Kevin 121

SAAS – Software as a service is not enough

kdjones121 — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:42:00 +0000

Several months ago I considered what I would need to set up a new business with the minimum hassle and staff. SAAS seemed to make sense for e-commerce but in my view was only part of the picture. There is a plethora of excellent e-commerce service providers that offer a vast array of useful features that appear to very scaleable. My ideal was to get everything on an ‘as a service’ basis. The 2 key elements that were not easily available but struck me as excellent ideas were a ‘virtual warehouse service’ and ‘accounts as a service. I guess you know what I stumbled across yesterday? Xero and Shipwire appear to deliver neat affordable solutions to both.

Xero offers an online accounting software as a service. Unlimited users, Unlimited transactions, No setup fees, upgrade fees or contracts all for £19 per month seems too good to be true when I think how much an accounting function costs a business.

http://www.xero.com/features/

Shipwire lets you grow your business by storing, packing and shipping your goods worldwide from a range of facilities. Store, Sell and Ship with a scaleable service. Select the space you need to store things, how many packages per month and the range of product codes you need and you are ready to start. They even offer a free trial. Looks worthwhile.

http://www.shipwire.com/pp/o.php?id=3881

With both of these I thought they might be too good to be true or expensive. Both are promoted by PayPal which seems like a pretty good endorsement and look to be extremely cost effective.

e-commerce on a shoestring

kdjones121 — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:29:03 +0000

The basics of marketing apply to e-commerce as well as the basics of business.

1   Think about what your customer may want from your ‘shop’ and how they would like to get it.
2   Is e-commerce likely to work for your enterprise?
3   Test and experiment so you can get your first mistakes out of the way.
4   Try E-bay and Amazon as routes to market and to see how it should be done.
5   Use a hosted service that does e-commerce, stock control, billing and marketing.
6   Ensure you control and create your content. A blog may be free but might be invaluable
7   Understand exactly how you will get paid and what the fees are. PayPal is great but remember they take a slice of the whole order including VAT
8   Think and learn about web-marketing as it is one of the most cost effective marketing tools available. The main cost is your time and the results can be measured easily.
9   It’s not about traffic and clicks but it is about customers and profit.
10   Automate as much as possible. Order acknowledgment, sending invoices, credits and after sales service.
11   Once you have a customer, what can you do to keep them buying from you or an affilliate?
12   Develop a dialogue as a trusted supplier with your customers – listen and do what you say you will – always!
13   Concentrate on the core business and your relationship with your customers
14   If you are going to grow very fast then consider outsourcing non core activities early

Email marketing basics

kdjones121 — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:45:53 +0000

The holy grail of email marketing are ‘opt in’ email contacts but you must give a clear way to opt out when you email them. So wherever possible engage in a dialogue and get consent to email again.

1.   Start with the result you want and focus on it. What is it you want? but more importantly what’s in it for the recipient of your email?
2.   What is the call to action and does it support the objective of the email?
3.   Subject line or heading will get the right attention or the delete button.
4.   Check your email works! Check a whole range of different email readers and get every possible part of the email tested and then do it again just in case.
5.   Focus the message to the recipient. If possible make it personal but always make it relevant. The temptation to send or ‘blast’ the same message to all is cheap and tempting but the results will not be as good as a specific, personal and relevant message.
6.   ‘Deliver your email successfully’ may seem obvious but there are many services that get blocked without you knowing so be sure you use a reputable broadcast service. Don’t be tempted just to BCC because it’s cheap. That’s the message your customers will get – you’re cheap and don’t value them or their time.
7.   Testing is easy and important. So think; test, wait, refine and then test again.
8.   Links can be tracked so use links and track them so you can see what your customers are looking at. Analyse, think, refine and then try again.
9.   Don’t freak people out by contacting them immediately saying ‘hey – you just looked at my email. What do you want to buy?’ Engage in a dialogue if possible by asking questions or route people effectively to be able to buy. Try sending a follow up email some hours later or a specific special offer that’s relevant.

Return on Investment (ROI) Marketing Calculator

kdjones121 — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:15:02 +0000

If you can establish the value of a new customer to your business then it is quite straightforward to decide how much to invest in attracting a new customer. In many cases the answer is to simply spend less on winning the new business than it costs. It may be more prudent to consider the profitability of the first few orders rather than just the first one. When considering ROI on marketing then the breakeven point (BEP) is a useful point to establish, as you at least know you are ahead from a cost point of view.

The long term view of ROI is based around lifetime value (LTV) and 3 years is probably as far as you need to go with that.

The key elements for the calculator are based around your existing customer profile. You need to know how many customers in total or you have for a particular segment of business. You need to know the average profit per order or margin per order and the average number of orders a customer will place each year. If you are undertaking a specific program for customer acquisition then you should consider what sort of attrition you will get over the period and ensure you have excellent customer support so more customers will stay with you. It is important to keep investing in your customers with service and marketing and it will cost you less to keep them than it did to win them in the first place.

If you would like an excel template then please drop me an email kevin@kevindjones.co.uk and I will send it to you.

Can you grow your business by 33%

kdjones121 — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:41:18 +0000

I was chatting to a client about her business and she asked about simple and effective growth strategies. It reminded me of one of the easy and cost effective ways to grow your business. Focus on a few of the obvious things that work. With an existing customer base that buys regularly and a decent range of products and/or services you can drive your business up by 33% and just carry on doing what you do, with a few minor changes in focus.

