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Blog posts tagged e-commerce
What not to do in business
July 06, 2009
I’ve just finished an extensive tour of some of my company’s most successful online retailers. One common theme has been that they aim to provide excellent customer service. But I’ve droned on about that many times before, so I’ll not bore you again.
However, one of the other themes that came out is how clear they are on what they are doing. The benefit of this is illustrated by the classic saying, “those that aim at nothing are lucky - they always hit their target.”
If you’re aiming at something in particular, by definition you also know what you’re not aiming at. To put it another way, if you’re not sometimes politely telling customers that “we don’t do that”, you’re not really clear on just what you are doing.
Here are a couple of examples from my tour. Kettlewell Colours (www.kettlewellcolours.co.uk) sell women’s T-shirts in a rainbow of colours. But it doesn’t do any search engine optimisation, or pay-per-click advertising, because it doesn’t compete on price. PPC and SEO won’t yield much of the demographic that buys from the site. Instead Kettlewell markets exclusively through image consultants who recommend its wares. This is easy for the simple reason that it really meets the needs of its clients, by providing clothes in a vast range of colours. It doesn’t do anything else, and being clear on what it does, means it doesn’t waste money on ineffective marketing.
In contrast, Cult Pens (www.cultpens.com), another customer, specialises in pens. It is much more niche than just stationery, so if you want a fax machine from them, you’re out of luck. However, it does consistently achieve first or second rank on Google UK for “Pens”. That’s out of nearly two and a half million entries. It’s a fantastic achievement and it’s heavily driven by the fact that the business has around 8,000 pen-related products. Not surprisingly, Google seems to conclude that it knows quite a bit about pens. That works to such an extent that it doesn’t need to spend out on pay-per-click advertising.
To be successful in business, you have to be focused. And when you are focused, it’s easy to know what to do and what not to do. The results will nearly always speak for themselves. It’s not just the marketing that works at these two companies, they are both growing like crazy. One of the reasons for their success? They know what they don’t do.
Price and Prejudice
June 08, 2009
Some people think that price is everything.
My son currently works in my company, Actinic, sitting beside me in the home office. His job is account managing customers who use our ecommerce web hosting. It’s very instructive listening in. We’re not the cheapest offering, although we believe that we offer good value.
Since you will start losing orders and customers the second your ecommerce web site goes down, and Google research suggests that marginally slow sites reduce orders by 20%, you would expect quality of service to be the major topic of conversation. Often it is, but for a minority, price is all that matters.
In fact, there are relatively few products and services where price should be the sole criterion. These probably include electricity, where the same stuff always comes down the same wire anyway, and petrol, where rival brands across town often sell petrol from the same refinery.
But some people always focus on price. The question is; do you even want to speak to customers who only care about price? Wouldn’t these customers be better hassling the competition? They not only pay less, they can also waste a lot of time.
Competing on price requires the lowest possible cost base. So most businesses try to compete on overall value. My suggestion is if you aren’t losing a few customers on price, you probably aren’t charging enough. And those customers that you would lose from slightly higher prices, will probably be the very same ones that would be the least profitable and the most trouble.
Saving the Lemming
May 26, 2009
Recently I have become utterly obsessive about ecommerce and business site design. This began after I spent a few hours reviewing a friend’s Pay Per Click (PPC) invoice. Apart from rivalling the deficit of a national bank his campaign was providing little success. Delving a little deeper, his problem turned out not to be traffic, rather his site has all the basics wrong.
While there are many techniques for running lean and successful PPC campaigns I want to take a step back to look at these fundamentals.
It’s easy to spend a bucket load of cash on PPC (trust me, I have done it). However, the very first objective for any site owner should be to create a site that achieves its aims. Using ecommerce as an example, this is about converting browsers into buyers. If you can get the principles right, driving traffic should be a secondary and relatively easy objective.
Anyone that’s played the popular 90’s computer game Lemmings will know that leaving these suicidal creatures to meander as they please will result in disaster, usually of the dead Lemming kind. The problem isn’t the lack of Lemmings -- there are enough for everyone -- the problem is the route you have devised for them generally ends up in the spiky pit of doom. Business websites sites have the same tendency, but we just call it ‘goal conversion’.
Ask yourself, what are the goals of your site? They could be anything from a sale, contact form submission, lead creation or a click somewhere. These goals are the foundations of your site -- the routes for the Lemmings -- and anything else is secondary.
Once you have identified these goals you need to optimise for them. It’s an essential and often painful process, but one where you need to be ruthless. Anything detracting from a goal conversion needs stripping away without mercy. Conversely, the message for any areas that need strengthening, is fix them now!
It’s only when you are happy that your site meets its goals that spending on PPC makes sense. Just press that button and let the Lemmings jump!
The Internet does not only enable us to laugh at William Shatner
April 10, 2009
There’s no avoiding the Internet. Whether you’re checking the headlines, keeping in touch, booking flights or buying a birthday gift for your mother, the chances are you turn to your PC first (or your laptop, or your phone…). It’s scary how reliant on the Internet we’ve become for information and entertainment, and how quickly. Who would have imagined 15, or even 10, years ago that we’d be using telephones to watch a video of William Shatner singing Rocket Man?
This all-pervasiveness is both good and bad news for businesses. Good because the web gives you access to an almost unlimited customer base; bad because just having a website is not nearly enough when the typical visitor expects to be informed and engaged instantly. If you don’t deliver straight away, your visitors will be off to someone who can.
To succeed in the modern business environment, you’ve got to have a web strategy that works. E-commerce, search engine optimisation, online advertising, affiliate marketing, email marketing, social networking – these are all things you may well have to master to maximise your online marketing and sales. It’s horribly confusing and complicated. Or is it?
For the Marketing Donut, we’ve recruited a phalanx of Internet experts to tell you what you need to know in language you can understand. We’ve got Penny Power, for example, the founder of the web’s top business networking site, Ecademy, explaining how to do social networking; a variety of experts from our main sponsor, Google, addressing online advertising; David J Smith, director of operations at the online retail body IMRG explaining e-commerce issues – you get the idea.
With the Marketing Donut, we want to make Internet marketing straightforward for small-business owners. We think we’re going to do it. Find out for yourself on 20 April.
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