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Special Offers can be great hooks. They can entice a user to your site and convert them into a customer. But making a Special Offer into a successful campaign requires more thought than ever. In the past retailers would have been able to reduce old stock to half price and someone, somewhere would have likely bought it, but not any longer. In this economic climate everything is on sale, all of the time, which means you may even struggle to give old stock away.

You have got to get inventive with your Special Offers, Promotions and Sales. It is no good to promoting a BOGOF (Buy One Get One Free) offer when any normal person would only want a single item (i.e. 2 toasters for the price of 1) and although discounts can be effective you often have to slash the price to a point that there is little or no profit in a sale. Big discounts can work in the form of loss leaders, i.e. getting users to your site in the hope that they will buy additional items at full list price but there is no guarantee that the all important additional sales will materialise.

Discounting - not always successful.

A potentially effective Special Offer to help you sell off old stock would be to group items into a set. Take for example the ‘old stock’ toaster, if you combine this item with a Kettle you then you have a Breakfast Set. The discount you were going to apply to the Toaster (say 50%) can now be spread across the two items (lets suggest 25% off the set). This still gives you an attractive selling price for the set but more importantly you are essentially selling a full price item (i.e. the Kettle) every time you give away a Toaster. Additionally the new ‘Breakfast Set’ is far more marketable than an old Toaster and as such would attract more attention and inevitably be more appealing.

So don’t just stick up a ‘Half Price Sale’ banner on your website in January. Get inventive with your promotions and they in turn will be more successful.

www.AttractionBank.com

This month our post is less ‘hints and tips‘ and more ‘general news‘.

Over the last few months we have been building a working relationship with an Edinburgh based firm called Tribalogic, who provide high standard technical products and services for a range of online buisnesses.

We first worked together when we were contracted by TheEdinburghAddress.com to propose a marketing and promotional strategy.

Tribalogic had developed the very powerful directory engine within the website and also provided the booking engine to enable users to check availability and book online.

Within a month we were once again involved in the same project as we had both submitted proposals for VisitMidlothian.com (soon to be launched) and ultimately worked together throughout its development.

Subsequently we decided that as we make a good team we should develop a joint project and as such we are now thrilled to announce AttractionBank.com

Tribalogic has brought the data and their experience of directory engines to the website and we have undertaken a feasibility study and made a number design changes. In the forthcoming months we hope to build content in the form of events / news and to introduce an online booking engine for ‘Admissions’ and ‘Tours’. Whilst we intend to offer free attraction listings and event listings throughout the UK we hope to monitise the site by offering an enhanced listing which includes online booking facilities.

We are very excited to be working with Tribalogic and if you have any questions about either of our services or would like further information about AttractionBank.com please do not hesitate to contact us at mail@digitaldesignscotland.co.uk

Involve an individual from within your business.

When working with companies to develop their online profile we find that involving an enthusiastic individual from within the company leads to profiles achieving a far higher growth rate and are subsequently more successful.

Whilst we can post tweets, blogs and your facebook status on your behalf it is always the personal touch that will entice fans or followers. People are naturally hesitant about following businesses assuming that posts will either be marketing based or boring business facts. It is therefore essential for businesses who want to become a part of an online community that they come across with a friendly, helpful and fun persona and undoubtedly the best way to do this is to have someone (internal to the company) with these same attributes regularly (daily) post.

Mixing up the news, promotions and personal posts will ensure people pay more attention to your feeds. This helps develop a community, builds stronger customer relationships, helps to increases your level of customer service and is likely to encourage existing customers to recommend your business via their online networks and secure you further sales.

An additional benefit is that for potential customers your community will allow them to learn more about you before making a purchase – they can discuss your services with members of the community, view your feedback and see how you have resolved any issues which may have cropped up in previous transactions. They therefore feel reassured when making the first purchase as they no longer think of you as an anonymous business.

Essentially you want potential users to feel at ease when visiting your profile – don’t make people think of you as a hard faced business.

Social Networking

On May 1st 2009 we gave a presentation to a number of businesses at the Midlothian Chamber of Commerce. It was a 2 hour workshop that included a guest appearance from http://twitter.com/showerguys and concentrated on how to use Social Networking as a tool to promote your business. In this post I have included a truncated video version of the presentation (sorry if I speak a bit fast but I was keen to keep it within 1 hour – additionally please note that this is the first edit) , an audio version and the presentation notes. If you have any questions please leave a comment.

The Audio Mp3 File is available by clicking here.

And the presentation notes can be downloaded here.

Any third party videos used in this presentation have been purchased for this explicit use. Excluding third party videos all content is Copyrighted by Digital Design Scotland 2009.

