May 2010: Social Networks (Facebook, Twitter etc.) = 11.88% of UK internet visits

May 2010 Search Engines (Google, Bing etc.)= 11.33% of UK internet visits

You can see by the graph over the last 3 years there has been remarkable growth among social network sites.

Are You Where Your Customers Are?

If you run an ecommerce site, this data should interest you and make you think about whether you are putting your products where your customers are. The following video sums up how your potential customers are using the internet to research purchases:

There is no one single way that customers are using the internet to research and make purchases. From groups and friends recommendations on Facebook to review websites or Tweets your customers are all over the internet looking for information.

Quick List of Types of Sites To Consider Marketing To:

• Authoritative Blogs in Your Space
• Facebook Groups
• Review Websites
• Forums in Your Niche
• Using the Search functionality on Twitter for people talking about your brand
• Flickr Groups
• Linked In

The list could go on and on.

Are all of those good options for your business? No. Could some of those be great options for your business? Yes! We were saying it in February of 2009 and we are saying it now- there are many avenues open for your business. You don’t have to do them all. If you can do one or two really well it can have significant impact on your bottom line:

In a world that seems to be consumed by SEO, the real value of some good PR seems to be overlooked. Get your site featured on blogs, news sites, take out select ad space with news sites (often taking out advertising space will be more likely to get you featured editorially), and don’t forget about off-line promotion too. Try to build a good rapport with blogs or news sites in your marketplace as these people can be very powerful allies .

Don’t Forget the Power of Search:

Search marketing (targeting potential customers who use search engines to get product information) is one of the most powerful forms of marketing in our world today.

All other advertising is based off of common interests. You sell sporting goods and you advertise in a niche magazine that talks about football. Many football fans are interested in sporting goods so there is an affinity of interest there for your product. This is good and how advertising has worked for many years. The problem is the audience you are targeting may have no need or desire for your product.

Search marketing is different because you target people at the exact time they have expressed a need. If someone takes the effort to go their computer and search for “Black Youth Lonsdale boxing gloves” they are expressing an intent to purchase and by marketing to them through the search engines, your business is effectively raising your hand and saying “Yes, I can help you with that!”

So don’t forget about search marketing, but at the same time you should realize there are lots of other possible avenues from which to draw customers as well.

Where Search Marketing is Weak:

From a customer’s end, using search engines to find information is relying on a mechanical “recommendation engine” that they don’t know if they trust or not. You know the feeling. Sometimes you search for something and the first few pages are nothing but garbage with no real answers to your question. Sometimes on the other hand you strike gold and find exactly what you are looking for. But the inherent breakdown is that it is impersonal. It’s cold. It’s rigid.

Pop over to Facebook or a great forum that specializes in the area you are interested in, ask a question and get 7 answers from people you know, or are experts in the area, you ask a couple of follow up questions and then are ready to purchase. Its warm. Its relational. Its the way people have done business for years. People like doing business that way.

In fact, I recently got an email about a site that I own where the inquirer said,

“Hi, I am putting together a list of resources on {A certain city in a certain country} to give to friends who holiday in an apartment I own in that city. Do you have a presence on Facebook or Twitter that I can refer them to. You can’t trust anything you get in the search engines like Google, there is just so much noise?”

Personal connection. That is what that potential customer was looking for and looking to refer her friends to me if I offered it. But she didn’t want my phone number or email address (which she had), she wanted to connect with me on Facebook or Twitter. They are a little less personal, a little less direct, but they offer the possibility of direct connection with me in a social setting.

Action Points:

Think about where your potential customers are today. What are they doing? What problems are they facing? Where are they going for information? Who is influencing them? How can you connect with the influencers today? How can you raise your hand and say “I can help” when they ask a question or express a need?

Is Google or Bing part of that mix. Probably so.

Are there other points of connection that could be profitable for you and your business? Probably so as well.

Emergency Support

We will provide an emergency support service during the Christmas and New Year period. If you have an emergency issue you may email support@limesharp.net - this will log your issue into our support system which will be checked most days. You may also log non-critical support tickets but it is unlikely that they will be responded to until we return on January 4th.

