know your business niche, give good service – ebusiness tips

Know your business niche and give good service are two tips from Melissa Norfolk, the author of the Australian and New Zealand edition of Starting an Online Business for Dummies.

More tips from Melissa and information about her book are here.

fast web pages, happy customers

Some pages on retail shopping sites take almost 10 seconds to open, according to a new Nielsen Online study of major shopping sites. Woah, that’s way too slow … g0odbye customers!

Don’t be like Noel Leeming, which in the study came  in slowest at a time of 9.57 seconds. Make sure your site’s pages open fast before you scare off visitors.

One way to do this is to have keep data-heavy information on the page to a minimum. That means, for example, ensure all your photos are optimised to good web sizes and stay away from too much animated Flash content.

Also consider, if many of your clients are overseas, basing your website on a web server in the country where most of your clients are, or have specific sites for each country. It’s cheap and easy to have your site hosted with an overseas web host, And the closer the site is to its customers, the faster the site’s pages will open for those customers – keeping them happier and more active on the site.

Nielsen Online general manager Ivan Fuyala was reported saying that the accessibility and viability of a website is a key business success metric.

“If consumers can’t reach you quickly online, it won’t take long before they start looking to competitors instead.”

feeling the love with Windows 7

Following on from our post last month about the effectiveness of giving away stuff online, here’s a piece about the benefits Microsoft is reaping from giving away copies of its latest operating system Windows 7, one year in advance of its official release.

Microsoft’s current operation system Vista has had screeds of negative press and relatively poor sales. As a result, Microsoft has pushed forward the release of Windows 7 and made it publicly available so that people can play with it and give feedback on its performance.

The move has met with widespread public acclaim and has also pulled Microsoft into the 21st century as far as online business models go.

twitter – what is it good for

Yesterday, we pointed you towards an article about a company using Twitter to improve customer relations.  Here’s another good one that explains the big picture behind the Twitter service.

twitter in the real world

Twitter – the microblog service where each post can only be a max of 140 characters – is getting hugely popular, even though many people are still working out just how to benefit from it. This article shows some real world Twitter uses that are getting good results for the U.S company involved.

organic vs inorganic website growth – go green!

Organic website growth basically means your growth in visitor numbers has been achieved largely for free, and largely through word-of-mouth (one of the key aims of social media marketing). Inorganic growth refers mainly to advertising to pull customers to your website.

It’s not hard to see which one might be preferable.

Having people come to your site because they feel compelled to rather than because they have been persuaded to by (often expensive) advertising can only be a good thing.

Not knocking advertising, though, and it should be considered at least, especially when you are starting a business and looking to alert people to your presence. It’s just that if people tell other people who tell other people that your website is a goodie and worthwhile visiting, the brand value is immense.

Here’s a good real life comparison of two New Zealand online businesses – one of which (online bike store Torpedo7) has become hugely successful largely through organic means and one (Ferrit – owned by Telecom) which puts heavy resources into inorganic growth.

UPDATE: Telecom announced today (12/01/09) that the three-year-old Ferrit site is to close. I hope it was not this post that caused its demise!

make a ‘performance’ of your online activities

Turning round a previous post here to highlight some good info …

Some US web researchers (Rubicon) argue that online discussion is a poor way to communicate with the average customer, because average customers don’t participate. But it is a great way to communicate to them, because average customers watch and listen.

So you kind of have to put on an online performance to attract and hold their attention.

What do they mean? Well … if you have lots of comments or customer feedback to your site, they reckon proportionately few people actually create them – 80 percent  of content is created by 10 percent of users.

Therefore most content and discussion sites should be viewed as performances, in which the site’s organisers interact with that 10 percent of active users to “educate, persuade, or entertain everyone else”.

The active 10 percent is the group that holds all the power and influence over how your business is perceived online.

“This means it is critical that companies understand who [they] are, and how to take care of them, because they are the companies’ fellow actors in the online performance. … Use your website to reach out to them and make sure their needs are met,” Rubicon says.

“When we say web communities are theatre, we mean that literally — you need to partner with the [actors] and make sure the show looks good. The difference from theatre is that you can’t pay the actors; you have to win them over through love, enthusiasm, and fairness.”

Need to know more?  Read the report! It’s packed with clearly written, easy-to-read information and lots of great graphs highlighting stuff.

word of mouth and online reviews the big online sales drivers

Online comments and reviews posted by enthusiasts are second only to word-of-mouth as a purchase driver for web users, according to a recent study (PDF document) by US consulting group Rubicon.

Those personal reviews are far more influential than official reviews posted by a website or magazine, or information posted online by a manufacturer, Rubicon says.

Those are trends that many online businesses already understand, but here’s something new (to me) from Rubicon that really opened my eyes to successful online marketing:

• Many millions of people read online comments and reviews but proportionately few people actually contribute to them (80% of content created by 10% of users), therefore …
• it is important that online businesses realise that most “content and discussion sites should be viewed as performances, in which the site’s organisers interact with that relatively small number of contributing users in order to educate, persuade, or entertain everyone else.”

Sort of turns the whole build-a-community meme on its head a bit, doesn’t it. Let the show begin!

stay in touch with customers: on- and off-line

In this interview, a US marketing guy reckons 30% to 40% of lost customers could be retained if more attention was paid to them.

And … businesses need systems to help them stay in touch with customers, he says. Staying in touch should be a relationship building exercise as much as a sales exercise. Email newsletters are one way to say in touch. CRM software can help you remember detailed information about your customers.

how to relate to your customers

Relate, don’t preach, to your customers is the message behind this spot-on and very funny video.