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Acknowledgements
This e-book may seem familiar to you, since it distills the basic wisdom
previously published in issues of Web Marketing Today, freshened up for
mid-2002. The first three steps also appeared in slightly altered form in my
book Planning Your Internet Marketing Strategy: A Doctor Ebiz Guide
(Wiley, 2002).
Table of Contents
Introduction............................................................................................... 6
Step 1. Define a Unique E-Business Niche.................................................8
Thriving in a Tiny Niche .............................................................................................8
Differentiating Niches from Blocks...........................................................................11
The Elusive Holy Grail of the "Ideal" Product ......................................................... 12
Unfilled Niches ......................................................................................................... 12
Poorly Filled Niches.................................................................................................. 12
Camcordia.com ......................................................................................................... 13
Partly Filled Niches................................................................................................... 14
Creating New Niches ................................................................................................ 15
Brick-and-Mortar vs. Internet Niches...................................................................... 15
Finding and Filling Your Niche ................................................................................ 16
Step 2: Devise an Adequate Revenue Plan ...............................................17
Traditional vs. E-Businesses .....................................................................................17
Advertising Revenue................................................................................................. 18
Referral Revenue ......................................................................................................20
Sales Revenue ........................................................................................................... 22
Multiple sources of revenue ..................................................................................... 23
Step 3. Naming Your Online Business..................................................... 24
1. Develop a clear, simple statement describing your online business.................... 24
2. List all the words that relate to your business idea.............................................. 25
3. Brainstorm business name word combinations................................................... 25
Good Names, Bad Names .........................................................................................26
4. Check domain name availability ..........................................................................28
5. Check trademark availability................................................................................28
6. Purchase relevant domain name(s)......................................................................29
7. Apply for a trademark...........................................................................................30
Naming Resources for Your Online Business .......................................................... 31
Step 4. Assess Your Needs and Resources............................................... 32
Establish Phased Objectives ..................................................................................... 32
Consider Your People Resources.............................................................................. 33
Examine Your Bartering Resources ......................................................................... 34
Inventory Your Equipment Resources ..................................................................... 34
Assess Your Financial Resources ............................................................................. 35
Plan to Reinvest in Your Business............................................................................ 35
Introduction
shoe·string n. 1. shoelace. 2. a small sum of money; capital inadequate or barely adequate to the
needs of a transaction.
boot·strap n. a looped strap sewed at the side or rear top of a boot to help in pulling it on. vt. to
promote or develop by initiative and effort with little or no assistance.
This e-book isn't for the get-rich-quick dreamers who are always looking for
the next magic bullet. They'll always be disappointed and disappoint others.
This is for serious individuals and small companies who are willing to learn
rapidly, teach themselves new skills, master new disciplines, and do all it
takes to become successful.
The first and crucial step to success requires finding your niche in
cyberspace. We'll start there.
But when you look more closely at the Wall, you see the
crevices between these giant blocks. In the first two tiers of stone they are
filled with papers inscribed with the prayers of the faithful. But above them
the crevices are alive. Plants, rooted deeply in the cracks between the
stones, abound far above the heads of the worshippers and add character
and life to the Wall.
When you move from the sacred to the secular, the Wall has a lesson for us.
If your company doesn't have the mammoth clout of a Fortune 500
corporation, then you must find a niche between the immense players and
adapt yourself to thrive there. The English word "niche" rhymes with
"ditch" (though is pronounced NEESH by some). It comes from a French
word that means, "to nest." And that's what small companies can learn to
do very successfully, filling small voids left by the big players.
How can small businesses thrive if the niches seem pretty narrow indeed?
You can purchase kitchen knives at Safeway and KMart, at Macy's and a
restaurant supply outlet, as well as a gourmet cooking store. But a shop that
specializes in kitchen cutlery? It would take a major metropolitan area of
one or two million people to support such a store, and still it might struggle.
But so long as you can deliver your goods or services across distances, on
the Internet your marketplace is the nation, and, if you have the vision for
it, the world. As of March 2002 estimates were about 1/2 billion Internet
users world wide. Look at the sheer millions of users that constitute your
market. English-speaking countries are in boldface:
After nearly eight years of intimate involvement with the Internet, I am still
awed by its vast potential. To succeed you must be able to see the Internet's
hugeness as a market, and at the same time comprehend that even the
narrowest kind of business can find enough customers to thrive. The "wall"
is so big that the niches between the huge corporate blocks are quite
adequate to support a lively small business marketplace.
The phone rang and the caller wanted to set up an online store. "I want to
sell something on the Internet," he told me.
I can see him competing head-to-head with Amazon, Barnes and Noble,
Borders, Good Guys, and Best Buy. With his puny resources, he doesn't
stand a chance against the big players. None. Nada. Zip.
I've been asked a dozen times, "What would it cost to build a book store just
like Amazon.com?" I grind my teeth. With all the opportunities begging to
be explored, why would you want to challenge the top dog? I answer that
question by saying, "It would cost you the millions and millions of dollars
Amazon spent to build its store." Look instead to the niches.
I'm sometimes asked, "What is the best product to sell on the Web?" The
answer is pretty straightforward; here are the characteristics:
If you can score with majority of those parameters you probably have a
winning product or service. But, frankly, few fit. Don't let your mind
wander aimlessly looking for the perfect product.
A better way is to look to yourself or to your company. What are you good
at? What do you enjoy? On what subject are you considered the "local
world's authority"? What are you strong in? What do you have to offer that
is fairly unique? How can you leverage your present strengths? Instead of
fantasizing about the "perfect," take what you know and let it empower your
vision to clearly see the niches out there.
Unfilled Niches
These days it's hard to find a niche that nobody is filling, but occasionally I
run across one. The classic path to success is "Find a need and fill it." So
look to the customers you know best. What are they asking for? What would
they like? What keeps them from fully realizing their own success? Since
you're an "expert," you may have some key insights. You may be able to
develop a new or improved product, service, or business process that,
coupled with the Internet, can make a big difference. It's your interest and
training that give you the vision to see these opportunities. Look closely at
the niches.
