Cartoon Shorelines Art Big companies and Web sites Most small business owners find some aspect of running their business frustrating. Unlike our bigger counterparts we cannot call on the IT department when the computer refuses to do what we want it do or spam is threatening to jam up the e mail box. Other frustrations come from trying to get the message of the advantages of buying from our business to our target market. How many of us do not update our web site regularly because we are either too busy or we are lost for inspiration and the technical abilities to make the changes we would really like to make. The Marketer this month has an article written by David Murphy about the lost opportunities of big companies on the web. Pulling no punches he quotes Margaret Manning of the digital agency The Reading Room who cites Habitat website as ‘a great example of a terrible site. It looks beautiful but is totally useless. It’s all in Flash so a lot of the world can’t see it. You can e mail a friend with a photograph of a chair, but you can’t actually buy the chair, so what’s the point of the pretty picture?’ One of the main reasons that the bigger companies are not delivering on the web is a failure to understand how people search and buy on the Internet. Some companies for example use web sites as venues for TV style advertisements assuming that web site visitors watch web sites as passively as they would a TV advertisement. But this of course is not how it works. Web site visitors have a notoriously short attention span, usually scanning pages and if they do not find what they are looking for or something of interest within a few seconds they are gone. So take encouragement from this. Whatever frustrations small business owners have with their web sites they have a distinct advantage over bigger companies. Internet marketing is a fast moving business and small businesses have the ability to react more quickly and to implement change more quickly than bigger companies. Whatever the size of your business you must have a web site that engages site visitors very quickly. To achieve this home pages should have either an eye catching (original) graphic or image, a call to action, compelling text or a special offer. Source The Marketer Back to the top Customer Service Martin Waller in The Times is not happy with the level of customer service in the UK and more than that he bemoans our inability to complain about it. He suggests three reasons for this. The first is that people in the UK see serving anyone as degrading, secondly consumers in the UK demand such low prices for products that retailers have no incentive to train staff to provide better customer service and thirdly consumers in the UK generally would rather buy new products than have to deal with retail staff when those products are faulty. He cites John Lewis and Waitrose as two retailers who in a recent survey of customer satisfaction across all sectors do provide excellent customer service at a price. John Lewis and Waitrose are both owned by the John Lewis partnership. Source The Times online Back to the Top Web site News Following on from the discussion in lasts months Summit of the change to downloadable programmes rather than software that you load onto your computer, Google have launched another downloadable tool. Notebook is very useful if you spend a lot of time on the Internet researching your competition or researching new products and services. Once you are registered with Google notebook like calendar is free. You can have as many notebooks as you like and its great advantage is the ease with which you can save information, particularly web site addresses. In other words rather than continually inputting web addresses if you have your favourite site addresses in notebook the easy hyperlink facility allows you to access your favourite web sites easily. Are the ‘techies’ blinding you with science? Yes – then check out our simple Internet and web site definitions. Anything you would like us to add? The simply e mail ann@summitup.co.uk and we will add in a simple easy to understand definition. Looking for inspiration and business help check our business and marketing book information Worried about the time it takes for your web site pages to load? Take comfort from research in the Marketer that found even large companies struggle to trade of the balance between loading time and content. Back to the top Retailer Response time in seconds Tesco 0.25 Boots 0.7 Comet 1.3 M & S 2.4 Amazon 3.0 Curry's 3.9 B & Q 5.3
source The Marketer Organic food and drink successes Organic food and drink is seen in all supermarkets now. In the year to March 2006 sales in the UK increased to 17% to £930 million. The supermarkets are all actively promoting the sale of organic food and drink and the variety they offer is on the increase. Marks and Spencer’s now sell organic ready made meals and Waitrose offers 1700 organic product lines. The numbers of Soil Associated certified producers has increased to 4,185 in November 2006. However there is one problem with all this good news, there is a supply shortage, particularly of dairy and meat produce. As a result the supermarkets are increasingly importing organic food and drink with supplies of milk arriving from Denmark and Holland. Asda has even taken out an advertisement in the Farmers weekly asking local producers of fruit and vegetable producers to get in touch. Source The Grocer Back to the Top And finally................................. Estate Agents Traditionally estate agents fees for house sales are based on a percentage of the house sale price. As a result estate agent fees have increased with ever increasing house prices and new estate agent offices are springing up everywhere with even small towns having up to six different agents. This could be about to change with Tesco who have now entered the property sales market. The supermarket chain have launched a new website where any householder can 'market' their property for a flat fee of £200. This follows on from Asda who entered the property sales market earlier this year, the difference being that Asda charge a 1% fee. Estate agents are not happy with the move from Tesco and have warned of the dangers of buying and selling a property without a middle man to negotiate with vendors and solicitors. source The Times Back to the Top If you enjoyed reading this newsletter please E mail it to a friend Return toTop of Page | 