Shift in focus

Over the last year Digital Design Scotland has intentionally spent less time working on smaller site builds to concentrate on larger e-commerce projects. In these larger projects the business adopts the role of e-commerce consultants, offering advice about CMS's, stock systems, couriers and often finding themselves working in situ at a clients for the duration of the build.

Additionally the business is not always involved in undertaking the heavy coding but instead takes on the responsibility of sourcing the correct developers and managing the project accordingly. The success of this years projects are as much to do with Digital Design Scotland's experience in retail and business as it is to do with their technical abilities.

In conjunction with this shift in focus, Ross Knight, Digital Design Scotland's owner has launched an online retail store (www.squelchsquerch.co.uk), in partnership with Andy Baker. This store has obviously been developed as a viable independent business but at the same time will be used by Digital Design Scotland to illustrate the 'best practices' for an online store, whether it be the use of social media, photography, site structure or promotional activity.

With this being the case Digital Design Scotland's "preferred" project is now e-commerce related. Ideally the client would not just require a website build but be employing the services of Digital Design Scotland for the "all round" approach required to develop a successful online store.

Being cheap might cost you!

On occasion a client will ask us to use an existing hosting package or customise a pre purchased template. Generally this isn't a problem but not always... especially if the hosting package or template was a 'bargain'. Take for example a recent clients story, lets call him Joe Bloggs* ...

Joe was technically knowledgeable and prior to approaching us he had undergone some initial development work. He had set up an account with a well know CMS, applied a low cost template and populated the site with content. He asked us to assist him finish the project by customising the design of the template - a template which he was already committed to using.

He had made the correct choice for the CMS so on face value the job looked quick, simple and inexpensive. Unfortunately however when we opened up the hood we found that the template was poorly written making it time consuming to alter. Whilst we made the changes they took twice as long as they would have taken on a well written template. This additional time obviously negated any initial saving. If Joe had approached us prior to selecting a template we would have been able to direct him to a source of well made templates which could be easily customised or for the amount he finally spent we could have produced a high quality bespoke design optimised for performance.

Similarly, many previous clients have found their 'cheap' hosting packages are not installed with the server components required to provide the necessary functionality and as such have had to purchase a second hosting package to complete their project.

So the moral of the story is do your homework or ask the experts... and don't worry we don't charge for a little advice.

*We received the clients permission before recounting their story. The clients name has been changed to protect their identity :-) 

An Introduction to Email Marketing

Based in Midlothian, near Edinburgh we are regular attendees at both the Edinburgh Coffee Morning (#EDCM) and the East Lothian Coffee morning (#ELCM).

We were recently invited to give a presentation titled 'An Introduction to Email Marketing' to the East Lothian Coffee Morning at the Waterside Bistro, Haddington on the 19th August 2010. I would like thank Al Byrce and everyone else involved for organising these thoroughly enjoyable events. Below you can view the slides and incorporated notes used during the presentation (if you can't view the flash slideshow you can download a pdf version).

If you are interested in attending any future events just search twitter for the appropriate hash tag for further information.

The Value of a Customer

It is generally acknowledged that making a sale to an existing customer is more profitable than attracting and making a sale to a new customer. This is because new customers are often attracted to your products / services after seeing advertising (i.e. Yellow Pages, Offline / Online advertisement) and that a new customer is likely to take up more of your time (making enquiries, etc.) before making a purchase. Obviously it is important that businesses attract new customers but it is imperative that they don't overlook the value of existing customers. A few reasons why this is the case... 

• Assuming the existing customer is signed up to a businesses contact database it should be easy to entice them to make further purchases by sending cost effective email campaigns.
• Existing customers will have previously purchased from a businesses website. A large hurdle in making a website visitor a customer is giving them the confidence to trust a website. Existing customers should not only be confident about using a businesses website they should also have they ability to store details enabling the check out process to be quick and simple.
• Existing customers will have experienced a businesses customer service. A portion of any sale can be attributed to customer service. If a customer needs to return an item is it going to be painless? If they have questions regarding the product / services is the business going to be easily contactable? A new customer will have no knowledge of how good a businesses cutostomer service is, an existing customer should already be impressed.
• and there are many more experiences an existing customer will have had when originally making a purchase including prompt delivery times, the good value of the goods / services, the high quality of goods / services, etc.

Recently a number of clients gave me an example of the value they gave to capturing an existing customer contact details and I would like to share that example with you.

As you may or may not know I work with a number of tourist attractions and along with Tribalogic, an Edinburgh based software team, I provide a booking engine called 'Bookster Showtime'. This engine allows Attractions, Venues and Performers to easily sell tickets via their own website and any number of third party sites.

The booking engine works in a fairly standard manner in that the user who is purchasing a ticket pays a small 'booking fee' on top of the ticket price. The booking fee is not seen by the Attraction but is essentially the cost of using the software. Understandably most Attractions prefer not to reduce their online ticket prices to take account of the booking fee but instead see the ability of pre purchasing an admission ticket as a service worth paying a little extra for. This obviously means that a visitor not pre purchasing a ticket but turning up to an Attraction and buying a ticket directly will pay a little less. For an Attraction however this has a disadvantage. Visitors purchasing tickets directly very rarely leave contact details and as such the Attraction has no way of enticing that visitor back. As they have no email address they cannot inform them about any new merchandise they stock, about any upcoming events or about any Special Offers.

As such a number of Attractions have or are considering discounting their online ticket price to take account of the 'booking fee' in the hope that a larger percentage of visitors will start to pre purchase tickets online. Obviously pre purchased tickets have a number of advantages to Attractions but the main benefit is that an Attraction captures the visitors contact details and can therefore target them in any future marketing campaigns. So what discounts are the Attractions applying to ensure visitors buy tickets online and that they capture contact details? Generally it is 10% and with the average ticket price being £10 the value of the contact details to this set of attractions is approximately £1.00.

Get Inventive With Your Promotions

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.

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.