While unfilled niches are rare on the Internet, poorly filled niches are
exceedingly common. I have come to expect so much from the Internet that
I'm often frustrated by what is NOT available online.
A while ago I was in the market for a camcorder. I knew practically nothing
about them -- and I found that the average salesperson at my local stores
didn't know much either. I had lots of unanswered questions. I needed
information, opinions from people who really knew something about the
trade-offs between one recording format and another. But I couldn't find
what I was looking for.
There have to be other people like me. What kind of site would make this
selection an easier task? One site was very good, but called on me to make
decisions about which I didn't have enough knowledge. Nor did it provide
expert opinion or consumer feedback on questions of format pros and cons,
answers to my stupid questions, etc. Another site had a camcorder buying
guide, but no individual comments except at the product level. And nothing
offered a chart that showed the differences between the models available
from a single manufacturer. I was also ready to buy an extra battery pack
and a carrying bag, as well as a supply of recording tape, but none of these
sites made it easy. Some camcorder sites were only departments in a larger
consumer electronics enterprise with little focus on this niche.
Camcordia.com
• Buying Guides
• FAQs
• Honest reviews of each manufacturer's product line contrasted with
other manufacturers' offerings
• Easy comparisons within a manufacturer's product line
• Live chat that allows shoppers to ask questions from a knowledgeable
person 8 to 10 hours per day
• Competitive prices, if not the very lowest
• Carrying all major manufacturers' products
• Inventory of best sellers, drop-ship arrangements for less common
requests
• Shipping at a variety of speeds and costs
• A no-quibble guarantee
• Links to the "help" pages on manufacturers' websites
• Addresses, phone numbers, and URLs of repair stations
• A full line of accessories
And I'm sure once I got immersed in the process of building, I'd find more
to do. We could call it camcordia.com or camcording.net or cambug.com.
(These names were available when I first wrote this, but have since been
taken.)
Of course, you could build a "good" camcorder store fairly easily. But not an
excellent one. Excellence takes high standards, sacrifice, great effort, and a
drive to achieve the best you can possibly do. If the project isn't worth doing
with excellence, my friends, it probably isn't worth even beginning. Life is
too short.
It would probably take six months of work and several thousand dollars to
get it fully ready, and a year or two to get it functioning at full potential. Is it
possible? Of course! Would it succeed? I have no doubt! Am I going to build
it? No. This one needs someone who lives and breathes camcorders. But
camcorders is a poorly filled niche just begging to be filled with excellence.
I've often toyed with the idea of setting up a firm that helps small
businesses market their websites. One that considers each company's needs
carefully and recommends a marketing plan tailored to each company's
needs and budget. One that offers exceptional value and a personal touch.
One that doesn't rest until the customer's need has been fully addressed.
Aren't there plenty of firms that specialize in online marketing already? Yes,
indeed. But I believe I could make one succeed, since there are hundreds of
thousands of small business website entrepreneurs out there, and only ten
or twenty thousand marketing companies, many of which aren't being very
effective at all with small businesses. Many excellent businesses exist, but
there is still a tremendous need. Do I plan to do this? No, but it could be
done quite profitably. This is a partly filled niche longing to be filled more
completely.
We haven't nearly exhausted the subject of niches yet. How about creating a
new niche where one didn't exist before? I love what JustBalls.com did
when they began several years ago. They didn't pump themselves up to
think they could tackle the whole sporting goods sector. They weren't a Big
5 or a FogDog. So they sliced sporting goods in a brand new way that it had
never been sliced before -- balls only. They didn't sell bats or first-
baseman's mitts. They sold balls. Baseballs, basketballs, footballs, golf balls.
If there was a sports ball of any kind, they would carry it. Now they offer
laser-engraved sports balls for gifts and presentations. They succeeded
because they created a brand new niche, found a catchy, memorable name,
developed a customer-centered approach, and opened their doors.
(www.justballs.com)
Several years ago, Jeff Greene called me for help setting up an online store.
Jeff is the longtime owner of The Office Market, an office and art supply
store in Conway, New Hampshire, an area of about 20,000 people in the
White Mountains. This was before OfficeDepot.com, OfficeMax.com, and
Staples.com had developed a strong presence online. He asked me if he
should sell both office supplies and art supplies. I pointed him toward the
niche market and away from the mass market, and he has since done well
with Discount Art Supplies (www.discountart.com) offering a full line of top
brand, high quality brushes, paints, and other supplies. If Jeff had tried to
put his whole office supply inventory online, the e-business would have lost
focus and he wouldn't have been able to carry a full enough line to compete
with the big companies (though in his local region The Office Market is the
leader). By putting all his energy into the art supply part of his business, he
has succeeded admirably on the Web and can compete with others in this
field.
Determine what aspect of your current business is best for the Internet and
put that online; don't load your website with generic products and services
that diffuse your focus.
The promise of the huge Internet market is there for you, too. While it is
intensely competitive, the size and lack of geographical barriers is especially
suited to small business people who are blessed with niche vision and a
dose of creativity and determination. Look closely, now -- not at the
massive blocks but at the niches between them -- and find a niche with your
name on it.
my advertising and lead generation was done online. But it also had strong
similarities to a traditional service business.
I'm sure there are some revenue types that don't quite fall under the Big
Three, but let's look at each and see their upsides and downsides as sources
of revenue for your business.
Advertising Revenue
Advertising revenue looks pretty good at first glance. You put banner ads on
your webpages and advertisers pay for the privilege. What could be
sweeter? Unfortunately, few commercial websites are able to earn much
money from advertising, especially banner advertising. Here's why.
