Win Sales with Holiday Offers

‘Tis the season for gift giving and rampant consumerism, so why not join into the spirit? With Black Friday & Cyber Monday now behind us, there seems no let-up in the number of special offers available, to try and jumpstart our economy in this traditionally heavy traffic period. As a retailer, you may have been looking forward to this month all year and it may take on added significance in 2009 as we wind down what has been, by any standards a challenging year.

If competition throughout 2009 was difficult, the advent of Black Friday and the holiday season has really placed an emphasis on ingenuity. Deals abound and it is no good just coming up with a few uninspiring loss leader adjustments, you really have got to set yourself apart, to connect with would-be purchasers and to get them to buy from you.

Be careful when coming up with deals related to your products or services, as it can be easy to project that they’re not worth as much as you suggest. You still need to justify your rates and must be able to market the business when all of this December madness has come and gone. This is where you will need to innovate and most definitely set yourself apart from the competition. Always sharpen your intelligence and find out what your competitors are offering and where possible, go the extra distance.

Good marketing is about creating a perception of value and then suggesting that the product or service is available at much lower cost. The best offers pile on the benefits of purchase, almost creating a “must have” urge within the consumer to buy. It is a good idea to offer certificates to existing clients and try and focus on those who may have purchased from you before and lapsed, or to pay attention to those who have expressed an interest in your services.

If you offer recurring services, consider a very steep discount just to get the prospect to try your wares. If you can really stand behind your product or service and are confident of your ability to perform, then you hope that once they are in the “system,” they will be pleased with what they receive and will continue to subscribe to your business.

Try and enter into the spirit of the holidays, as after all we have seen enough of Mr. Scrooge all year long, without letting him have his way right now as well!

What are Your Holiday Specials?

Matthew Toren

Love a Local Business with Intuit

Small business software developer Intuit is doing its bit for the community and the economy by promoting a rather special program called “Love a Local Business.” Each month during the course of the program the company will allocate five local businesses a $1000 prize, or grant as they call it, with one of those five receiving $5000 on the basis of a community’s votes. Any local business can be eligible and all it takes is a simple nomination from the program website. Small business owners can even nominate their own company.

Love a Local Business is integrated with the successful Google Maps widget and you can drill down to your locality to see the local businesses nominated close to you. Eligibility is based on inclusion within the Google Maps database, so this is another reason to get a local business registered with the service. As we know, Google Maps results often show in a prominent position within search results and this certainly helps when geo-targeting keywords for potential traffic.

It’s important to mobilize your army of fans and take advantage of your followers. Once the business has been nominated, the more people that vote for it, the better and the more descriptive and unusual comments the better the chance of it receiving that grand prize. We will surely see a lot of requests on Facebook business and fan pages and numerous tweets as votes are solicited from an organization’s followers.

Intuit has also developed a widget that you can include in your own blog or website, using simple embed code to help you build awareness of the campaign and start spreading the word of mouth. To date, the company has awarded over $60,000 for this program, which is effectively designed to encourage consumers to “shop local.” Intuit is promoting their “Weblistings” product, which for $99 per year ensures that your business information is found on major local search related sites, including Google Maps and Yahoo Local.

Some entrepreneurs are being very creative when it comes to interaction with this program and are offering sweeteners or deals to their fans or followers to gain attention. Consider making some kind of donation or giving a special gift of your services to a nonprofit organization, encouraging people to nominate you in recognition of your philanthropy. Of course Intuit also hopes that you sign up for one or more of their products, as well…

Have you used Love a Local Business?

Adam Toren

Don’t Give Up on Your Customer if Their Payment Card is Declined

Whether we like it or not, business these days revolves around the use of credit or debit accounts and if you’re involved in e-commerce you have to address this situation. It is fairly easy to establish payment procedures using these types of cards for your online business, whether you use PayPal or another authorized reseller such as 2checkout, or you may have your own merchant gateway established. The entire process between presentation of product or service and delivery to the customer requires considerable attention and your business success will depend on your ultimate ability to control the effectiveness of each step.

From time to time, a customer’s card will be declined, but this need not necessarily result in a failed sale. There can be any number of reasons for the decline, including what is known in the industry as a hard decline or a soft decline. In the case of the latter, it invariably means that a system timeout occurred or some other technical issue precluded the transaction from running its course. As a retailer you have to decide when you actually want to process the account, as if you are not physically shipping goods for a specified period, for example, you could just build in a resubmission process, hopefully overcoming the soft decline and not having to contact the customer with notification of failure.

Sometimes you will be notified that the customer needs to contact his or her bank, known as a “referral.” Make sure that the shopping cart contents are retained and that the client can return to consummate the transaction once the referral has been cleared up.

