Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

Many places tend to treat repeat customers specially through offering discounts, extra services, or whatever.

However, they remain customers and one of the key things about that is that you need to get money off them for whatever goods or services that you sell, even if they are both a repeat customer and a large one.

One trap to fall into is to be more lax with the payment terms. Unless you habitually offer credit then you shouldn’t offer it to even the best of customers as sooner or later it’ll just cause needless friction between you and a good customer. If it’s pay on delivery for everyone else then that should be the case for even the best customers too as your sales contract probably doesn’t allow for any credit in such circumstances: a recipe for trouble collecting the cash if ever there was one.

So, yes, offer better discounts to better customers. Yes, offer, additional services to better customers. But, NO, don’t change your payment terms.

For those interested in France and perhaps thinking of buying a house in France at some point there are really only two property exhibitions that are worth considering which are the French Property Show in September and the Vive la France exhibition (now called The France Show) in January.

Anyone at all serious about property purchase in France should know of both of these or else they’ve been hiding out of reach of any France related publication. I had thought they were both so well known that there wouldn’t be any need to explicit advertising for either of them other than the mentions that both get in the numerous France property magazines.

And yet, they DO advertise, seemingly quite extensively. Why?

Well, my guess is that the punters were a little thin on the ground at the last exhibition in January 2007 as they certainly were very thin on the ground in France: we had no housebuyers staying with us at all during 2006. So, the organisers have hit the panic button this time to avoid any repetition.

Ironically, the housebuyers seem to be reappearing of their own accord so it’s probably going to be one of the most packed France exhibitions seen for some time. Of course, this just goes to show that people treat the Vive la France advertising more as a note of somewhere to go if they’re serious about buying than as something which puts them into a buying frame of mind. For really serious purchases such as for houses, advertising doesn’t change opinions a whole lot.

I was a bit taken aback by the very high takeup from our e-mail to Scottish B&Bs and self-catering places a couple of weeks ago. So many took it up in fact that I’m going to have to implement a redesign of the site for Scotland that I’d not planned on doing ’til next year at the earliest.

So, I figured that the takeup would be broadly similar in Northern Ireland. Yet, although I’ve mailed a similar number of places (allowing for NI being smaller), the takeup is only about 10% of that for Scotland. Less than that actually as I’m still getting new entries for Scotland from the e-mail of a few weeks ago.

The wording is identical too so I’ve no idea why the takeup should be so abysmally low: lower even than the notional 1% that I should have received.

I’ve been “hit” yet again by StumbleUpon for a post in the same subject area ie on The France Show.

As before, there are the usual hundreds of hits and diddly in terms of adsense income from them as, on the whole, StumbleUpon people tend to be looking for something fairly specific (which is pretty ironic given the nature of it, of course).

What I keep meaning to do is to use StumbleUpon in some way as I feel sure that there must be some way to keep the arrivals on the site in some way. So far though I’ve not sat down and done more than think a little about it.

Ideas welcome!

As it’s the start of the B&B/self-catering marketing season, I’ve made a start on trying to drum up some more entries for our various listing sites.

Usually, the rule of thumb is that you get about 1% return on any marketing so, in theory, I need to send out 100 invitations just to get one new entry. That’s certainly been the case with any previous e-mails I’ve sent out but for a variety of reasons the return on this particular e-mail has already passed 3% and there’s probably another week or so before the responses will start to really peter out.

How come? It’s combination of reasons. The listing is free which should improve the response although it hasn’t done so in the past but perhaps the bigger reason is that I gather that a lot of people haven’t had a great year with their properties so they’re probably taking up more marketing opportunities now than they would do otherwise (funnily enough, the sites have been pulling in much more business than expected this year).

Anyway, if you’re looking for a good freebie listing for your B&B/inn or self-catering place you can sign up at Our Inns.