Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

When we started off the original plan was to get going on the Internet marketing first as that would be a quick success (hopefully!) then we’d move onto advertising in the books & magazines. Notably absent was the idea of advertising by way of brochures and it was quite a deliberate omission too. Why?

Simple really: by and large you get roughly a 1% return on any marketing that you do. So if you want to get ONE sale you need to distribute ONE HUNDRED brochures. Unless your brochures are very cheap or your service is very expensive it’s easy to see that brochures are not the way to go. For example, say your brochure costs about £1/$1/‚€1 including any postage or distribution costs then that 1% rule means that you will be spending around £100/$100/‚€100 to get one sale which isn’t really a runner unless your product costs at least 10 times that.

This is, of course, why the Internet is so appealing. You can get thousands of people reading your “brochure” and at virtually no cost to yourself. Sadly, that 1% rule doesn’t apply to all the hits that your website will receive but it should apply to those that are relevant (which can be determined by looking through your site visitor stats). However, if you can manage to, say, double your site traffic then, by and large, the number of relevant readers will also double so, in principle, you should double your sales, or at least those that you get directly from your own website.

You might think that we’d see long term guests more than we see overnighters but in fact it’s the reverse that’s generally true.

There are two different reasons for this.

Firstly, the long term guests who come out of season are generally staying with us because they’re visiting relatives who live nearby. This means that they basically disappear right after breakfast and don’t come back ’til quite late in the evening.

The long term guests that come in the Summer season are quite different. In general, they have researched the area very well and know exactly what they want to see and how long it will take them to get from here to where they want to be each day. We don’t see much of them because they never need to ask us what there is to see locally nor do they need to ask directions.

In fact, it’s usually those staying two or three nights that we see the most. They’re generally not quite so knowledgeable about the region and neither know exactly what there is to see nor where they would go to see it.

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 leafing through the categories and funnily enough though I write a fair bit about both holidays and finance I don’t think I’ve ever written something that covers both!

So, with the Christmas holiday season coming up, how were you planning on financing the holiday? Christmas is perhaps the worst holiday to finance as you can have a “worst-case” scenario in terms of finance with the potential for both Christmas presents and a foreign holiday which makes for quite a big bill for some people.

In an ideal world, you’d have saved up for it all months in advance, but then this isn’t an ideal world, is it? Therefore many people are looking to borrow money to finance it all.

Fortunately, many people are in the same boat and therefore there are lots of offers of credit around at this time of year. As a rule, avoid store credit for the presents as this is often the most expensive form of credit and instead look towards the banks. If you’ve not used up all the 0% card offers, this is the time to get filling in the appropriate application forms which can get you up to 9 months interest free credit on purchases and, if you’re lucky enough, you might be able to finance both the Christmas presents and the holiday with one of these cards.

One thing to avoid though is the head in the sand approach that many people take. That attitude will almost certainly cost you dear and you’ll end up paying way over the odds for your borrowing. Even if you can’t get 0%, at least check what interest you’re paying on your credit cards and use the one with the lowest rate to buy whatever needs bought.