Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

Although it might sound obvious, you need to ask people to do what you’d like them to do when you send out a marketing e-mail.

It might be obvious but many marketing e-mails are sent out without a clear “buy this” message and even more go out without giving the reader a clear means of actually buying the product. Many newsletters are sent out without containing links to specific products sold by the company sending it out yet it’s one of the easiest ways to pick up easy sales as you’re sending it out to people who’ve asked to be on your mailing list so they’re already interested in your products.

Don’t forget to vary your message too. For example, if you’re sending out a travel related newsletter, pick out upcoming vacations such as Easter and special interest periods like Valentine’s Day. Hallmark spend a LOT of money to produce cards that address every possible situation that you could imagine and you should approach your newsletter with the same originality (or just copy Hallmark!).

However, the most important thing is to ensure that there’s a very clear “buy this” message and a very easy way of a reader doing exactly that.

We get a relatively low rate of turnover of the properties listed on our sites but one thing that always amazes me is that the seller never passes on the information about the advertising they’d done to the new owner.

In pretty much all cases that sale is a straight sale of the business so you’d think that the new owner would want to retain the existing customer base yet never once have we been contacted by a new owner wanting to revive the site through changing the contact details to their own, perhaps a new description, or whatever. In fact, in most cases that we follow up the very first thing that the new owners do is to change the name of the business and change all the contact details so they are pretty much guaranteed to lose all the existing customer base.

For the first time today we by chance caught one of the new owners via a general mailshot. Their first thought was to delete the advert rather than simply change the contact details even though the subscription has already been covered by the previous owner.

So, even if you are planning on changing how the business that you’ve just bought operates, do ask about the advertising and try to get a list of places that it’s advertised in. You may find that ongoing advertising has been paid for in advance so you may as well just change the contact details even if you don’t plan to renew it next time around.

One thing that constantly surprises me with the adverts that we get for the listings sites is how poor some of them are.

Whilst most people will write two or three paragraphs to describe their place and some even run to quite extensive descriptions of both their property and the local attractions, others put as little as one sentence on and don’t bother with a photo either.

Now, it’s possible to get some hits with a one sentence description but realistically the number of hits you’ll get with one sentence is tiny as it just isn’t enough for the search engines to work with. And the search engines do matter because even with listings sites, the majority of hits are generally on the pages generated for individual properties rather than the home page of the listings site. Therefore if your entry is very short then you’re going to get a good deal less business than if your entry is above average in length.

Photos are a different matter. They’re usually not important in bringing people to your place although there’s been a recent trend towards people using image search to find properties so they are more important than they were. However, many people book directly from the advert so it’s a good idea to load as many good photos as you can with any adverts that you place. Make sure that the photo used on your summary page is eye-catching too or your place will get skipped.

In fact, rather than spending time to get the “perfect wording” for your ad, it’s much better to spend the time in making it longer.

It’s surprising how small changes in how you word things can have a large impact on the message that convey to your potential customers.

For example, if you actually want to entice people to use your services it’s often best to offer potential customers a free trial period. Those usually come with a few strings attached for example a software product will have some facilities disabled.

However, if you combine that free trial period with a discounted full-service product that has at least the implication that it’s only on offer for a limited period then you can find that the take-up of the offer is much greater. This puts the idea in people’s minds that they could have the full product at a discount price right away or take the chance that the offer will be over by the time the free trial period is finished.

Often very small differences in the wording of such offers can have a major impact on their take-up. For example, if the free trial period isn’t actually related to the time which the customers can take up the discount offer but you imply that it is the take-up will usually be higher than if you don’t imply that link exists.

Whilst we’re all looking for rapid growth in our businesses, if that rapid growth happens to arrive unexpectedly it can cause equally unexpected problems.

Moving from being a small scale business to a medium sized one in any market is usually a very big move. On the small scale, it’s quite possible to operate very much as a cottage industry in many fields with the owner doing a lot of the work themselves. As the scale moves up though a point arrives where automation in some form is a necessity and that’s where many businesses fall down through not having prepared for it.

I say automation but, of course, another option is to take on staff. In the “real world” it’s additional staff that is usually the way to go but online automation is often the preferred route although not necessarily the easiest one. In fact, often automation is essential online simply because growth can be very, very rapid and so much so that taking on additional staff may not be a viable option. Sure you can hire staff if you find that you now have two or three times the number of customers that you had last year, but if it’s 10 times the number of customers you had a couple of months ago then it’s a different matter.

Fortunately, the Internet provides the tools to let you scale up your offering without major hassles. Ten times the number of customers online isn’t the problem that it would be in the real world. If you’ve used standard software then chances are you may well get away with simply upgrading the hosting package for your website as the number of customers grows.

What’s dangerous is to take it for granted that you can simply upgrade in that way forever though. There are upper limits that shared hosting packages offer before you need to move onto VPS hosting or even a dedicated server and in some cases those upgrades may mean you looking to hire an IT expert to support it all for you.