e-commerce


All businesses and organisations work in their own ways, and serve different markets with different goods and services, but they have at least one thing in common: a need to make their marketing budget work as effectively as possible. Your existing marketing mix may include: your own printed materials; trade, national and local newspaper advertising; direct mail and/or email campaigns. Embracing internet marketing can add a whole new range of channels: websites, search engine advertising, email campaigns, social media and much more. But the continuing responsibility of marketing budget holders is to balance spending in these areas to maximise effectiveness.

The percentage of your business that comes directly from websites or email campaigns will vary from one sector to another. A business selling goods online, for example, should make every effort (through email campaigns, search engine advertising and integrated use of social media) to drive as much traffic as possible to the website, as cost of sales online may well be substantially lower. The context may be very different for a consultancy, where the role of a website or an email campaign is more likely to focus on establishing brand positioning and values, making the latest news, offers and service details available as quickly as possible, providing information about services and including calls to action that encourage – and make it easy – for web site visitors – to make contact with appropriate points within the business.

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If your business operates in a crowded and competitive marketplace, how can you make sure your website really stands out from the crowd and serves you best?

The shortest answer to this question is probably “think it through”. Although we now accept the idea of the web being an interactive environment, too many businesses still treat it as a ‘broadcast’ medium – “here’s our online brochure, please admire it”. But there are simple pieces of sound advice that might help you to kick-start your thinking:

  • analyse the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ sites to – are they clearly laid out or cluttered, easy or hard to navigate and use, what features and functionality do they have (and learn from this)
  • focus on what your audience want/need to know about as much as what you feel you have to tell them: to engage them, it is your audience you need to address – you are not your own customer (and remember, they control they mouse)
  • play to your strengths – your web site is your ‘shop window’, and you need to present yourself in the best light.

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As a company that likes to provide advice as well as the best possible service, it’s only fair to say this isn’t directly an article about our services. But if your company is selling products over the web, it would be ‘best practice’ for you to read on, as running a high quality e-commerce website doesn’t begin and end with stocking the right products at the right prices and having a robust and well-designed website to sell them from. Every third-party you contract must play their part in maintaining your reputation.

Think of this as a case study – albeit one where a few names have been concealed. But what happened is a true story, and one that might be eye opening if your company’s reputation is important to you. It is, we hope, obvious, that – at least as far as your customer is concerned – an order isn’t completely fulfilled until they receive the wonderful product that you have sold them.

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Despite the Internet having been very much a business reality for several years, we still see many organisations whose approach seems to be “we’ve built a website, the world will now flock to it”. We don’t like to be spoilsports, but the ‘If you build it, they will come’ may have made a great hook for Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, but that was the movies – and what came were ghosts. Not big shoppers by and large, the dead. So can we suggest a more pragmatic approach that reaches out to the living without crystal balls or Ouija boards?

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