Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Science & Technology’ Category

Camera technology is moving so fast these days that it’s getting to be pretty much a lottery as to when is the best time to buy a camera.

For instance, I’d pretty much come to the conclusion that the Pentax Option S10 was the perfect camera to be my next “take it everywhere” camera. Launched in August 2007 it offers good quality 10mp images in a very small package.

However, when I did a search for some more information on it, what did I come across but that yesterday Pentax announced the launch of the S12 which is basically the same camera but with a 12mp sensor. Note that the launch has been announced but not actually happened (it’s due in March) so Pentax have delayed (and possibly lost) a sale to me.

After all, why buy the S10 now when I can get a much better camera in two months time for, probably, the same price? Sure, if I was just about to go on holiday I’d buy the S10 now, but I’m not so I’ll wait.

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.

Over the last couple of years we’ve watched our very own French gite listings site slowly but surely climb the ranks in the search engines.

Now that it’s a middling size site, roughly comparable to the likes of VisitFrance in size it’s great to see that it’s sitting right there in the middle of all the fully commercial sites and, moreover, often towards the top of that list.

What’s confusing though is quite simply: why? After all, several of those commercial sites are spending quite serious amounts of money in promoting their site whilst we spend very little comparatively speaking. We know for a fact that at least one of the middle ranking sites (which we rank much better than) was spending around £3000 per year on marketing up to a year or so ago.

Confusing too is how come we’re not innundated with applications to list on our site in that we charge a maximum of £29 whilst comparable sites are charging around the £100 mark and, for that matter, we even offer a “free forever” listing too whereas others limit their free period to six months.