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This is a follow on from a previous post i posted regarding: Increasing Sales Using Relationship Marketing

Email Updates

Email Updates should play an integral part in automating your business and website as effectively as possible. Thinking of a way to get your users to leave their details may change the way you market your business online forever (and the only way you marketing online altogether). Attracting visitors to your website is great but if you want them to be a customer for life you need to be able to contact them and entice them with great offerings.

E-Shots / Newsletters

An e-shot otherwise known as a Newsletter is a great piece of marketing and ensures you remain in your customers minds at all time throughout the buying cycle, its a great tool to remind them that you’re still there offering products and services.

Newsletters are commonly sent out on a monthly basis and are used to maintain a professional online presence and gets people to expect your regular communications (which is great for brand awarness and online authority).

Many email marketing providers offer great tracking where you can view an emails open rate, click through rate and bounce rate (a bounce is when your email has not been delivered successfully). 

Newsletters can be personalised and even dynamically created, for example you could segment your database list and have a section of your newsletter to change depending on who opens it, e.g. for women you may display perfume and for men display aftershave (thats just a simple example).  

Broadcast Emails

Broadcast Emails allow you to send out the same email to everybody in your list quickly and very easily, furthermore you can personalise them.

You may be launching a new product, have a special offer running or you may want to share industry or company news with your subscribers.

Using Relationship Marketing and an Autoresponder to Deliver Newsletters

Its well known that you need to make several points of contact before your lead will consider converting.

Therefore you may consider using an autoresponder to deliver a series of emails to warm them up into buying from you.

Let say for example you are selling a training course in I.T. and as an incentive you are offering a free 6 week e-course in return for their contact details. After your subscribers have give you their contact details, on day one you may decide to send them a welcome message, following this after 1 week you may want to start them on the free course, then for the next 6 weeks you send them some free content every week, tutorials, top tips, etc, by this point you have built up a good relationship with your readership and you are now in a better position to convert your subscribers.

Your subscribers will be that pleased with the free e-course they have just received they will be a lot more inclined to hand over some money for the real full length course.

Whats great about an autoresponder is your emails / newsletters don’t have to go out on the first day of every month, they can go out whenever you want them to, they can go out at a set period of time after they have subscribed, meaning not everyone will be receiving the same newsletter at the same time.

What is an Autoresponder?

Allot of people think an auto responder is that email you get back when you email somebody who is on holiday “Sorry i am out of the office and i will get back to you upon my return on the 31st January” or very similar messages to this one.

This isn’t what an autoresponder is exactly. Autoresponders as previously mentioned can be an e-course or contain an attachment.

Email courses or general content delivered through an autoresponder are a great way of building and maintaining relationships.

Furthermore an even better thing about using an autoresponder is that it can automate your marketing. Using the example of the e-course, delivering a course over 6 weeks would require 6 separate pieces of content, therefore you simply create these 6 pieces of content, load them into your auto responder and pre-load the interval sends and the best of it is you only have create this content once and once only.

All your website visitors have to do is opt in to your free course or website updates by leaving their name (preferably their first name) and email address. You can then deliver the course to them and even choose to make personal contact a few weeks down the line.

Autoresponder Software

You can read about this in more detail here but the market leading autoresponder software is called AWeber. This is a great piece of autoresponder software which is widely used and has many satisfied customers, this is the perfect tool for automating your marketing and build long term relationships and at such a low cost its a must have tool to generate leads and build relationships.

A small note ‘Email Deliverability’

A big thing to consider here is email deliverability. AWeber has a 99% deliverability rate, this is an outstanding rate and you will not be able to ascertain this kind of deliverability using your own server and you may be at risk of getting a bad reputation as a spammer if you were to do so, so a word of warning there.

Protecting your online presence is extremely important and if you do not do this it could effect your search engine rankings, therefore you need to ensure your emails are coming from a trusted third party.

How Does AWeber Work?

There is nobody who can explain this better than AWeber themselves. AWeber offer a whole host of excellent Video Tutorials. Starting from scratch where you can learn everything for a quick and easy setup for your first email marketing campaign, includig how to set up your list, add messages and publish a sign up form to your website, its so easy and AWeber make it even easier.