Advertising revenue is realistic mainly on sites that are both:
But ad prices have plummeted since the glory days of the dot-com boom. If
you can sell them, banner ads are going for $1 to $10 CPM (cost per
thousand page views). E-zine ads command a larger price, but they've
dropped in cost, too.
The revenue projection above assumes (1) that you sell out your advertising
completely each month, and (2) that your costs to sell the advertising allow
you to earn a profit. With millions of websites there is often unsold
inventory available, especially on untargeted sites. To sell advertising you'll
need to develop (1) your own in-house sales force, (2) outsource sales to a
representative who'll expect 20% to 50% of the gross ad sales, or (3) sell
your inventory to an ad network.
1. Advertising dollars are being spent more carefully since the dot-com
meltdown in April 2000.
2. Sites that carry advertising are getting much more aggressive about
selling ads.
3. The increase in sites means that inventory (total advertising space
available) exceeds paid advertising, and actual sales prices are in
decline.
4. Media buyers find it easier to deal with a few large ad networks than
dozens of smaller sites.
Referral Revenue
Affiliate Programs are one of the most popular types of referral programs.
Typically, the siteowner (affiliate) signs an agreement with a merchant, or a
third party affiliate service bureau, such as Commission Junction. If
someone makes a purchase as a result of clicking on a link at the affiliate
site, the affiliate will receive a sales commission of 3% to 15%, and
sometimes more.
It sounds like a pretty easy way to make money. No work, just add a link or
a banner and wait for the dollars to roll in. I've belonged to dozens of
affiliate programs over the last several years and have learned this:
For several years I devoted the right side of each page of my website to Web
marketing and e-commerce books, many of which I had reviewed. Each was
linked to the appropriate product page at Amazon.com. If someone made a
purchase of a book I was directly linked to, I earned 15% of the purchase
price. If they browsed around and found another book, I would make 5% of
the purchase price. Here was the report for a quarter in 2000:
But quarterly checks in the last year are only about a third of that.
I share this to point out how much a site with 650,000 page views a month
can make on an affiliate program directly related to the content of the site.
I've had good success with Ken Evoy's Make Your Site Sell
(sales.sitesell.com/myss) and WebPosition Gold software
(www.wilsonweb.com/go/to.cgi?l=wpg), and, to a lesser degree, Cory
Rudl's Insider Secrets course. http://www.marketingtips.com/t.cgi/15267/
Sales Revenue
This leaves us with sales revenue for goods or services that you sell or re-
sell directly.
The more automated the service, the more "productized" it becomes, and
you move from selling time to selling a product. The more person-time
invested in performing the service, the closer it is to a regular "job." Now
don't get me wrong, even though you are selling a time-intensive service
over the Internet, you can certainly gather more business through
marketing it nationally and internationally.
Products. Hard and soft goods can be bought and sold via the Internet in
online stores as well as on eBay, in B2B marketplaces, and through e-
procurement systems in an increasing number of industries. For more than
two decades the US has had a thriving mail-order industry. In a sense, an
online store is just an automated catalog. But while the Internet automates
the front-end ordering process, the make-or-break decisions of the business
often rely on the efficiency and costs of back-end product fulfillment and
customer service. Drop-shipping is a way of outsourcing inventory,
warehousing, and product fulfillment, but it cuts margins and makes it
more difficult to offer excellent customer service.
Selling products and services means that you must deal with real
customers, some of whom will phone or e-mail you angrily and demand
that their concerns be heard. None of this is easy. But I believe that for
many siteowners, selling or re-selling goods and services is the primary way
to make the Internet positively affect your bottom line. The ins and outs of
selling products and services will be the main thrust of the remainder of
this e-book.
Even better than just one of these approaches is to find ways to incorporate
two or even all three sources of revenue in creative and innovative ways.
The site that can include advertising revenue, referral revenue, and sales
revenue is best positioned to leverage its Internet investments in a way that
will produce profits. When you're starting an e-business on a shoestring,
make sure that you've designed a realistic plan to bring in the
revenue you'll need to continue.
Don't get this backwards. I've met a few business fools who own some nifty
domain names and want to start a business to fit the names. Wrong.
Without a niche and a sound business idea, you don't have a chance of
success -- even with a good domain name. You're much better off to sell
unneeded domain names to someone who can use them (or someone
foolish enough hold them for ransom).
The name should evolve naturally from your niche. As I was reading Dan
Janal's e-book Branding on the Internet, I came across a wonderfully
simple positioning exercise which Janal calls his Fool Proof Positioning
Statement. It is an extremely useful fill-in-the-blank approach. First, you
need to decide what to put in the blanks:
While the first sentence helps you state the benefit clearly, the second
sentence helps you differentiate yourself from competitors.
This may seem simplistic, but take a couple of minutes right now to see the
power of it for your own online company. You might want to stress different
key benefits to different core audiences, but this will give you a start. Keep
working on your two or three sentences until they are clear and compelling.
Next, list all the words that relate to your business idea, its category,
products, services, core audiences, and key differentiating factors. The
longer this list, the better you are at loosening up your brain so you can
come up with a business name that is striking and memorable.
The chances are that domain names of each of these keywords has already
been taken -- by themselves. But now you take the list of words from Step 2
and begin to form two-word combinations. Ideally, you'll come up with a
business name that propels you to stand out from the crowd. While you're
not quite at the stage of selecting a domain name yet, the characteristics of
a good domain name that I outlined in my article "How to Select a Domain
1. Short
2. Memorable
3. Not easily confused with others
4. Hard to misspell
5. Relates to your core business
6. Sounds solid to your target audience
Hopefully, you'll find some word combinations that fit many or most of
these criteria. Run them past some other people to see how they react.
I'm a bit mystified at companies that name their products or business with
words that don't have any meaning in their target language. At the risk of
offending, let's look at the name Hewlett Packard selected for a major spin-
off company -- Agilent Technologies (www.agilent.com).
