Jon Smith / On...

writing & digital marketing

April 25th 2012

On… Defining “tone of voice” for your new business

Decide upon a distinct tone for all your communications and stick to it – it doesn’t have to formal, just consistent and in-keeping with your brand and your target audience. Having a unique tone can be the key to winning customer’s trust, winning valuable press coverage and ensuring that it’s your brand and your website that users click on and recommend to others.

It’s obviously possible to alter your company tone of voice over time, but deciding on what you want from the start will be far more effective. For an example of a distinct tone which has won a company customers and reputation check out Innocent

Creating a unique, witty or off-the-wall style will immediately get you noticed and help differentiate your site from the raft of competitors out there. Certain topics or professions may limit your ability to get creative – after all you’re unlikely to drum up much divorce advice  business for your law firm if you make light of the client’s situation or circumstances – however, including a well thought out diagram of the divorce process and a bullet-pointed list explaining how your firm can help, will sell your services far better than pages and pages of legalese than confuse your reader.

Be different, inform, engage.

Posted at 9:20pm and tagged with: marketing, start a business, online business,.

April 24th 2012

On… Good Customer Service from your online business

Customer Services does not just mean offering a phone number or an email address on the site and hoping for the best.

To manage your expectations, if you’re operating an e-commerce operation, you’ll be very lucky indeed if your customer contact rate is less than 5-10%. This means for every 100 orders you ship, at least 5-10 people will contact you before, during or after their order. Of those same contacts about 50% will contact you again with a follow up inquiry. You must allow for this in your daily operations and have suitable staff allocation in place.

At first you will be able to handle the calls and the emails yourself, but for all the time you are answering a customer, or finding out what happened with their order, either internally or with the carrier, you’re not doing the other twenty tasks that need to be done.

For service providers, customer services also covers sales inquiries and client care, both pre- and post-sale. These inquiries won’t be so numerous, but without doubt each inquiry will be unique and will require a detailed and well researched response. Again, you will be able to handle this yourself initially, but eventually it will require its own resource.

Posted at 7:56pm and tagged with: Customer Service, start a business, online business, online reputation,.

April 23rd 2012

On… Pleasing your customers, everytime…

Your tone with customers (or potential customers) must at all times be professional and courteous – it could be that one initial email that leads to a huge order or turns out to be from a journalist writing a piece on your particular market. It could be that this same customer becomes one of your most loyal and constant clients recommending you far and wide. Your customers are your lifeblood and customer service is therefore a very necessary arm of your business, not something you can try and ‘deal with’ whilst eating your lunch.

·      Clearly display a phone number on your website, especially during the order pipeline pages

·      Provide email addresses or contact forms for customers to contact you

·      Consider livechat functionality for customers who require an immediate response

·      Give customers a guide to when they can expect a reply – if it’s 24 hours, make sure you reply within this timeframe

·      Fix the customer’s problem as quickly and efficiently as you can

·      Take any criticism seriously and investigate what you can do to stop the same thing happening to other customers

Without doubt many of your customer’s inquiries will have similarities and therefore it’s well worth creating templates or blurbs which can be utilised for the most common types of contact. Don’t send the template out un-edited, as no single email can cover so many bases.

·      Personalise the email with the customers name, order number/reference, delivery address

·      If the contact is related to a credit or debit card number, be sure that neither you nor the customer quotes the card number via email – this must be done via an http webpage or via telephone/fax

·      Quote the expected or revised delivery date if applicable

·      Sign off with a real name, so that the customer can follow up with the customer service representative in the future

·      Thank the customer for their query/order/comment

Posted at 8:13pm and tagged with: Customer Service, start-up, start a new business, online business, online reputation, two column,.

April 5th 2012

On… The importance of A/B or Variate testing

A/B or Variate testing

You will never be all things to all people and even if you employ the most accurate targeting imaginable, your email shoot will not convert every recipient all of the time. To improve your opening rate, click through rate and ultimately the conversion rate of campaigns, it’s advisable to test different designs and copy and measure the results.

If you have identified 1000 registered users who have opted in to receive email marketing about one of your products or services, break this group into further smaller clusters – for example, four sets of 250. With each variant email, test a specific alteration such as the size and colour of the action button, or the sales message in the opening paragraph, or the subject line…

It takes time, but over the course of a number of shoots, you begin to build a profile of what works for a specific group of your customers. There are learnings that can be applied across the board, and their will be interesting subtleties that seem unique to a particular sub-set of customers.

Record your findings and constantly optimise – remember that even a single percentage increase in your opening rate will impact the effectiveness of the entire campaign, and adding a single percentage increase to your conversion rate, can result in massive shifts in your profitability.

Posted at 11:13pm and tagged with: marketing, online business, start a business,.

April 4th 2012

On… Start an online business in easy steps

Start an online business in easy steps

A comprehensive guide to starting and running a profitable online business–Taking you from initial idea through to start-up and profitability Start an online business in easy steps walks you through the process of creating a website that will get you noticed, by customers, clients, suppliers and search engines. Aimed at entrepreneurs planning a full-time venture, at those interested in generating a second-income, whilst working around existing commitments, as well as offline businesses who are looking to expand their offering by venturing online, Start an online business in easy steps provides you with the tools and the know-how to turn your dream into a reality.

Heaped with practical and proven advice you can put to immediate use, this book will help you:

To find your niche and dominate it

To plan your online business to be scalable

To finance your venture

To establish and maintain a killer website

To take online payments safely and securely

To generate traffic to your website

To turn users into consumers… and ensure they come back

To market your website effectively in the digital age

Posted at 7:56pm and tagged with: start-up, start a new business, online business,.