If you find that you are getting a notable number of hard declines, whether the card verification details are incorrect or whether there is a funding issue, consider whether you want to offer alternative methods of payment or not. Tracking sales and conversions through an analytics program will help you to determine the level of the problem as it pertains to your business and whether or not you should really consider alternative methods, if at all possible. Some e-commerce software products support procedures for handling these declines. Either way, you should consider a “so near and yet so far” sale to be very valuable. Just think about how much time, effort and money you have invested in getting the prospect to that point in your sales funnel. At the very least, a communication via e-mail or phone would be in order before you think of abandoning the prospect altogether.

How do you handle declines?

Matthew Toren

Put the Customer First, Even When They Are Leaving You.

As we know, it’s all in the list. List building is so, so important for any online enterprise, as it gives you the opportunity to keep in touch with those ever so fleeting visitors to your site. A workable list building campaign will go out of its way to entice the visitor, offering an unbelievable deal, information not available anywhere else, which will be sent to the e-mail provided. Everything must be squeaky clean and give the subscriber the impression that they’re getting a super deal by agreeing to opt in to your list. The double opt in feature provided by industry leaders aWeber and Constant Contact gives subscribers an additional feeling of comfort, that they are dealing with an organization on the “up and up,” who will treat their e-mail contact details carefully.

We would like to think that the subscriber will stay with us ad infinitum, allowing us to gently and occasionally suggest that they buy our products and services, even as we keep providing them with great free information and deals. As we proceed with this relationship we must tread carefully, always being polite and considerate and never bombarding these folks with too much noise. As always, you’re putting the customer first and in this case, the customer to be, applying all the principles of first class customer service.

Every now and again a subscriber wants to leave you. Unless you have a super-duper, gigantic list of thousands, this is always a little disappointing, but you should always remember that first class customer service is important when you are saying goodbye, as well. You never know when this particular person may come back to visit or buy from you, or may recommend your services to others. The fact that they are unsubscribing is not necessarily a negative move, at all!

As mailing lists are best automated, including the unsubscribe feature, be very careful how you set this up. We have all come across nightmare systems and processes when trying to unsubscribe from the list. Be sure that your list is not one of those.

• Don’t ask them to input their e-mail address again. In other words the unsubscribe page should be directly linked to the subscriber’s e-mail record. There is no reason why this should not be the case. The unsubscriber will be annoyed if he or she is asked to enter the e-mail concerned again. This is especially true if the subscriber is using an automated, multiple account e-mail checker, such as Outlook. The individual e-mail account might not be immediately obvious.

• Always streamline the process. Never make the collection of a “reason for leaving” a part of the unsubscribe process.

• Label your button “unsubscribe” or “confirm your change.” It’s amazing how many of these systems make you just sit there and think for a second. Sometimes it almost appears as if you are signing up once again, or even signing up for something else.

• There really is no reason why a subscription cancellation should not be instantaneous. Don’t let your site be one of those culprits, claiming that it will take X number of days to remove you from the mailing list.

Its time to clean your act up!

Adam Toren

Making Mistakes with Social Media

It’s such a minefield, isn’t it? How do you set foot into the social media world without making mistakes, even if you are the most hardened industry veteran? The question often asked is how do you market using social media? The blunt answer is, effectively, that you don’t! At least you don’t in the more traditional sense of the word. Enter subtlety…

You may have read our blog on Monday (Top Hits on Microsoft’s Bing) on how Twitter was the second most popular term searched this year through Microsoft’s Bing search engine (Michael Jackson being number one). This shows the explosion of social media and the interest in this microblogging platform as a way of communication in the New World. Off-line marketers could be forgiven for salivating at the thought of engaging clients, both old and new through platforms such as Twitter and many have jumped headlong into the fray, blasting out and tweeting direct marketing messages to the world. This is a major mistake and one which is guaranteed to turn off both your existing clients and anyone who might be tempted to do business with you. Social media is not social marketing and it should be viewed from a very different perspective.

I mentioned subtlety and this should be your keyword. The fact that you are engaging in social media circles is effectively marketing enough for you. In other words, your presence is your marketing tool. By all means provide great quality information and get involved with a conversation relevant to your product or service, but never, ever direct sell something. Note that the minute you do this, you have lost all the credibility and trust that you have been working hard to build up through these social media channels.

Any messages that you send out into the social media world should be relevant to the people you are sending it to and the channels that you are using. If you come across, over time, as the purveyor of good news and information, relevant and usable and at no cost, you will build up a following of sorts, which will in time be convertible to sales. There is nothing wrong in sending interested parties to a URL, so long as the contents of the landing page are appropriate, relevant, educational, informative, enlightening or entertaining. This page should not be an out and out sales page, although subtle links to your more sales-orientated offers or solutions can be contained elsewhere on these pages.

Don’t try and short-circuit the process by paying individuals to authenticate your wares, one way or the other. Be creative and come up with a great, service orientated social media campaign and treat this form of subtle marketing correctly.

What lessons have you learned using social media?

Matthew Toren

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