JesusWalk®. The words indicate the goal, to help individuals learn about
Jesus from simulating the kind of training that his twelve disciples
internalized by just walking along with him. The name is memorable,
descriptive, and simple (www.jesuswalk.com).
Remember, your online business name may be different from the name of
your traditional brick and mortar business. You may need to file with your
local government a Fictitious Business Name Statement for a new business
name -- but that's usually not too expensive. Don't be blocked by a poor
existing business name; take advantage of going online to brand your
business well.
Only when you have developed a number of possible company (or product)
names should you begin the domain name search. The reason is this: so
many good domain names are taken already that you might be influenced
to only use what is left over. A good place to check your domain name
possibilities is the Whois database at 000domains.com.
(www.wilsonweb.com/go/to.cgi?l=000domains) or VeriSign
(www.netsol.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois). Beyond the .com, .net, and .org
domain names, also consider the newer .biz, .info, and .us designations. For
countries other than the United States, consult a domain name registrar in
your country (www.norid.no/domenenavnbaser/domreg.html).
Check all of your top name choices and minor variations of them. Note
which domain names are available as a .com (or with your country
designation, such as .fr or .de). Also note which have already been
purchased. These days there are many more domain names than there are
active websites. In many cases, over-eager domain speculators have bought
up blocks of names and are having a difficult time unloading them at the
level of prices for which they were hoping.
Just because there isn't a corresponding domain name doesn't mean that
your business name isn't being used by others who have a prior claim on it.
A trademark is a graphic logo or a unique name that is used in trade to
identify a business, product, or service. In general, the first company to use
a name in trade owns it. Make sure you check the trademark database for
your country -- it's probably online. Make sure you search your own
country first for similar names, then other countries where you want to
avoid confusion. Some online databases are:
Canada
(strategis.ic.gc.ca/cgi-bin/sc_consu/trade-marks/search_e.pl)
UK (www.patent.gov.uk/tm/dbase)
Australia (www.ipaustralia.gov.au/trademarks/T_srch.htm)
Sincerely,
John Doe
Sheetrock screws par excellence!
This way you don't sound too eager, but willing to deal; additionally, the
domain name owner knows you have other options so he can't push the
price up too high. Venture capital funding initially drove up domain name
prices and fed greed among speculators. But VC money has pretty well
dried up for start-ups, and there are many, many domain names waiting for
the right business. My guess is that if you were to get your hoped-for
domain name appraised for a modest fee, you could use that as leverage to
purchase a pretty good name for your business. You also should consider
having others appraise your domain name picks at Afternic.com
If you plan to use a trademark, you should place the letters "TM" in
superscript next to the trade name to indicate your intention to use it as a
trademark. The letters "SM" indicate "service mark," though the usage
often blurs with that of the word "trademark." To protect your right to use a
particular business name, you ought to register the trademark with the
official government agency in your country, and other countries where you
expect to do much business. In the US this can cost $500 to $1,000
(including search and attorney fees) and take a year or two to be completed.
If you are successful and your trademark is registered, you are entitled to
use the ® symbol to indicate registration of your trademark.
Many online businesses have learned the hard way that it's
cheaper to register the trademark up front than to wait until
another company files for registration ahead of you. If you
can't afford the filing and legal costs, I understand, but make
this one of your early priorities as soon as some revenue is
generated if it looks like your business has commercial
potential. Just because you own a domain name doesn't
automatically mean you own the corresponding trademark. Since your
business is likely to be national or international on the Internet, you can't
afford to ignore the legal threats you may face to your unique business
name. More information is available on my website
(www.wilsonweb.com/cat/cat.cfm?page=1&subcat=mm_Law). If you're
interested in US trademark law, you might read the book Trademark:
Legal Care for your Business and Product Name (Nolo Press,
2001), by Kate McGrath and Stephen Elias or look at these authors'
Trademark Registration Kit (Quick & Legal Series; Nolo Press, 1999).
I hope this will help you see the process involved in naming your online
business. As one who has made some serious marketing mistakes here, I
hope that my advice will save you some headaches. Remember, the main
costs of naming your business are:
Even if you're trying to name your business on a shoestring, make sure you
don't scrimp where it counts.
NameBoy. A creative tool that helps you combine words to come up with
interesting, and often humorous, domain name combinations
(www.nameboy.com).
Your phased plan may look entirely different. The point is to make sure you
don't try to do everything at once, but that you have a plan to develop the
essentials of your site and marketing plan.
You'll want to prepare a rough budget for each phase, but make a detailed
list of the items you'll need in Phase 1, and the amount it will cost you to
reach your Phase 1 objectives before you can expect any revenue. With this
sort of plan you can hope for some revenue in Phase 2 to fund Phase 3. And
enough in Phase 3 to fund Phase 4, etc.
Of all your business resources, people are most important because they will
form the team you need to succeed. For some of you, the main people
resource may be you -- especially if you are multi-talented. If not, you'll
need to find others who can help you. Perhaps it's you and your spouse, a
true "Mom and Pop" store. Don't laugh. There have been many, many
successful mom and pop stores and businesses. The partnership begun with
marriage now extends to a venture to help earn a living. Since it is,
hopefully, a stable relationship, it will provide stability for your business as
well.
Some will join forces with a friend or two or three. Since there may be little
or no money involved, you might be tempted to make the relationship very
informal. I recommend that you write out clearly, agree upon, and sign a
memo of understanding that details: (1) the responsibilities of each person
involved, (2) what investment each brings to the task, (3) how profits will
be shared after expenses are paid, and (4) what happens when a person
leaves the business. How much, if anything, does a partner take with him?
When you get a little money, you'll want to formalize this with the help of
an attorney. Many small businesses fail because the partners don't have a
clear agreement. Clear written agreements form the basis of good business
relationships. You can find a lot of help at the Inc.com website
(www.inc.com) and Nolo Press books on small business (www.nolo.com).