Other tutorials include using free templates for email newsletter and how to build an effective follow up again (this is great!).

Ok so where do i start?

The thing i find with email marketing is to get started ASAP. Say you receive X number of visitors per day on your website, why arent you collecting their contact details?. Your potentially chucking away your chance of making a sale.

The most important thing to do is get started as soon as possible, offer some great content, special offers or an e-course and start collecting details now.

Simply sign up to AWeber for a free test drive, get the code on your website (its very easy - its a simple copy and paste job - all of the code is provided for you) and start collecting names and email addresses.

Once you have registered with AWeber (its completely free) they will give you a little bit of code for your form in which your subscriber will enter their details, if you dont feel comfortable with this feel free to drop me an email and i can help you out.

To try this piece of sofware out for free enter your details below and take a free test drive now.

Increase Sales - Use Online Customer Relationship Building & Email Marketing

Did you know that with the effective use of Online Customer Relationship Building, Relationship Marketing and an excellent email marketing tool by the name of AWeber you can increase website visitors (traffic), leads, conversions and most definitely sales by a ridiculously huge amount, learn how you can do this.

What is Online Customer Relationship Marketing?

Online Customer Relationship Marketing as it says on the tin is all about relationships and the effective use of tactics and various methods to develop long term relationships with customers with the intention to turn them into loyal customers.

With the ongoing amount of competition, organizations must demonstrate and offer extremely good customer service which gives great value and excellent targeted messages and communications.

However first you have to attract customers before being able to convert them into paying customers, therefore methods and tactics are used to do exactly this. Some organisations offer a whole array of offers, new product promotions and competitive prices. As soon as these leads are captured they then have to be retained, its common for organisations to use methods such as loyalty cards, courtesy calls and many other relationship building tactics.

How does Customer Relationship Marketing work online and how can i get started?

Online Customer Relationship Management tells us that we must have a healthy intelligent database with good data that we can use to use to our advantage to convert leads and retain consumers e.g knowing Mr smith likes to play golf at the weekend and enjoy indulging in a bottle of 1957 red wine of a Saturday evening would be extremely powerful information to some organisations.

Doing this online has never been easier, however asking for too much information at the beginning of a relationship could be asking for that little bit too much, so here we go, this next part of this post will show you how you can start to gather your visitors contact details with ease and convert them into paying customers.

How Can I Generate Leads

You must collect the name (preferably first name - surname is not really required) and email address of a large proportion of your visitors - the reason why I have not mentioned their address or postcode is because most people cant be bothered to fill all of this information in and you can get this later if you need to, to do this you will need to set up a lead capture system, but I will go into this in more detail in a minute.

The idea behind this is when people arrive at your website you encourage them to leave their details, but how can you encourage them do this? There are many ways you can do this but the strongest and most successful way is to offer something for free, now … it doesn’t have to be something outrageous like a free product or something expensive, it doesn’t even have to be anything tangible, it could just be an E-Book or E-Guide which you know will add great value to your visitors, for example i recently listened to a great podcast from someone who set up a website on “How To Cure Acne”, this person simply implemented a lead capture system and to entice visitors into leaving their contact details the webmaster offered a “7 Day Plan to Cure Acne” which was a 7 day plan which provided down to earth advice, tips, product reviews and other useful resources to its readers which was delivered over a 7 day period each day, and the best of it was it was all automated.

However the relationship building didn’t end there, the visitors wouldn’t simply receive 7 days of material and then not a whistle for months, the idea here is to grow the leads and build up a rapore and strong relationship

Using a sophisticated but easy to use web based software the web site owner was able to pre load a list of relationship building emails into what’s called an auto responder, each of the 7 emails only had to be constructed once, then it was loaded into a piece of software and scheduled to go out at a specified time in the day each day for 7 days.. , so let’s say I signed up for the 7 days course on days 1 - 7 i would receive some great tips and advice on how to cure acne .. great …, but then maybe a few days later i would receive another email saying “hi .. i thought you may like this” and then several more emails very much like this one (building up a rapore with me offering sound advice and tips) over the next month, by this stage i would typically begin to look forward to receiving their emails as they are providing great value to me in my struggle to cure acne, this is a great way to build a relationship but to also build authority in their market, in this case curing acne.
To put simply if there is no relationship there is no conversion from leads to buyers. If your site gets great traffic, the key is to build genuine relationships, a byproduct of this is conversion rates and this will increase as your list of subscribers will be responsive.