We are offering emergency cover by phone for customers on SLA support contracts. Simply contact us on our main London office number which is 0845 5202 500 and your call will be routed to a member of staff on their mobile. Please note that this is for emergency use for customers on SLA support contracts only.

Hosting

Our Rackspace hosting environment is fully managed and monitored by Rackspace Engineers 24/7/365. In the unlikely event of hardware failure there is a 1 hour fix guarantee plus many components are redundant so even in the event of a failure your website would continue to operate. Thus hosting hardware is fully maintained and we will know automatically of any website fail and will resolve this promptly.

As a footnote, Magento also supports “Related Products” in addition to cross-sells and upsells. They are typically cross-sells however they can be positioned on the product page as opposed to the cart page. In most of our sites we omit this feature, as we feel you can sometimes go overboard with cross-selling which detracts from overall usability. However on some occasions cross-sells on a product page may be beneficial, or even preferential to having them on the cart page.

Featuring Dean Cain, the videos use acronyms to explain the benefits of IE8 such as F.O.M.S, which stands for ‘fear of missing something’ and is talking about IE8’s web-slices. With a tongue in cheek approach it is another attempt to show Microsoft the brand in a different light, appealing to a younger, hipper audience of which it could be said that Apple currently dominates.

In particular one of the video’s released highlights the new ‘private browsing’ feature of IE8 which temporarily stops your browser from recording your online activities. If you think that the ‘private browsing’ feature will only be used for one thing - then so do Microsoft, as the video is extremely honest about how the feature can and most likely will be used.

The video campaign is also tied in with the official IE8 website - Browser For The Better. For every copy of IE8 downloaded between August 8, Microsoft will donate eight meals to Feeding America, a domestic hunger-relief charity.

Have a look at two of the videos from the campaign below.

According to a survey carried out by American company Cone “93 percent of social media users believe a company should have a presence in social media, while an overwhelming 85 percent believe a company should not only be present but also interact with its consumers via social media. In fact, 56 percent of users feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.”

Whilst social media sites have been around for quite some time now, it’s only recently businesses have started to see what benefits they hold. Initially seen as a fad, social media sites are evolving and showing no signs of going away.  How can a business make good use of this though?

By combining these new ‘low cost’ media channels with your existing marketing you have what is an extremely effective and powerful way of communicating directly to your customers.

People are communicating online now more than ever and somewhere on the net your customers will be talking about your business, so providing a channel in which you can join in the conversation could prove invaluable. Give your customers a place where they can communicate with you and they will.

Online marketing gives you the chance to listen to your customers, build better customer relationships, promote your products and services and reach out to new customers. Used effectively the benefits are huge.

Facebook and Twitter can be used as fantastic free marketing tools to promote your company. Using these sites as a communication tool can give you instant feedback for your business, that if required can be acted upon almost immediately. Obviously there is a danger that if your customer service isn’t up to scratch then the feedback may not be what you are looking for. However this feedback may be what saves your business from not being here in 12 months time.

Which sites should you be using though? There are a lot of them out there and it can be a tad confusing.

Facebook

Facebook being arguably the biggest is a definite.  By simply setting up a group for your business you can then post regular updates, videos of your products and services, listen to customer feedback, and send newsletters for free to your entire group. You could effectively cut down on the costs of email newsletters you may be sending using other paid for services.

Forward thinking technology giants Apple have made great use of Facebook, creating a page informing their 1,343,978 ‘fan’s’ of a range of new topics from latest itunes releases to holidays offers. Importantly though they give their fans the option to ask questions and obtain answers relating to any Apple concerns.

Twitter

Twitter on the other hand gives you the option to release snippets of information about new products, services, exciting changes in your business or whatever you feel the need to inform your customers of.  It works best by releasing bite size chunks of information regularly, which could be an excellent way of marketing a teaser campaign for new product releases.

British Airways have adopted Twitter as a way to inform their customers of a range of different topics such as special deals, important information about Terminal 5 and from one twitter post just to wish everyone a happy St. Georges Day.  Having just adopted Twitter recently British Airways currently have 1696 followers. That’s 1696 customers they can market to costing them absolutely nothing at all.