April 3rd 2012

On… Creating the right tone/content for your website

Tone/content

You will have created and utilised a tone throughout your website copy and advertising creative. Your email marketing activities must also convey this tone to show the correlation between this campaign and your overall business. With email marketing there is the additional pressure of having to get an effective message across, quickly. Writing effective email marketing copy is a challenge. Here are the main pointers to remember:

An effective email marketing mail focuses on the following three core tenets.

·      The specific product, service or promotion

·      The benefit to the user

·      The action you require from the reader

The specific product, service or promotion

It sounds obvious but you must focus the mail on a specific product, service or promotion. A generic ‘hey, we’re here and we sell stuff’ message is a waste of your time and your customer’s. Decide on what you’re going to promote and tailor the design, layout and text to support this choice.

The benefit to the user

Just notifying the reader that you sell or provide something, is not enough. There needs to be a hook, to pique their interest and convince them they need your product or service. The benefit of course could simply be a very competitive price, if this is the case, ensure the imagery, and copy highlight this fact. A benefit can be seasonal, related to a festival or on the service side; relating to changes in the market, law, technological improvements etc. The benefit to the user should also reinforce why the reader should choose you…

The action you require from the reader

Make it easy for customers to do what you want them to do. If they need to click on a link or a button, make it obvious that it’s a link or button and design the page so that everything (text, image, train of thought) leads to that one goal.

If you require the reader to complete a form, keep the questions to a minimum and only capture what’s absolutely essential for them to continue – by definition of the fact you have emailed the customer, asking for their name or email address are redundant steps.

Posted at 10:39pm and tagged with: two column, start a new business, online business, marketing,.

April 2nd 2012

On… Going above and beyond to attract customers

Going above and beyond

You’re a new business and you have to impress potential and returning customers – giving away something for free may seem counter-productive but it can be super effective at ensuring future custom and causing a word-of-mouth stir. This is true for both product and service providers.

For product providers:

* give away something novel i.e. a free packet of sweets/candy bar with every order

* upgrade random customer’s delivery options – under promise over deliver

* include a voucher or code for a discount of future purchases.

* offer a reward for introducing a friend to your service

For service providers:

* A pdf guide or white paper on a topic of interest to potential clients available for download - if it’s branded, you’ll get the call… see http://www.aedgency.com/resources/guides/

*An invitation to all your clients to join you on a night out

* offer a reward for introducing another company to your service

* Run a fantasy football or similar league for your clients with an attractive prize for the winner

* create an award – i.e. if you are an accountant launch a competition via your website or create a micro-site for the best business plan – you’ll have a great chance to get media coverage, traffic and all those new businesses will need accounting services…

You can use one or all of these techniques at different times of the year – your aim always is to delight your customers.

Posted at 10:39pm and tagged with: Customer Service, online business, online reputation, start a business, two column,.

March 12th 2012

On… Effective data capture

Data Capture

Targeting can only happen if you have collected and correctly recorded/processed data. How and what to capture is a debate beyond the scope of this book and this very topic will have Customer Relationship Managers fighting to the death with Usability Managers. On one hand you want to capture as much as possible to accurately segment the database to improve targeting. On the flip side, if you ask too many questions, or you ask questions before you’ve built up trust and a relationship with a customer, they’re not going to answer completely or accurately, which devalues the process and the data…

What’s a girl to do? Well, at all times it’s essential that you put yourself in the shoes of the customer and make decisions based on the customer journey through your site. When you’re selling products online you want to make the process as straightforward as possible, and that means asking the minimum number of questions to allow quick progress through the order pipeline.

Effective data capture and targeting:

·      On a customer’s first visit or purchase ask as few questions as possible – you need to build trust first and show you can deliver on your core product or service

·      After a customer’s first purchase or after you have provided a service, follow up with a questionnaire asking the customer to rate aspects of the service. On this questionnaire you can add additional (optional) targeting questions – such as gender, age range, purchasing interests etc

·      People change email addresses – your database is full of defunct email addresses and continuing to send mails to these addresses is a waste of time and money. It will also negatively affect your statistics when you measure the effectiveness of campaigns. Cleanse your database of hard-bounces (email addresses that never arrived at the recipients inbox)

·      In the ‘My Account’ section on your website, empower users to alter their preferences and interest. By asking the customers which products or categories they are interested in, you will have the most accurate information available.

Posted at 10:49pm and tagged with: two column, start a business, data capture, online business,.

March 6th 2012

On… Online Forums and your small business

Someone somewhere is talking about what you sell. Chances are, there are communities of like-minded people all furiously typing out their views and opinions, asking questions, seeking clarifications and generally getting involved. Why aren’t you?

A quick search on Google, or in Yahoo! Groups, LinkinIn, Xing etc will give you an idea of both the quantity and size of existing groups that relate in some way to your business. Groups can be very local or totally international in scope. If you find that one doesn’t exist, it’s a 1 minute exercise to create your own group.

As with blogs, this isn’t a suitable media to ‘sell’ your business; you will receive a backlash from other users and probably banned from the discussion. You must offer other group members advice, help, and information. Of course you can include a link to your website in your profile (as standard on most discussion forums). This is subtle marketing, in which you and your business are introduced to potential customers through your interaction, your ability to solve problems and your willingness to help.

You can also add a forum to your own site, which can be an effective way to capture the traffic interested in your product or service. Bolt-on opens source solutions such as PHPBB are very easy to install and configure. If you operate a forum on your website expect good and bad comments and allow your own time or someone else’s to moderate the boards.

Posted at 9:42pm and tagged with: Forums, start a new business, marketing, online business,.