Websites

The Great Little Trading Company have had a fab campaign to persuade their clients to shop now for Christmas rather than leaving it any longer. I can’t say I’ve seen the comprehensive marketing that Stu describes with his eBuyer experience, but it’s a compelling sales promotion nonetheless.

You see the problem with sales is that the retail industry has taught us that the longer we wait, the better the deal. And whilst we love the instant gratification of walking home with armfuls of bags, and we persuade ourselves that we need to buy it now or it might be gone, this strategy isn’t helpful for business owners. You need people to buy now don’t you?

And letting people even remotely assume that if they wait, you’ll slash your prices further is bad news for margin, bad news for your conversion rates and bad news for business.

That’s why when I found this promo during a spot of Christmas shopping on Sunday I just had to share it with you. Isn’t it fab? Great Little Trading Company (GLTC) have been completely upfront about the fact that their best deals are available for people that take action now. Wait, and you won’t save as much money. I love the fact that they’re showing all the discounts – past, present and future. It really compels you to take action doesn’t it?

I know I’ll be looking forward to spotting opportunities to use this with our ecommerce clients – how about you? Could you use this in your business?

Postscript: The fallout from not following through

I’m really disappointed. I nipped over to the website to check the URL and look what I saw on the homepage!

I’m so gutted. Why did they do it? I did think twice about whether to reword the whole blog post in the light of this, but I do think it’s important that I share a) what worked so fabulously well and b) how you can undermine it so easily.

What I think is a real shame is that in the grand scheme of things, what difference does 2% really make? Are they going to lose clients tonight just because they are “only” offering 16% off? I really don’t think so. I honestly think the original banner would have trained the consumer to get in early next year (as well as sign up to the newsletter so that they could be the first to hear).

What do you think? Did they make a mistake in backtracking on the offer? I’d really love your thoughts on this one.

Tagged as , GLTC, Great Little Trading Company in Business Strategy, Marketing, Powerful Ecommerce, Websites

You may already be able to execute the perfect marketing strategy. You can send out your e-shots at the right time and get a fantastic open rate. You can come up with a clever way to get users to follow you on Twitter or ‘like’ your page on Facebook. But if your conversion point (where they move from being a prospective customer to a paying customer) doesn’t work then it’s all for nothing.

Say hello to ebuyer.com

Ebuyer.com are an online company that sell discounted computer hardware and little gadgets on a b2c and a b2b level. They’re good value and reliable (*note here for personal experience – other opinions may vary). I’ve used them time and time again for building computers and servers (some of our machines in the office are in fact made using components bought from them) and we’ve found that they have a very hard working marketing department. At least twice a week without fail I will receive promotional offers from them by e-mail.

The idea

So a few weeks ago they decided they would hold a £1 sale today (Monday 28th November 2011). Lots of clearance stock that they wish to shift – some good and some worthless – all going on sale at different intervals throughout the day. Brilliant idea. Bring in the potential customers and convert them into customers that will now be receiving the e-mail updates several times a week. Sell off some stock that they are finding difficult to sell at full price and in return gain some new faces.

So their marketing department have been hard at work over the last few weeks. They’ve sent out e-mails about this promotion. They created a Facebook campaign that allowed users who have ‘liked’ their Facebook page to access the offers half an hour before everybody else. It’s all looking to be a really brilliant campaign. However 10:30am comes and their site becomes inaccessible. Too many people are trying to access their website to pick up these great deals and their current set up cannot cope with the volume of traffic.

The fallout

The frustrated users that after pressing the F5/Reload key over and over again find that once they’ve finally managed to add an item to their basket and checkout (and even in some cases they’ve paid for their items) that the product that they wanted is now out of stock. Suddenly their incredible viral marketing is about to backfire on them. And it does.

All of the users that they’ve managed to get to ‘like’ their Facebook page are now constantly updating it with bad reviews and poor comments about the company. Rival firms are managing to get in and link back to their websites for users having difficulties. Prospective and current customers lost (though who knows for how long).

We’ve all seen these problems before. Many people had trouble accessing the Olympic Games booking site and if you’ve ever tried booking tickets for popular concerts then you’ll also know the frustration at seeing “This page cannot be displayed” in your browser.

So what should they do better next time?

