Online Business Blog

Imagine you enter a shop, the logo looks like it was designed by a child, there are sheets of paper stuck on the walls with hand written text on them. The tiles are all misaligned on the floor. The walls are painted in bright contrasting colours which almost hurt your eyes. The display units are huge, but the products are tiny. None of the products have clear labels or prices. You look for a shop assistant but can’t find any. After a few minutes you give up and leave.

No business owner would ever want to have a shop like that one, and no client would bother wasting time in that store. However, when it comes to the online store/website it is often forgotten that we are dealing with the same person and the same issues.

Some excellent businesses have terrible websites. Badly designed, disorganised, difficult to navigate and just not user friendly at all. The Stanford Web Credibility Project found that 47% of users make buying decisions based upon the site itself. This implies that if the site looks professional and has good graphic design it can heavily influence sales. So much so that nearly half your customers can make a buying decision without having to shop around, or doing off-site research.

This seems extremely obvious in the physical store example explained above, but for some reason it is often disregarded when creating a website. Whilst in a physical store you may have up to a few minutes, on the web you only have 10 seconds to make an impression.

10 Seconds

In the first 10 seconds of arriving at your site many users will have already made a decision in their minds. In this time visitors gather a large range of impressions: company quality and size, product range, product offering and price. They either connect and feel they are in the right place or leave.

Website owners need to look at their websites objectively and ask this type of questions:

• Does my site look attractive and professional?
• Does my website properly reflect what we do?
• Would a complete stranger know how we can help them within 10 seconds of visiting our site?
• What is the overall message my site is sending?
• Do I have clear calls to action?
• Is it easy for someone to find what they are looking for?
• Is my contact information obvious?

In my experience I have seen some incredibly convincing results that good graphic design can positively increase sales. One particular ecommerce site is our best example of this:

The site was consistently selling around 6000USD per month before we took it on.

Without any further advertising or increases in traffic, but just by applying a totally revised look the site sales shot up to 10,000USD per month instantly.

The second redesign of the site, after extensive user testing has again increased sales to 13 – 15,000USD per month.

Don’t forget that your website can say a lot for your business. Make sure your site is saying the right things.

Just before Christmas I realised how effective a long term nurture email newsletter can be.

Last year I purchased some really good photo calendars from Apple, using Iphoto. Whilst doing so I looked around at a few websites to compare pricing, I registered for an offer on a site called Photobox.

This began the continuous and automatic process of sending me regular emails with offers and discounts every 2 weeks. Whilst sometimes they were annoying, often they prompted me to take action, but as I had already bought these calendars and they last a whole year I really didn't need to buy anything else.

So Christmas came round again, I had been receiving these emails for almost a year without making a single purchase. What did I do?
I ordered the new set of calendars from Photobox, they were in mind, they had given me offers, they were my friends...

I also recommended them to some close friends, before even seeing how good they were at their job.

There are many photo printing companies out there, and probably a lot of them are better/cheaper than Photobox, but Photobox had built a relationship with me, and their brand now occupied a space in my mind.

They bothered to keep in touch with me even though I had never spent a penny. Photobox have overcome the number one marketing problem facing small businesses – Follow up.

In surveys of many small business owners and entrepreneurs it was evident that following up with warm leads was the biggest frustration.

The natural thing a business owner does is focus on the immediate sales (hot leads), normally putting aside the nurturing process and therefore allowing leads to go somewhere else.

80% of people who are looking to buy something will do so within the next 2 years.

This means that if someone visits your website or calls your business it is very likely that they buy your product/service, only it may take a lot longer than you would like. It is a difficult and time consuming job to continuously contact these warm leads for 2 years, and very few people can afford to do this manually.

That is where email marketing comes in. Photobox and many other companies have learned the secret powers of email marketing. By setting up well planned, useful emails that get sent automatically to these warm leads continuously and indefinitely you turn a complicated process into an incredibly simple and powerful solution.

Now if these automated emails are customized and sent to specific people (eg. Those who have expressed an interest in a specific product) then the power of these emails is multiplied.

I bought a calendar from Photobox and now I receive offers for related products, that are actually quite enticing. Every time I see one of these emails I am reminded of the power of Email marketing, and how frustrated some of Photobox’s competitors must be. They won my business and my recommendation without me even knowing if they were any good!

Now a question for you - is your business keeping contact with people continuously until they absolutely don't want to know anymore?

Do you have automated systems in place to keep contact and send offers to people that you have never actually met?

Is your website working as hard as it should be?

If not, you may be one of the many website owners that lose out to the competitor who is constantly building a relationship and confidence with their warm leads. Remember the prospect is actually a customer in disguise.

Names are very important, some people believe that you are defined by your name. There are plently of books which explain the meaning of each name and a lot of parents use these books before naming their children ( I know we did). With a business it is very common to use your own name or something to do with Gibraltar. That can be good but can also mean you get lost in a large array of businesses with similar names. Here are some tips to help you select your business name.

1. Keep it simple.If you company name is too hard to spell, or difficult to pronounce or remember you are making things difficult for yourself. At the beginning it is best to have a simple name that people can remember.

2. Describe what you do.Your name or at least part of it should describe what you do, an easy test is to tell someone the name and ask them if they know what the company does. As in all marketing keeping things simple and clear is the best way. 

3. Choose the right tone.Is your company very corporate and serious? Or youthful and fun? The name should help to set the tone of the work that you do, this helps the right people to identify with the company.

4. Don't limit yourself too much. Although describing what you do in your name is good, it can also limit what you offer in the future, try and choose something that is descriptive but quite open for future business expansion.

5. Sleep on it. Once you have decided a name, sleep on it and look at it freshly the next day. This is a great test for any creative ideas. Having a good rest will help you to look at it from a more neutral point of view.

6. Add something memorable. If your business tone allows you to, you should try to add something a little different. In our case we chose Piranha Designs. Piranha is not something common and is quite unusual, people remember it. The Designs part describes what we do without limiting us to one particular area of design. 

7. Be careful about using your own name. It can be very good to use your own name for the business but you need to try and think long term. Maybe you want to sell the business in the future, or things don't go so well and your name is always associated with the company. It is best to be very sure before connecting yourself in such a powerful way.

There are always exceptions to these rules, that still work incredibly well. Google, Yahoo etc are perfect examples of this. These are just some thoughts and suggestions for smaller businesses, that have proven to be useful. If you have any other ideas or things to add to this list, please let me know, or add a comment below.