Give me the software

Now you need to know how you can start to build your list immediately but most importantly build strong relationships. AWeber is the marketing leading automated email follow up and newsletter delivery service in the world (follow up autoresponder).A follow up autoresponder is unique in that, although it can be of great use to almost any business, few people fully understand what it does. If more people knew, then more people would buy.AWeber offers a great solution to building lasting relationships through the use of an automated sequence of personalized messages. Did you know that statistics have shown that it often takes multiple contacts to maximise sales conversion. Creating good quality content in the form of a 7 Day E-Course or writing a comprehensive E-Book followed up with a sequence of relationship building emails (helpful tips, resources, product reviews etc) is one of the easiest ways to obtain paying customers, increase conversion and most importantly increase revenue, and not as a one off, you can automate the whole process, site back, eat, sleep or even take a holiday and your automated lead capture service will be working while you do nothing. Here is the link again, AWeber Offer a free demo, so sign up, give it a try and lean how AWeber can help you achieve excellence. But is it too technical for me? Mastering and I mean mastering all of the tools and functionality doesn’t take too long at all. AWeber have done a great job in ensuring the tool is intuitive and simple to use as possible. It has a good looking interface and the way the tool is designed it makes your job a lot easier to do. You do need to have a technical background or any skills in HTML at all. Ofcourse if you find you are struggling excellent support is a available as is a library of instructional materials, so give AWeber a try.

Why use AWeber Autoresponders

To put simply ever since I began Online Marketing I noticed all of the Online Marketing “gurus” were using it, every mail list I signed up for I received confirmation from AWeber. But I did do a little bit of research around the web and out of the main Autoresponders out there I found it hard to find any negative comments about AWeber.

Furthermore I know a lot of Online Marketers who have been customers with AWeber for a long time so it looks like AWeber have a great retention rate, obviously keeping customers happy, and whats great about using such a popular tool is an online community seems to grow with it, meaning any questions or support you may need there a whole community out there who can not only point you in the right direct but also provide some great tips on how to utilize the tool to its full potential.

What about SPAM and Email Deliverability

Using the wrong tool on you email marketing campaigns, newsletters or broadcasts can have a detrimental impact on your organization and the deliverability of your emails (i.e the amount of emails that actually get through to your subscribers inbox). A lot of inexperienced providers offer services which may seem great but it doesn’t really matter if your email are not getting through as intended.
AWeber have the astonishingly highest percentage of email deliverability meaning AWeber is doing an excellent job to ensure emails are getting through to your subscribers (customers). Email Deliverability is something that should not be ignored.

How Much will it cost me?

AWeber is competitively priced. Obviously if you’re just starting out and have a subscriber list of between 0 – 500 paying only £12 ($18) per month is worth every penny to give your website that professional and more importantly automated edge. Furthermore there is a money back guarantee so if for some reason you don’t like it you have the satisfaction that a refund is available.

Click here to test drive or order an AWeber account today, alternatively sign up for a free test drive below.

Do Your Potential Customers Forget About You?

Posted by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Your web business probably gets product inquiries from potential customers around the globe. Inquiries come via e-mail and your web site, and you try to send information to each hot prospect as quickly as you can. You know that you can drastically increase the likelihood of making a sale by satisfying each person’s need for information quickly!

But, after you’ve delivered that first bit of information to your prospect, do you send him any further information?

 If you are like most Internet marketers, you don’t.

When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip from your grasp! This is a potential customer who may have been very interested in your products, but who lost your contact information, or was too busy to make a purchase when your first message reached him.

Often, a prospect will purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you find him important enough to follow up with later. When he doesn’t receive a follow up message from you, he will take his business elsewhere.