Well I could personally go into a lot of technical waffle about balanced loads, failovers etc. and I could also talk about how they should have separated their deals website from their main website (there have been a lot of comments on the Facebook page about customers not even wishing to get a £1 deal becoming frustrated at their inability to buy normal-priced products so have gone elsewhere).

However the essence of what they needed to do was make certain that all parts of the campaign were doing their role. The marketing department obviously managed to do their job brilliantly. But the technical and service departments are now not keeping to their end of the bargain. The technical department cannot keep their website online and the customer service department aren’t responding to (we’d all assume inundated with) customer queries and complaints.

Have you had experience of these situations either as a customer or a business owner? How have the issues been resolved? Or do you have best practices that you adhere to to avoid such problems? Let us know below.

Tagged as in Online Marketing, Websites

Do you run a January sale? If you don’t, do you think you should be?

We as consumers often see January sales as a way of retailers clearing stock. If you run a business that doesn’t hold stock – be it a craft business where you make everything to order or a service based business where you sell your time, then it’s easy to dismiss sales as not being for you. But is it worth looking at them from a different angle?

Sales are just as much about stimulating demand as they are clearing stock.

And when you think about it like that, it sounds a whole lot more attractive doesn’t it! If your business is quiet in January, rather than sitting about moping about it, should you be doing something about it? A sale could be just the thing, with one caveat, it needs to be planned and executed well.

Discounting can look desperate and damage your brand. It can also affect your pricing strategy in the long term, so I would only ever do it with caution. But it really can work.

A poorly planned sale also looks weak. 10% off everything isn’t a sale – it just looks desperate. You need to give people a compelling reason to buy, and a blanket discount just won’t cut it. If you sell product, consider slicing between 25% and 70% off various groups of products rather than applying a global discount to everything. Again, this gives people a more compelling reason to buy.

Last year Clare Yarwood-White ran a sale that started on Christmas eve – her sales increased by 600% compared to the previous year, and it didn’t cannibalise her figures for the rest of the month. printing.com have run a January sale since around 2003 and it works wonders for stimulating demand (although it certainly affects margin for the month). I’ve yet to see a serviced based business pull this off, but I wonder – can it be done? Should it be done? What do you think?

Tagged as in Business Strategy, Marketing, Online Marketing, Powerful Ecommerce

You don’t need to be an ecommerce expert to know that related products helps you sell more stuff online. Amazon are often hailed as the trailblazers for related products, at least, the customers who come in and brief us on their ecommerce websites always ask for ‘the “Customers who bought this also liked…” like Amazon [...]

Tagged as , powerful ecommerce in Online Marketing, Powerful Ecommerce

We’re currently doing some really fun work with Harvey Maria working on their customer experience. When we wireframed the website we mapped out the basics, and we’re now working on the sampling and order experience with the team. Working on this sort of thing gets me really excited because it gives companies the chance to [...]

Tagged as , ecommerce basics in Powerful Ecommerce, Websites

There seems to be a school of thought amongst many online retailers that price and search engine optimisation are king, and everything else is unimportant. Now whilst I’m not going to argue with the fact that price and being found for what you sell are crucial, many ecommerce businesses fail to place customer experience at [...]

Tagged as in Online Marketing, Powerful Ecommerce, Websites

Rarely does a week go by when someone doesn’t ask me the question “How on earth do you find the time to blog?”. I too, have been the victim of the “I don’t know how she does it” type comments. Small children, business, baking etc – where does blogging fit into my time? I know [...]

Tagged as in Blogging

DR Solicitors are a niche law firm that specialise in law for the medical profession. I love DR Solicitors’ approach to business: flexible, expert and incredibly professional. Their new website really communicates their status as one of the leading niche law firms and certainly seems to be paying off in terms of attracting new business [...]

Tagged as in Web Design, Websites

Angela Marshall is an author and one of the country’s leading image consultants. I’ve known her for years since I met her networking when I first started my business, and I was delighted when Angela invited to give her blog an image makeover. Angela works with large corporates: often financial institutions and professional services, and [...]

Tagged as , angela marshall, appearance management, blog design in Blogging, Case Studies, From The Studio

Yehey! It’s been quite a week in the studio for getting websites live. Stuart has a number of quite chunky ecommerce sites to finish off this week and next but he certainly hasn’t been twiddling his thumbs recently! I have a whole host of delicious websites and blogs to share with you over the next [...]

Tagged as in Web Design, Websites