Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

I managed to get the various listings sites fully integrated in their new home just in time as I’ve just had a couple of requests for upgrades to the sites.

Back when they were all in separate places, the small amendment that I did this morning to add click-throughs on all the photos of properties would have meant several hours of work checking that I’d applied the amendments properly in each of the separate sites. This morning just one file needed to be amended and it was done across all of the sites at a stroke.

The next one up is more of a task though and it’s one that I’ve been mulling over for quite a while. Essentially it’s adding the ability for each property to specify the facilities that they provide for the guests. Sounds simple but the list of facilities is rather long by the time you consider that in addition to the pool, there’s things like flatscreen TVs, DVD players, hifi systems, saunas, steam rooms: you name it and somebody is sure to have it. Not only that, but somebody else is likely to have something that you’ve not even heard of never mind considered adding it to the potential list of facilities.

Now I could do it in the very fixed way that a lot of sites go for but that seems to be asking for trouble in the long run. Much better, in principle, to have a popup list I think and that’s easy enough. What I’ve not thought about yet is actually storing the information in the database nor for that matter how the owners might go about entering it. Still, ’tis time to do that bit of thinking I suspect before the list of little requests gets too long.

Now and again it’s always useful to review the websites that you’ve collected over the previous year and consider if they can be integrated.

We spent today doing that with our own collection of sites which are mainly in the accommodation listings field and found that we could, with relatively little effort, integrate our UK listings sites with our global offering. Why bother though? Well, now that both are running on the same platform we don’t need to duplicate effort in maintaining and upgrading the functionality of both series. This lets us leverage any development work that we carry out on the sites so, for example, after we integrated the sites we were able to set up a single series of adsense channels which will improve our revenue stream in due course once the stats have had a chance to build up.

Next up for integration is our standalone sites for France. They’re a little more complicated in that they are bilingual so we’ll have to have a bit of a think about how to do that but, in principle, it’s easier to do now that we have made the amendments required to integrate the UK sites.

The single platform will also aid us in rolling out new country-specific sites which is very much a plus point. In fact, it will reduce roll-out time to under an hour rather than a couple of days as it was previously. And, of course, it will make rolling out new developments for the sites much quicker too.

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.

Although you can usually assume that you’ll get around a 1% return on any marketing that you send out, now and again you can get a much better response if you happen to hit on exactly the right message and target it at exactly the right group of people at exactly the right time.

The message that you use is the one variable that you have a great deal of control over and it’s worthwhile running a test of each marketing e-mail that you plan to use in your campaigns before you send the mail to everyone on your mailing list. By testing on a small group you have the chance to modify the text and get a better feel on the level of response that you might expect which in turn let’s you stage the mailing appropriately.

Unusually for us, we decided to short-circuit that process and just send out a brand new e-mail to our latest mailing list without any prior testing which has resulted in a certain amount of chaos in the last 24 hours.

For a start, the e-mail was unexpectedly attractive to the target audience which resulted in the webserver slowing to a crawl almost immediately after the e-mail went out. The volume of people looking at the site was so great that within a few hours we used up as much bandwidth as we normally do in two days. This in turn reduced the take-up as it was so slow at times that the signup form was timing out for some people. Finally, the responses coming through were so many that it looks like it will take us an entire day to process them all.

And all this for an e-mail that was sent out in what would ordinarily be a time of week that would produce quite a low immediate response rate for us!

I think in future we’ll make more of a point in testing any new messages that we issue.