How many Customers (C) do you have? How many times each year do they place orders (O) with you? How much is your average gross profit (G) per order? With these 3 factors and your annual profit or targetted profit you can check you have the right baseline.

100 Customers x 3 Orders per year x £100 GP per order = £30,000

Three simple questions to ask yourself:-

How can you get more customers and keep the ones you have?
What can you do to get some more business from them each year?
What can be done to increase your average GP per order?

If you increase each by 10% the results are worthwhile.

110 Customers x 3.3 orders per year x £110 GP per order = £39930

An increase of 33%!

Obviously this is too simplistic and doesn’t reflect the real world we work in.

However if you introduced a newsletter and ran a referral or find a friend program then you would communicate your values and business better to your existing clients or customers. And just by asking then you may well get introduced to more clients that are similar to the ones you have already.

Next just ask your customers what else they would like or need from you. You may have complementary products already and you may think your customers know about them. Ideally you have a range of products and services that your customers know about and need. If not then maybe think about that too.

This is the ‘Would you like fries’ question. It’s worth £millions a day for Macdonalds, so is well proven. When someone is buying they are more likely to buy more if you ask or suggest something at the point of sale. If you do it every time you will see a change.

In this particular case the £9930 increase would not cost much and would show a very attractive return on investment but that’s a different subject.

If you would like to try this and would like a reassuring chat then drop me an email at kevin@kevindjones.co.uk and I will try and help.

Web 1.0 v Web 2.0

kdjones121 — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:39:45 +0000

Web 1.0 is ideal for finding structured and well managed information where you can conduct a simple transaction. Whereas Web 2.0 is potentially chaotic but is dymamic, interactive, personal and in an odd way a bit more like us.

I read an excellent comparison from Susan Rice Lincoln that describes Web 2.0 as like the world’s biggest Cafe with Web 1.0 being the worlds biggest Library. From a communication standpoint Web 2.0 is more of a Dialogue with Web 1.0 being Monologue. We prefer to interact with people rather than be talked at by business. So how will business get personal in a way that will engage with people who are customers? Business’s are staffed by people but most don’t behave in a personal way which engages with the needs of customers.

Marketing Strategy or Sales forecasts & Budgets

kdjones121 — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:49:16 +0000

“The good thing about not having a marketing strategy is that failure comes as a complete surprise and is not preceded by a long period of worry and depression.” This wry observation was made by John Perton of Boston College and prompted the consideration as to how many business’s only have sales forecast and budgets? Would these business’s be surprised when they fail as their customers abandon them for a competitor that takes the time to develop products and services that meet their needs?

Cross Media

kdjones121 — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:22:00 +0000

Direct Marketing has changed dramatically over the last few years with the personalised letter being upgraded to variable data printing, then to CRM with segmented marketing and now into cross media, dynamic, interactive Dialogue marketing. This uses mail, email, web and SMS communication. The bit that ties it all together is a personalised URL (pURL) or personalised landing page (PLP). EG www.yourwebsite.co.uk/kevinjones

Why?
More Responses
Case studies have consistently shown that a larger proportion of people respond to a campaign featuring a PLP than equivalent campaigns without a PLP.

See what happens
You can view and analyse data about who visited their PLP, when, how many times, and which pages they visited. This is all valuable information to generate leads that you can follow up. With a typical campaign, you only get to know about those interested enough to contact you. A significantly larger percentage of people will have been interested enough to visit your web site, but not quite convinced enough to make a purchase. These are very warm leads, and with the tracking software that comes with PLP’s you can identify them and follow them up.

Then ‘Trigger’ something
Triggers are routines to systematically and reliably create an action to move the Dialogue to the next step towards the result you need.

Maritime Business Centre – Portland

kdjones121 — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:08:17 +0000

We will submit plans for the MBC to Weymouth and Portland for outline planning next week.

MBC is a new development of 18 small business units of between 70 sq m and 800 sq m and is part of the much larger Ospray Quay Development scheme. Located at the gateway to the Isle of Portland adjascent to the Weymouth and Portland National Sailing Academy (WPNSA) the UK’s world class sailing academy. Sunseeker are well established with 11 ½ acres available to build their range of superyachts and Dean and Reddyhoff have already opened their 720 berth Portland Marina. This is a prime location for any marine based business.

New RS boat pictures

kdjones121 — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:26:17 +0000

It’s an obvious gap in their range as well as the overall market for a single-handed asymmetric.

It looks very tasty and appears to have a Vareo bow and a bit of a winged RS300 at the stern. It looked very poised and balanced with easy acceleration. It looked as though it would be quite hard to capsize too with the wings giving more leverage to stop you going over as well as buoyancy to slow things down in a crisis. The cockpit was spacious and all the bits of string seemed to be well organised. The seating position looked very comfortable.

I overheard Nick Peters commenting ‘how can we have got it so right first time, its so light and balanced.’ Mike Lennon from Hyde looked pleased but I doubt if he will give up his foiling moth. I tried to join the queue for a test ride but had to collect the children from Nursery!

Not a bad day at all, I was only packing my RS Vareo ready for the weekend at Stokes Bay.