a product or service? Maybe you just want to contact customers that you haven’t spoken to for a while informing them that you are still offering the products or services that they once purchased.

After you have thought about what message you would like to get out there you must also consider how often you want to send out your emails. You can send emails on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual basis; it is recommended that you send your emails regularly. However you do not want to send your emails so regularly that is discourages customers and they just end up deleting them instead of reading them.  Many people do not like receiving high levels of email unless they are informative or offer them a special deal.

How many contacts do you have to email? Some business will have a figure in the hundreds and others in the thousands. Depending on how many contacts you have to reach depends on how you will approach you email campaign. You can of course send the emails yourself through whatever email programme you use such as outlook express etc…. If you have a large number of contacts then this can be a very time consuming thing to do, my advice is to contact an experienced SEO company to manage this for you. They can manage high levels of email for you and make sure that your message really does get across. An SEO company can also design a template for your email so that once received your customers will automatically identify that it is from you – Good brand identification.

If you have an e-commerce website then email marketing is a must as when people order a product from you they give you their contact details, this however must be treated with caution as there are laws in place such as the Data Protection Act to ensure that these details are not abused and customers can opt out of any use of their personal data. Using these contact details correctly and Professionally you can keep good contact with all of your customers increasing your changes of making a repeat sale and stopping them from maybe using a competitor for a future purchase. It is also an effective way to reach potential new customers who haven’t yet heard of your company or service.

Email Marketing is a great way to keep in contact with your customers and getting them to return to you no matter if your business is based online or not, however please treat with caution and do not over use as you could deter more than encourage.

Posted by adminian at 1:21 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

Understanding PPC (Pay Per Click) And CPC (Cost Per Click)

Online Marketing, Pay Per Click No Responses »
Jul 122010

Pay Per Click or PPC is the process of using Google, MSN or Yahoo to pay for clicks or traffic received to your website, gaining extra exposure, but at a price (per click). Pay Per Click is also know as Cost Per Click or CPC by many people, but both titles equate to the same thing, paying for traffic for your website.

Most SEO companies can provide a number of monthly management plans for clients and customers wanting to pass on to us the management of their pay per click advertising, so no matter what your budget is, they can help you complete and achieve all of your goals and objectives and make your campaigns more efficient and effective.

What Is Pay Per Click?

Pay Per Click is the process of paying for every click you receive from a search engine, using their Sponsored Results, normally at the top of the search or to the top right hand side.

10% of clicks on a search engine are currently reported to be users clicking on the Pay Per Click results, so for every 100 searches and click throughs, 10 people will use the sponsored results, rather than the natural results.

For example, run a search for Washing Machines in Google.

The search results will have a light orange box at the top, with two or three results in, and then on the right hand side you will see a list of adverts, normally 7 or 10 to a page.

These are the Sponsored Results, and depending how much you bid for on a keyword, this is where your results would appear. The more you bid, the higher you rank.

PPC is an effective way of getting traffic to your website in the early months of it being live, and also a valuable marketing tool throughout the life span of the website. Just as you would probably pay for an advert in the news paper, you really should think about online advertising, and PPC is one of the most effective, as you control how much you spend and how you spend it.

Why Should I Pay For Traffic?

PPC is part or could be part of any online marketing or advertising. Most people spend money when it comes to offline advertising and the reason for doing this is obvious, increased exposure and therefore increased enquiries and sales.

PPC is not really any different. You are paying to get more exposure against thousands of other people doing the same. The nice thing with PPC is there are thousands of words and alternatives to any main keyword and you can assign the budget, and you can still get good results from being on the second or third page of the sponsored results.

If you are competing against thousands of others doing the same thing or offering the same service, or your site is quite new and still being indexed and dancing in the search engines, PPC is still an efficient and cost effective measure of driving traffic to you site. Many of the biggest companies in the world assign a PPC budget, as it really can be a useful measure to increase visits and sales, and we can help to make sure you get the best results, no matter what your budget is.

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