Are you losing profits due to inconsistent and ineffective follow up?

Following up with leads is more than just a process - it’s an art. In order to be effective, you need to design a follow up system, and stick to it, EVERY DAY! If you don’t follow up with your prospects consistently, INDIVIDUALLY, and in a timely fashion, then you might as well forget the whole follow up process.

Consistent follow up gets results!

When I first started marketing and following up with prospects, I used a follow up method that I now call the “List Technique.” I had a large database containing the names and e-mail addresses of people who had specifically requested information about my products and services. These prospects had already received my first letter by the time they requested more information, so I used the company’s latest news as a follow up piece.

I would write follow up newsletters every now and then, and send them, in one mass mailing, to everyone who had previously requested information from me. While this probably did help me win a few additional orders, it wasn’t a very good follow up method. Why isn’t the “List Technique” very effective?

• The List Technique isn’t consistent. Proponents of the List Technique tend to only send out follow up messages when their companies have “big news”.
• List Technique messages don’t give the potential customer any additional information about the product or service in question. He can’t make a more informed buying decision after receiving a newsletter! If someone is wondering whether your company sells the best knick-knacks, what does he care that you’ve just moved your headquarters?
• List Technique messages convey a “big list” mentality to your potential customers. When I used to write follow up messages using the List Technique, I was writing news bulletins to everyone I knew! I should have been sending a personal message to each individual who wanted to know more about my products.

What follow up method really works?

Following up with each lead individually, multiple times, but at set intervals, and with pre-written messages, will dramatically increase sales! Others who use this same technique confirm that they have all at least doubled the sales of various products! In order to set this system up, though, you need to do some planning.

First, you’ll need to develop your follow up messages. If you’ve been marketing on the Internet for any length of time, then you should already have a first informative letter. Your second letter marks the beginning of the follow up process, and should go into more detail than the first letter. Fill this letter with details that you didn’t have the space to add to the first letter. Stress the BENEFITS of your products or services!

Your next 2-3 follow up messages should be rather short. Include lists of the benefits and potential uses of your products and services. Write each letter so that your prospects can skim the contents, and still see the full force of your message.

The next couple of follow up messages should create a sense of urgency in your prospect’s mind. Make a special offer, giving him a reason to order NOW instead of waiting any longer. After reading these follow up messages, your prospect should want to order immediately!

Phrase each of your final 1 or 2 follow up messages in the form of a question. Ask your prospect why he hasn’t yet placed an order? Try to get him to actually respond. Ask if the price is to high, the product isn’t the right color or doesn’t have the right features, or if he is looking for something else entirely. (By this time, it’s unlikely that this person will order from you. However, his feedback can help you modify your follow up letters or products, so that other prospects will order from you.)

The timing of your follow up letters is just as important as their content. You don’t want one prospect to receive a follow up the day after he gets your initial informative letter, while another prospect waits weeks for a follow up!

Always send an initial, informative letter as soon as it is requested, and send the first follow up 24 hours afterwards. You want your hot prospects to have information quickly, so that they can make informed buying decisions!

Send the next 2-3 follow up messages between 1 and 3 days apart. Your prospect is still hot, and is probably still shopping around! Tell him about the benefits of your products and services, as opposed to your competitors’. You will make the sale!

Send the final follow up messages later on. You certainly don’t want to annoy your prospect! Make sure that these last letters are at least 4 days apart.

Following up effectively seems complicated, but it doesn’t have to be! So many potential customers are lost because of poor follow up - don’t you want to be one of the few to get it right?

Posted by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Permission

Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses

When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

List Maintenance

Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL: Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.Words/phrases:

Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.

Images:

Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

Attachments:

With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.

Reputation

Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:

• http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php
• http://www.bondedsender.com
• http://www.habeas.com

Relationships & Whitelisting

Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

Technorati Tags: AWeber, Email Deliverability Tips, Relationship Marketing

Why You Need A Website …

Even the most negative anti-internet people out there even believe that a huge portion of business revenue is be derived from online transactions, or offline transactions as a result of seeing the product or service online beforehand.