A big Thank You must go out to Les and Paul (showerguys). Follow them on Twitter at http://twitter.com/showerguys or visit their website at http://www.theshowershop.org/

Success during the Credit Crunch

For business to be successful in this economic climate it is important that they increase their market share. To enable businesses that trade online to accomplish this they must first increase visitor numbers, then increase conversion rates and finally ensure that the service they provide is of such a standard that their customer retention rate is as high as possible.

Unfortunately these changes cannot be made overnight and generally they require the help of consultants such as ourselves. When we are approached to perform these services for a client we must first fully research their business, their products/services, consider the demographic of their existing customer base and gauge the success of their existing website. We will then prepare a report which will outline the changes we would implement to increase conversion rates and customer satisfaction and how we would promote the site to increase visitor numbers.

As these changes, or more importantly the results, can take weeks to materialise it is understandable that not all businesses wish to pay in full for these services upfront. It is therefore advantageous that one of our most productive methods of working is to spread the cost of our services over the period of our working relationship (although we are more than happy to provide one off services for an upfront payment). This is achieved by discounting the cost of any development and linking any revenue we may earn to the success of the website.

If you are interested in finding out more about the services we offer or our various payment options please feel free to contact us with any questions you may have – contact details found here.

After relocating at the end of 2008 we have started 2009 by joining our local Chamber of Commerce (http://www.melcc.org.uk/). The Chamber offers a large number of events focussing on networking and building business links.

It is something that is overlooked in the online business world but developing your offline network can help your online business considerably. Not only are face to face meetings with like minded business people a form of promotion but it is often these discussions which will inspire you to developing new ideas.

As online social networks are a great mass market promotional tool, offline networking is generally more cost effective, offers higher conversion rates and produces higher value sales.

Apple

Apps created for Facebook and alike has been a big growth area in a way to promote your business and your services. These apps often focus on entertainment and if you are very, very lucky have the potential to go viral.

Unfortunately however Facebook doesn’t appear to be the best platform for practical apps to make their mark. The practical apps would appear to making their home on the new generation of Smart Phones such as the Apple IPhone or Googles G1. The practical applications offer a range of services such as availability checkers for hotels and stock / price checkers for retailers. These apps can become an indispensable tool for users as they become more reliant on them. A good example is an Amazon application for Apple’s IPhone which compares a store price against the same item on Amazon. Just imagine how many additional sales this app has generated Amazon when people using the app have found the product for cheaper on Amazon.

Apps are certainly not required for all businesses but if information about products / services would be more accessible to your customers via a Smart Phone app it is worth considering having one developed.

If you are interested in finding out more information about having an Iphone app developed please get in touch.

Video Training

Producing websites that can be maintained by our clients means we also supply training. Training is generally provided during a site visit and video tutorials. The videos, which are constructed uniquely for each client, are concise and easy to follow. The advantage of using videos for training is that they contain an example of the process being taught and can be easily re-watched as way of a reminder. To ensure they are easy to follow we produce our videos so that a new employee would be able to learn how to maintain the website without any prior knowledge of the site or its construction. The videos are hosted along with the website so that they can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection.

Website Statistics

The more you know about your wesbite’s users the more succesful your website can become. It is therefore essential that you regulary check the stats in whichever analytics software you use (Google Analytics is a favourite as it comprehensive and free). By monitoring the habits of your users you can determine what content is the most popular, how your visitors have found your website and whether they are returning visitors. Obvioulsy with this information you can make informed decisions about where to advertise, which content you should develop and whether your site has that all important stickyness (i.e. is your content interesting enough to persuade users to keep coming back).

From our perspective having good data about a site and its visitors is invaluable. We were recently approached by the Midlothian Tourism Forum which is a group of businesses involved in Tourist Attractions, Accommodation Providers and Tour Operators in Midlothian. They had the foresight to install stats on the creation of the site which enables us to determine how users have found and interacted with the site in the past and lets us make informed desicions about how best to promote the site in the future.

Social Networking has been a buzz term for some time now and even the biggest technophobes will have heard of the large sites such as Facebook and My Space. Online Social Networking can be described as a community of people who post information about themselves and communicate with like minded individuals via a website – nothing too dissimilar than catching up with some friends in the pub.

Use Social Networking to stand out!

It is for this very reason that promoting your site via your, or others, Social Networks can be very successful. Imagine for example it was your anniversary and you were looking for a local restaurant to eat at; are you more likely to trust an advert that was dropped through your front door or are you more likely to trust a personal reccomendation of a friend – we hope you stated the latter. Well if we use the same principal on the web imagine having your site recommended on someone’s social network where they may have tens if not hundreds (possibly even thousands) of friends. And one final thing to consider – the conversion rate of a visitor to a customer when that visitor has received a recommendation is far, far higher than someone who found the site in a search listing or advertisement.