Youtube

Youtube pretty much dominates the market online for video uploading and has undeniably had a massive impact in quite a short space of time. Acquiring a Youtube channel would give your business a platform to engage with your customers using video.

Myspace

At the other end of the spectrum there is Myspace. Possibly not a site that corporate companies would want to use, but for new and edgy, youthful businesses Myspace is a fantastic channel in which to promote your company to a large audience.

Limesharp are now offering a package to help your business fully embrace the world of social media.  If you would like more information about this please contact David Scott on 0191 645 0170

This is a staggering statistic - for as long as anyone can remember Internet Explorer has always dominated the browser market with a fairly hefty lead. While Internet Explorer as a browser on the whole (across all its versions) is still more popular than Firefox, these statistics show that the gap is narrowing quite dramatically. In Europe at least…

What does this mean? Well, it could mean that Eurpoean web consumers are becoming more web savvy, care more about security and speed and have simply opted to use a superior web browser. The knock on effect of this is much better support for web standards on the whole, making our lives as web desginers much easier. It also means less pressure to support hideously out-dated browsers such as Internet Explorer 6. I love it when a plan starts to come together!

If you haven’t already joined the revolution get involved at www.mozilla.com/firefox!

Delete Orders

As mentioned in a previous post, the fact you cannot delete orders in Magento is somewhat frustrating. However Boutik Circus have produced an excellent extension that allows you to quickly and easilly delete cancelled orders. Magic!

Fontis WYSIWYG Editor

Another subject we touched on in a previous post, the fact that Magento doesn’t come with a WYSIWYG editor as standard. This extension will allow you to use either TinyMCE or FCKeditor, however the image upload functionality will only work with FCK.

Textile Formatting

For those who are festidious when it comes to having clean code, this extension uses Textile formatting instead of a WYSIWYG editor. This is great if clients don’t need the ability to upload images – but if they do you’ll need to use FCKeditor.

Yoast MetaRobots

This handly little extension is great for refining your site for better search engine performance. It allows you to quickly add robots tags to prevent indexing of login pages, search results and other non-content pages. You can also add your own custom robots tags to CMS and product pages.

Gift Certificates / Virtual Cards

We haven’t had a chance to test this extension much, but it certainly looks impressive. It allows for customers to purchase and use gift certificates in your Magento store. A very extensive module that seems to be very popular in the community. We’d be keen to hear peoples experiences with this extension.

If you’ve found an essential Magento extension why not let us know by leaving a comment!

Magento Jnr is a set package designed to give you a high quality, very professional Magento website for just £2,995. This includes a beautiful front-end design (check out the screen shots below!), full setup and configuration of your store, hosting for 1 year, and telephone training. It also includes a few of our own bespoke features that are not included in the standard Magento download.

The Magento Jnr package is set to launch April 1st 2009 – but we are taking orders now. If you’d like to know more contact David Scott on 0191 645 0170 or at david.scott@limesharp.net.

A couple of sample designs from our Magento Jnr package - get in touch to find out more…

1. Your website needs to be updated DAILY

Weekly or monthly updates are not enough if you want your website to reach its full potential. Even if you don’t have new products to add on a daily basis, you need to find a way to keep things happening so that people have a reason to come back time and time again. What about a daily special offer? A blog? Editors picks? Clearance stock? Coming soon products? Pre-orders? Be creative – the more you update your website the more your customers will keep coming back. It’s also worth noting that a by-product of these daily updates will be increased search engine rank. Update daily, and the ecommerce gods will smile on you.

2. Send out regular newsletters

You want to be sending out a customer newsletter at least once a week. What if you don’t have anything new to advertise? Do a mail out on a special offer, coming soon products, or editor’s picks. Sending out a regular newsletter serves two purposes:

1. It gives you the chance to push special offers and new products, increasing your sales
2. It raises brand awareness so that customers don’t forget about your website

Also, invest in a good email marketing service and get a high quality, well branded email template designed.