Sometimes I wonder why people even hesitate about creating an online presence, why? nowadays the cost of setting up a website from scratch is extremely, and I mean extremely cheap.

Don’t be quick to dismiss your product or service as one that doesn’t lend itself to the online environment, people all over the world are selling all kinds of goods online, the product doesn’t even have to be tangible, it could be selling an e-book on how to make hats!

I know of many local businesses who don’t put all their efforts into selling over the internet but they do have some kind of online presence, whether it’s a small brochure website which simply contains an inviting homepage, about us and contact page, this type of website is great for small local companies who offer a local service, for example a ‘local car valeting service’.

The point here is to have something on the web so you can be found by potential customers or even partners etc; even if your website simply contains your contact detail with a brief description you can still generate leads and business.

Below are a few more reasons why you need a website

1. Build Customer Relationships

A website is a great place to build customer relationships – this can be done extremely effectively using email (see Online Customer Relationship Marketing). Once you have a consumers name and e-mail address they could be a customer for life if they are treated well.

2. Lead Generation

Let’s face it we all want to make money online, and the sole intention of many online organisations is to make money, and turn visitors into customers into loyal customer who use their products or services again and again.

Creating a website, attracting visitors and funnelling this traffic are a great lead generation technique. A local organisation I worked with on a website visitor conversion campaign found they increased lead generation by 800% by effectively utilizing the powers of creating an effective online presence and marketing their website through a variety of channels (see Using Email to Leverage Relationship Marketing and Generate Leads).

3. To compete against your competitors

Without having an online presence could mean you are missing out on a lot of potential business – meaning your competitors have a distinct advantage just by having an online presence. Effectively leverage the power of the internet and get ahead of competitors by learning by their mistakes and doing what they do better.

4. To provide business information

A huge proportion of internet users use the internet to find local businesses or a product or service in general. Using the web to do this, is a lot cheaper than directory enquiries and a hell of a lot quicker than using a telephone book or directory.

A website containing your business information is available 24 hours a day, this can be printed and can be bookmarked to return to later. Furthermore potential customers can contact you using the desired communication channel you display.

5. Global Reach

Ok, a lot of people use the advantage of having a global reach to say things like “you can sell your products to people overseas” and “people like to buy the latest and best products”, yes of course you can but you already know that. Having a global reach means that people from all over the world can buy your products, however again it doesn’t have to be a tangible product it could be an e-book or a series of videos.

6. Open 24/7 365 days/year

Your shop is always open so to speak. Visitors can enter your shop any time of the day – before 9am and after 5pm – because out of these hours are when people tend to surf the internet, a perfect reason why you should have an online presence

7. Cost Effective Advertising

Offline advertising generally has an extremely low conversion rate. Leaflets and brochures can be quote costly and once these have been printed and distributed and more often that not thrown away this communication channel is dead.

However using a website as a communication will always be online; this cannot be thrown away or discarded. Offline Marketing could be looked upon as a ‘push’ marketing mechanism, however having a website uses a ‘pull’ mechanism, and customers search for your services and find your website.
Think of a website as a full colour interactive brochure which you can add to whenever you like. Reduce advertising costs by using just one effective call to action / message and promoting your website address e.g. learn more about this product on our website, for more information visit www.domain-name.co.uk.
And finally on this one alteration to your website can be done quickly and free, this is a completely different story with marketing literature such as posters or flyers.

8. To Project a professional image – not @hotmail.co.uk

Lots of very small business nowadays has some kind of online presence. Nothing looks more unprofessional than when a company refers to one of their points of contact being your-name@hotmail.co.uk or your-name@yahoo.co.uk. This says too many consumers that the business either couldn’t afford or wasn’t bothered about investing in their company brand image, would it to be nicer to use a more user friendly and professional email such as support@your-domain.co.uk or contact@your-domain.co.uk, this gives the consumers the feeling they are dealing with a successful organisation and that their query or contact is being deal with a customer support / care team.