Make a list of the equipment and services you need for your online
business. By definition, you'll need a computer, a web server ... and the list
continues. I suggest a list of Phase 1 "must have" items, with less vital items
planned for later. Then determine the costs of your Phase 1 list. Consider
purchasing used equipment, borrowing a scanner from your brother-in-law
until you can purchase your own, swapping for services, and bartering. The
nice thing about an online business is that you don't need to impress
anyone's ego but your own, so your office can be pretty basic for now.
Consider starting in space you already have, such as a garage, basement, or
extra bedroom. Hewlett-Packard was famously begun in a garage in Palo
Alto. Follow a legend. As the business grows you'll be able to -- and may be
forced to -- move the business to its own space.
Consider your financial resources now in comparison with your needs. You
have tremendous advantages not seeking venture capital or large bank
loans. Realize that credit card purchases that aren't paid off every month
are very expensive bank loans. Instead look to savings and to part-time jobs
that can provide for a basic investment. Consider pooling financial
resources with friends, partners, or co-founders of your company, but make
sure you are crystal clear in writing about the arrangements. Consider
relatives -- your great aunt Samantha who has always liked you. Perhaps
she'll loan you some of the money you need and feel very good about
helping you. But I encourage you strongly: don't mortgage your home in
order to finance your bootstrap business. New businesses are risky, even
when they're well planned. Only invest what you can afford to lose if the
business's success doesn't meet your expectations.
Finally, plan to take at least some of your early profits and reinvest them in
the business, especially in marketing, since marketing provides the
lifeblood of your business via new customers.
As you consider your absolute start-up needs and assess your resources --
especially your hidden ones -- you may well find that you're not that far
away from beginning your business.
Building Trust
When my daughter was young she would bring home a drawing or painting
she had done at school and we would make a big fuss over it. It would hang
in a place of honor in the kitchen and finally be gently laid to rest in a folder
to be looked at later. Were these painting really good? Well, they were good
for a seven-year-old, especially a seven-year-old who is our daughter. But
are they really good on some objective standard when compared with
artists older and more experienced? Of course not.
The danger of doing it yourself is that you may think your work is really,
really good. You're wild about what you can do with this software. It's so
easy! While in fact, as websites go, it is pretty shoddy and filled with
problems. Only you don't have enough taste or humility to know the
difference.
will feel intuitively that this is a well-run business. The website will convey
many hidden messages that evoke trust. And trust is absolutely necessary
for the success of your online business.
Navigation Systems
I have built literally hundreds of websites. What I've learned along the way
is that you can create maintenance nightmares for yourself unless you
design the site in a modular fashion. When I began, I would construct
template pages and then insert my content into them. But the only way to
change the design of the whole website would be to do a "global search-and-
replace" on all the pages. Inevitably, I would have made tiny changes in
certain pages and they wouldn't update properly. The result was a humble-
jumble headache. To fix it I would have to take my new template and
manually insert every webpage into it again, one-by-one through the entire
website.
The problem is that the average storeowner just doesn't have the experience
to build this kind of system. It looks deceivingly simple, but there are little
SSI gremlins that like to taunt you. Insist that your website designer builds
your site with SSIs (or "include" statements, as FrontPage 2000 calls
them). The time you save in maintenance will be very substantial. You can
learn more about SSIs in Craig McFetridge's SSI Tutorial
(www.carleton.ca/~dmcfet/html/ssi.html).
book such as Elizabeth Castro's HTML 4 for the World Wide Web Visual
Quickstart Guide (4th edition, Peachpit Press, 2000) or Nolan Hester's
FrontPage 2002 For Windows: Visual Quickstart Guide (Peachpit Press,
2001). Using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) tool such as
FrontPage 2000 makes maintaining your webpages rather easy.
In far too many cases a designer will produce a great website, but it
becomes obsolete and non-functional because the siteowner or his 17-year-
old son didn't bother to learn to maintain the site. In-house maintenance is
a must.
Many website designers would like to do your website hosting for you, as
this creates an additional income for them. However, if you need to move to
another server, it can sometimes be very sticky. I would encourage you to
specify a nationally known web hosting service, such as Lexiconn Internet
Services (www.lexiconn.com) or Interland.com (www.interland.com). Make
sure you get some basic instructions on how to upload and download files
using FTP, and get the password to your website before making the final
payment. Also insist that your name is listed as both the administrative and
billing contact for your domain name, and that your company -- not your
website designer's company -- is listed as the owner of the domain.
Yes, it is possible to build a website without a designer, but make sure you
know what you are giving up when you do so. Trust from your customers is
paramount. If your shoestring operation means your website looks too
pitiful to trust, then you've cut a corner that will keep you from succeeding.
My advice: find a website designer to build your initial small business
website and then plan on doing your own website maintenance after that.
But smaller companies just can't afford the money it takes to establish a
national brand. Instead of relying upon an established reputation, they are
required to build trust and confidence from the moment customers land on
their site. Big companies have their brands, but small companies have the
advantage of a personal face and a personal character -- and connecting
personally can be a very powerful sales motivator indeed!
In a sense, you are what makes your small business different from all the
rest. You are your own brand.
If you hesitate to display a photo of yourself, perhaps you can show a group
photo of your staff or sales team. Professional photos taken for this purpose
can project the personal service you show your customers. They put faces
behind the names. And people connect with people. Give people the choice
of doing business with a cheerful, competent person rather than a faceless
corporation, and they'll choose the person every time.
Wells Fargo talks about "your personal banker," Wal-Mart features its own
employees in national TV ads, and MicroWarehouse.com's "brand" includes
a picture of one of its phone order-takers.