3. Make life easy for your customers

I could talk for hours about user experience, usability and clarity – but the bottom line is this: make life easy for your customers! Understand why they are visiting your ecommerce website – to find and buy products – and make sure they don’t have to think too much in order to do this. The top ecommerce websites all have simple, consistent navigation and excellent customer account facilities (to make repeat ordering simple). You might think that flash animation with music is cool, but trust me; it will only annoy your visitors. Also, have a telephone number in clear view at all times so that if someone does get stuck, they can pick up the phone and speak to a real person.

4. Stay ahead of the competition

Your website should always be evolving, adopting new technologies and moving with the times. This could involve reworking your site slightly over time, or every now and again giving the whole thing a complete redesign. Factor in these costs as part of your overall business strategy – they should not be seen as an unnecessary, unwelcome cost, but as necessity to running your online business. And be proactive as opposed to being reactive. What I mean by that is don’t wait until you’re left behind to start thinking about keeping ahead. Always be on the lookout for fresh ideas and always strive to be the best in your marketplace.

5. Get someone in to manage your site full time

If you run your website as a “sideline” to your main business then the revenue it generates will always be a “sideline” to your main stream of revenue. Successful ecommerce sites have dedicated staff to run them, on a full time basis. A lot of smaller businesses expect their websites to be run by an existing member of staff, on top of their usual duties. Investing in a new member of staff to manage your web strategy on a full time basis may seem like a substantial cost but if they get it right, it won’t take long for you to see the return on investment.

6. Image is everything

It’s cliché, I know. But if you’re serious about reaping the rewards of the global ecommerce market (which is set to double in sales by 2012) then you need to look the part. A homemade site with a cheap logo probably isn’t going to cut it. If you’re currently running a homemade or low-cost ecommerce solution, now might be the time to invest in a professional solution. Remember, a professional web designer understands how your visitors interact with your website and can be a wealth of knowledge when it comes to growing your online business. Choose a web design company carefully, make sure they have the skills to deliver, have a proven track record, and give good honest, genuine advice.

7. PR, PR, and more PR…

Remember that full time member of staff you hired to manage your website? Well, part of their job needs to be PR. In a world that seems to be consumed by SEO, the real value of some good PR seems to be overlooked. Get your site featured on blogs, news sites, take out select ad space with news sites (often taking out advertising space will be more likely to get you featured editorially), and don’t forget about off-line promotion too. Try to build a good rapport with blogs or news sites in your marketplace as these people can be very powerful allies. Finally, get your staff member trained up on pay-per-click advertising – it can be a very effective tool when used correctly.

8. Web analytics are your friend

If you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your site, head over there and get it installed now. You should constantly be monitoring your stats, where your visitors are coming from, and tracking conversions on sales. If you examine these things in depth on a regular basis you will quickly get an idea of what works and what doesn’t. If most people are exiting your site on a particular page (say the cart page) then ask yourself why? If your average page views are down or your bounce rate is up, have a think about what could be behind this. Also be sure to note when you send out newsletters or update your site, as you will be able to tie this information into your analytics trends.

9. SEO is not the answer to everything

It’s amazing how many small businesses think that “tricking” a search engine into ranking them on page 1 is the only way to generate a lot of business. The truth is that if you are relying on SEO to bring in the bulk of your business you are in a very bad position indeed. What happens if Google decides to drop you for some reason? It is not as uncommon as you might think. Putting the fate of your business in the hands of the Google overlords isn’t a viable business strategy. Good quality SEO can be very effective, but don’t rely on it entirely. Also, the good news is that if you’re doing all of the other things discussed in this article, you’re probably well on your way to achieving a good search engine position naturally.

10. Make sure your customer service is second to none

All of the above points deal with having a good website and marketing strategy, but your customer service needs to back these things up. Make sure you get your orders posted out promptly, and that you deal with any complaints or issues quickly and cheerfully. We may live in a world of pay-per-click and SEO but word of mouth is still the most effective kind of advertising there is. As the saying goes, “a happy customer will tell their friends; an unhappy customer will tell anyone who will listen.” Wise words…