9. Your website can make you money - sell your products and services

Firstly before I go into this one I would like to tell you two things, I recently attended a Search Engine Optimisation seminar in London and In one of the exhibition hall I engaged in a conversation with a middle aged woman from Scotland, after discussing the topic of the seminar we were about to watch she revealed to me that she found her online success selling, get ready for it, selling books on how to make straw hats, she uncovered that she was able to quite her full time job 3 years ago to peruse her online career selling books full time, but without the full time 9 – 5 or later house, she found she could happily sit back and work 1 – 2 hours per day checking email and performing general maintenance on her website.

I think this goes to show that you need to be a retail outlet selling top brand labels in clothing to become and entrepreneur online.

A website can be a great tool in not only promoting your products but selling them to, your shop cannot be available 24 hours a day but your website can, and its probably worth mentioning again that people do tend to surf the internet most when they return from work, so why not reinforce your brand online as well as offline.

Having a website is a great way of automating your business, whilst you are having an evening off or even sleeping you website can be generating brand awareness, generating leads but more importantly generating sales and revenue for your company.

10. Word of mouth advertising

With the growing online community and social networking going on nowadays it has never been easier to like minded people to communicated, but more importantly communicate your website address or even drop it into an email. Its very common nowadays that a website address could be posted up onto a website discussion forum by a happy customer and you could expect to receive hundreds even thousand of visitors to your website from that one forum post or conversation about your company and the products and services you offer.

11. Effectively reach new markets

An overwhelming amount of people now have access to the internet whether it is through their mobile phone, pc, laptop or game console. You really can’t afford to miss out on all these potential customers. It may be that someone didn’t mean or intend to land on your website but people surf the internet in many different ways, more often than not people often refine their searches on search engine again and again until they get to the website they want, they may begin searching for “car wax” and throughout their journey they may find that they done actually want “car wax” anymore what they want now is a “car valeting service”, this is common with website users in that they do end up on a website looking at products or services they didn’t intend to look at in the first place.

12. Test the market

Many organisations at some point would like to know how their target marketing are going to react to their new product or service but are afraid of investing large amount of money into creating the product and then be disappointed by the lack of interest or enthusiasm for it. A great way to “test the market” is to expose this new product or service on your website. A typical idea of this would be if a training consultancy wished to offer a new training programme, by adding a small paragraph on the homepage of your website detailing a brief introduction into the course followed by a “click here for more information” or “contact us to register your interest”, by tracking the number of click through or page views or even email enquiries can tell you how your market has reacted to your new offering, this can then determine whether the launch of this new product is feasible. You can even go a step further and test your new found marketing on piloting product prices etc.

13. Customer Support

Provide a support area or knowledge based for your customers. This can become a hub for all your customers’ queries and questions, assistance on products, provide a variety of ways to be contacted, alternatively use a frequently asked questions to answer the most popular questions or queries – all of this can be done without using staff time, employing new resources or without even answering a phone.

14. Advertising Seasonal Offers / Special Offers

A website and having the right data capture in place is a great way to tunnel traffic into an email list. Effectively collecting customers email addresses gives you the power to contact them when you want to tell them something. You may have a seasonal offer that you wish to communicate, effective email marketing is a great way to build relationships, generate leads (by offering a free report or discount voucher in exchange for their email address, and more importantly convert leads into customers through the use tailored email that meet the demands of your customers.

Building up an intelligent database can have a massive impact on consumer retention and loyalty, knowing that Mrs Smith loves to buy books by a certain author gives you an opportunity to up sell and cross sell other books by that author / similar authors and also attempt to sell items that other people have purchased – hence giving the consumer exactly what they want, when they want it a step on from this is to build an incentivised loyalty program e.g. buy this book and get another book for half price, all of this is possible.
Every one of your customers can be alerted about this special offer at the click of a button, and compared to the cost of offline marketing this is extremely low cost with a higher conversion rate and an even higher return on investment.

So that concludes the list on why you need a website, thanks for reading and feel free to add to the list.

What Do I Need To Start My Own Website?

1. A Domain Name

2. Web Hosting

Technorati Tags: AWeber, Lead Generation, Relationship Marketing, Website, Website Design