But don't stop with photos of yourself and your staff. Instead of animated
letters and blue buttons, provide centers of human interest on your front
page. Find photos of happy people who are part of the demographic target
group you've determined are your best customers. To see how this is done,
take a look at Wal-Mart (www.walmart.com). You can secure royalty-free
people shots for your website from Getty Images for about $40 each -- a
small price to pay for attractive models and excellent photography
(creative.gettyimages.com/photodisc).
Shoppers will relate to the people they see at your site. If they look
confident and at ease, it will help to lessen a shopper's natural distrust of
unknown Internet shops.
To build trust you'll also want to tell the story of your business. You may
think that shoppers won't care about the details. But it's precisely these
details that show your store is for real, that values of honesty and hard work
underlie your whole business. I've read some business stories that really
made me want to make a purchase because I liked the people I was reading
about.
Let the big companies write in their pompous, elevated, third person,
slightly distant tone. But you need to write in the same way you would talk
to a shopper if she were directly across from you. It'll help you build a bond
of friendship and trust that will produce sales.
As you develop satisfied customers who tell you how much they like your
business, ask whether you can use the kind words they've written for your
promotional materials. Nearly always they'll agree. Then excerpt two or
three sentences for the testimonial. Make sure you use a variety of topics --
one about your great customer service, another about your selection and
prices, a third about how you took special time to explain something, a
fourth about how they recommend your site to their friends, and a fifth
about the promptness of your e-mails and shipping. Feel free to remove
extraneous phrases or clauses from the final testimony, but make sure you
don't change the wording or intent of the key items you leave in. Use full
names with their permission, where they live, and ideally, a phone number
to contact them. (Listing an e-mail address will subject your top customers
to a barrage of spam.)
ask questions and make contact. This breeds frustration and distrust.
Consumers are wary of online stores that hide phone numbers or mailing
addresses. The shopper wonders, If I can't get in touch with this storeowner
when I have a question, what happens when I have a problem after the
sale? Why doesn't he accept phone calls? I, too, am wary of companies I
can't contact through traditional communication channels.
One of the reasons people hesitate to place orders in your store is the risk to
which they feel they are exposing themselves. If you can reverse this so that
you the merchant take all the risk and your customer takes none, you'll
substantially increase the number of orders completed and expand your
profit at the end of each month. You build trust by taking the risk on
yourself.
For many years, Sears has clearly displayed its simple policy: "Satisfaction
Guaranteed or Your Money Back." Do you think this policy has lost Sears
money over the years? Hardly! It is one of the reasons people shop at Sears
in the first place.
Small business storeowners are often afraid to make strong, iron clad, no-
questions-asked guarantees for fear that unscrupulous people will take
advantage of them. And a few moral rejects will take advantage of them,
but not many. Overwhelmingly, those who offer a money-back guarantee
have found that it creates much more business than problems.
Make sure you have easy-to-find links to your ordering policy page. You'll
need to include:
• Return Policy
• Guarantee on Products
• Shipping policies
The clearer you are, the more confidence you inspire. The more generous
you are, the more trust you build. And remember, trust is the one essential
business element.
Trust-Building Associations
You'll notice also that on my own site I provide some low-cost advertising
opportunities for small businesses. Especially, consider 2-Line Ads
(www.wilsonweb.com/ads/2-line-ad.htm) in Web Marketing Today and
Doctor Ebiz. (10% off when you place 3 or more ads at a time.) and
Sponsored Links (www.wilsonweb.com/ads/splinks.htm) at the bottom of
each page that offer amazing click-throughs.
Note: You'll find that I often join the affiliate programs of the products I mention in my
newsletters and e-books, so long as the products are excellent and the affiliate programs don't
require exclusivity. I also link to many products or services that don't offer affiliate programs -- I
want to send you to the best resources I know and I do my best to be objective. But to keep my
business afloat I use affiliate links where possible. For a complete absence of affiliate links you'll
probably need to read publications fully funded by advertising -- that are still in business. :-)
The four brief strategies below are basic, but even experienced marketers
may find some clues that have eluded them.
Registering means to let search engines and directories know that your site
is up and ready to be included among their listings. Just be aware that
registering and actually being listed are two different things. You have to be
patient and persistent. Here's how to go about it.
META Tags
It's important to design your website so that each webpage includes a clear
page title, because when your site shows up on a search engine the webpage
title will be displayed. This isn't the headline that you place between HTML
<H1> tags, but the title placed between HTML <TITLE> tags. The title of
each page ought to be both descriptive and provocative. For example,
"Widget Specifications" might be better titled "Acme Widgets Have Won
Five International Awards for Quality." Think of the webpage title as a vital
marketing tool.
Two other META tags are important to search engine listings of your site.
The description META tag is used by some search engines as the sentence
or two they display below your webpage title. Limit this to about 200
characters or so. The keywords META tag will include half dozen to several
dozen words that someone might search on in order to find your website.
Lately I've been inserting keywords separated by spaces rather than
commas, because experts I trust tell me that this allows search engines to
better create their own combinations of keywords. Both science and old
wives tales contribute to META tag lore. You can learn more in the Search
Engine section of our Web Marketing Info Center
(www.wilsonweb.com/cat/cat.cfm?page=1&subcat=mp_Search) and at
Danny Sullivan's SearchEngineWatch.com
(www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters).
Search Engines
Directories
Search engines are vital, but directories arguably drive as much or more
traffic to your site. And increasingly, search engines are combined with
directories, so they'll include information from both human-edited
directories and automatically-indexed webpages. The most important
directory by far in most countries of the world is Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com).
But they are very picky about what they'll include in a listing and reject
many listings because of shoddy websites. You'll also want a listing in the
DMOZ Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) since its materials are also
used by Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit,
and hundreds of others. A third important directory is LookSmart
(www.looksmart.com) -- not because it gets a lot of hits itself, but because
its listings feed into search results from MSN, About.com, Netscape,
InfoSpace, CCN.com, and CNET.com. Another directory you should submit
to is Ask Jeeves! (www.ask.com).
Commercial sites need to pay $299 for a listing to be considered for Yahoo!
Directory listing. This is one of your best marketing investments. You'll
sometimes see ads such as, "We submit your site to 500 search engines for
only $50." Don't bother! Only a dozen or so search engines are important to
While important, just registering your webpages with the search engines
isn't likely to lift you above the clutter of billions of webpages currently on
the Net. If your site doesn't appear in the top 10 or 20 search results for
your important keywords and keyphrases, your site will seldom be visited.
To achieve high ranking you need to enter the complex world of search
engine optimization (SEO) or search engine positioning.
While it's wise to design your webpages to score high on search engines,
you don't want to make your content subject to the changing vagaries of
search engine preferences. Instead, you build a series of gateway or
doorway webpages that point to your main website. Sometimes these
gateway pages may employ an HTML frame system that contains your main
webpage within it. That way the words in one frame of the system can be
altered without changing the content of your main webpages.
Let's say you wanted to show up in the top 10 of a search for the keyphrase
"economy widgets." Since each major search engine has different and
sometimes conflicting algorithms, you need to build a separate webpage --
fine-tuned for "economy widgets" -- for each search engine, perhaps 6 to 10
different gateway pages per keyword or keyphrase. If you desire to score
high for several search words or phrases, you'll need to create a set of
gateway pages for each. You can see how this can get complicated (and,
unfortunately, increase clutter on the Web even further). Then throw in the
complication that algorithms often change. Furthermore, you need to be
careful, since some search engines have been known to ban domain names
or IP addresses associated with search engine spamming. Consequently,
these gateway pages may be hosted on a domain other than your primary
website.
Do-It-Yourself
Paying a Service
Once you get visitors to your website, your next important task is to secure
their e-mail addresses and their permission to e-mail them your newsletter,
occasional updates, or new product information. Failure to collect e-mail
addresses of site visitors is a common and often fatal error. Getting visitors
to your website is hard work. But getting them back again is much easier
once you can contact them inexpensively via e-mail.
You're naive if you think that you can just collect e-mail addresses for use in
your Outlook or Netscape e-mail program. To conduct e-mail marketing
you need a program that's specifically designed to handle lots of e-mail
address -- and provide for constant e-mail address changes, deletions, and
obsolescence. Two excellent free programs are Yahoo! Groups
(www.yahoogroups.com) and Topica Exchange (www.topica.com), which
pay for their services by attaching ads to outgoing e-mail messages you
send. If you have some money to spend, consider three hosted solutions
that start at $20 to $30 per month: Topica Email Publisher (www.email-
publisher.com) EmailFactory (www.emailfactory.com), and
ProAutoResponder (scc.proautoresponder.com).
It's important to understand two related trends that affect a house e-mail
list. First is your visitors' understandable desire to maintain privacy of their
personal information, so that it is not sold or distributed without their
knowledge. Second is the importance of obtaining permission to send e-
mails to your site visitors and customers. Single personal e-mails don't need
permission. And where you have some kind of marketing relationship with
a person you have a kind of implied permission. For example, if someone
asked to receive free information from your autoresponder, they have
initiated a sort of relationship reciprocal relationship with you. After all,
nothing's really free. But using bulk e-mail extraction software to suck e-
mail addresses off webpages and bulk-blast them to siteowners is called
spamming and can earn you a lot of enemies -- including having your ISP
and web hosting services abruptly terminate your accounts.
Collecting Information
To market effectively to your site visitors, you need their e-mail addresses
at a minimum. But more information allows you to tailor your e-mailings to
their needs. For newsletter subscriptions I ask for a full name so I can
personalize newsletters. Just remember that the more information you ask
for, the fewer visitors will submit your sign-up form. Only ask for what you
absolutely need.
Finally, e-mail regularly to your growing house list of site visitors and
customers -- but not too often, otherwise recipients will feel you're abusing
the limited permission they've granted you. But once or perhaps twice a
month is necessary to keep your company in the forefront of your
recipients' consciousness. Marketing is best done in conjunction with useful
information that interests your visitors. That's why sending a brief
newsletter not only informs, but also builds your "brand" and customer
trust, as well as providing the context for offers of your products and
services. For more information, consider my e-book "A Guide to E-Mail
Newsletters" (www.wilsonweb.com/ebooks/email-newsletters.htm). See? I
just marketed a product to you in the context of valuable information. :-)
very cost-efficient way to advertise your products and services. You can find
helpful information comparing various affiliate management software
programs from a merchant's perspective in my e-book Report on Affiliate
Management Software: User Feedback and Editor's
Choices (www.wilsonweb.com/ebooks/affilisoft.htm).
The ability to transfer money via the Internet is part of my core definition of
e-commerce. Back when I designed my first online store in 1995, e-
commerce elements were difficult to assemble. Today there are a number of
solutions, some of them quite inexpensive.
In this e-book I focus on low cost methods. They work reasonably well, but
have their downsides. The better -- and more expensive to set up --
methods involve two major expenses: (1) a merchant credit card account
and (2) a payment gateway. A merchant account enables you to accept
credit cards for payment, and a payment gateway connects the transaction
on your website in real time with your bank's credit card processor. All this
takes place via secure Internet pipelines so that your customer's credit card
information is not compromised.
In Web Commerce Today, Issue 38, September 15, 2000 I explained how to
get good prices on merchant credit card accounts
(http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct4/issue38.htm) and how to avoid the
sharks of that industry that lock naive merchants into 3 to 4 year leases and
often sell them e-commerce software they don't need. I also vent a little
anger in that issue. :-) I hope you'll subscribe to Web Commerce Today so
you can get up-to-speed quickly (www.wilsonweb.com/wct/).
processes in greater detail. But in this e-book I'll point you to several
relatively low-cost ways to get started in e-commerce -- without either a
separate payment gateway or a merchant account.
The tremendous popularity of eBay and other consumer auctions in the last
few years created the need for low-cost means of transferring money that
protects both seller and buyer. This has spawned a number of new solutions
-- PayPal, BillPoint, Yahoo! PayDirect, C2it, and BidPay. Of these, only
PayPal has really matured to the point where it is of much use to serious
online merchants outside the auction arena. (Note: eBay recently acquired
PayPal and will probably discontinue their own BillPoint solution.)
Finally, I've compared these prices to typical fees paid by merchants that
have both a merchant account and a payment gateway, and which typically
require substantial set-up fees, and minimum monthly fees in addition to a
discount rate (percentage of the transaction amount) and a flat transaction
fee.
For the most part, the payment transfer systems function as a kind of
ordering system -- often inadequate. For most e-commerce sales you need
the following functions.
• Shopping Cart (to allow purchase of more than one product at a time)
or ordering system. (CCNow and PayPal have shopping cart
applications.)
• Shipping Calculation. (There is a primitive calculation system on
PayPal and CCNow.)
• Tax Calculation (currently only on PayPal.)
• Payment System and real-time credit card authorization (all the low-
cost systems provide this)
If you are selling a tangible product, you'll have to decide upon a storage
method. Storage sounds a bit stodgy in this fast-moving age of electronic
commerce, but it is essential to having your product available and ready to
ship as soon as you get an order. There is no single one-answer-fits-all --
each has advantages and disadvantages -- but here are the various models.
This brings visions of boxes of CDs lining the hallways of your home or
running over in your garage. Some small companies lease light industrial
space to store inventory. For the smallest e-businesses that want to make
maximum dollar profit on sales, probably warehousing your own inventory
will make the most profit. This is appropriate, too, for brick-and-mortar
retail stores, which are small enough to ship products for online sales out of
existing inventory. From a customer service standpoint, handling inventory
and shipping yourself means that you have the records at hand to provide
quick, efficient customer service for telephone calls and returns. You
control the inventory, ordering ahead what you think you'll need. You'll be
able to easily determine the amount of product in stock and know whether
orders can be shipped or must be backordered. You are in control.
But there is a price. First, you must pay for the inventory that the
manufacturer or distributor ships to you. Only individual artisans will be
willing to negotiate payment for sales on consignment. Second, you must
pay for inventory space. If you have extra space already, there's no extra
cost. But if you need to lease space to warehouse inventory, you'll be paying
for the square footage it takes to store the products. When you carry your
own inventory and run your own shipping department, you are betting that
your own shipping system will be more cost-efficient than that of a drop-
shipper or fulfillment house.
The advantage here is that you don't have capital tied up in inventory or
monthly leases for warehouse space -- the distributor takes care of that. You
might get caught, however, if the distributor runs out of one of your
important products. There's no easy way to determine what is in stock and
can be shipped immediately.
The downside is that many drop-shippers don't give you much information
about what's in-stock or out-of-stock, so your customer may be left
hanging. In case of customer service inquiries, you may not have much
information at your fingertips about the status of any particular order.
Since building a happy clientele that makes repeat purchases is dependent
upon excellent customer service, drop-shipping can affect your long-term
viability. In addition, your discount from the manufacturer or distributor
isn't as great when you drop-ship; you're paying them to carry inventory
and fulfill your orders, so your profit margin may be lower. However, drop-
shipping may be your best way to begin on a shoestring.
Which of these four models is best? A lot depends upon your goals and how
mature your online business is. Here's one scenario that many Internet
companies follow:
Offering your customers a high cost but fast option for shipping should be
balanced by also offering a low cost but slower alternative. Do this, and
you're likely to increase sales over offering just a single shipping choice.
The chief difficulty with digitally delivered products is that they are subject
to fraud. A private download URL can be given to a friend (who may post it
on an online bulletin board). And fraudulent credit card transactions using
stolen credit information leave the merchant to susceptible to damaging
chargeback fees.
Here are some systems you can use to sell and deliver digital products. (I
am excluding ClickBank from this list because it only handles the sale, not
the digital delivery.)
When you begin to research fulfillment services, you rapidly find that they
price in enough different ways that they can be hard to compare to each
other -- and it can be difficult to figure out what kind of bill you'll be paying
at the end of the month. Here are some fees and policies to watch for as you
research:
Set-Up Fees. Fulfillment houses charge set-up fees to help cover their
costs of acquiring your business and preparing their system to take your
products. Make sure these are reasonable and within your budget.
Order Processing Fees. This may include a flat amount for each order,
plus a charge for each additional item in the package. Rates vary with the
number of orders processed each month. Ask if boxes and packing
materials are included in the order processing fees or if they are in addition.
Return Processing Fees. Find out what you are charged when a
customer returns the merchandise and how this process will be handled.
Storage Fee. This is a monthly fee that reflects the amount of storage
space your products take in their warehouse. You may be charged per
pallet, or per cubic foot, or in some other manner. Your goal is to keep on
hand no more than a two- or three-month's supply of your product or you'll
be paying excessive storage charges.
Shopping Cart Services. You can run your own shopping cart and
transmit orders to the fulfillment house via their preferred methods: FTP,
secure download, e-mail, EDI, XML, etc. But it may be cost-effective to use
the fulfillment house's own shopping cart program order buttons in
conjunction with your own website. That way they get your orders directly
and painlessly. Some fulfillment houses also offer accounting and banking
for foreign clients. Ask what services they offer. You may be surprised at
what they can do for you.
Order Transmission Method. Make sure that the method by which you
are required to transmit orders is technically within your company's grasp.
Is it simple or sophisticated enough to meet your needs?
Growth Capacity. Can the fulfillment house that serves your 100 to 500
orders per month ramp up to 100,000 orders per month if you get a
tremendous response? Inquire about their growth capacity.
I've heard a lot of bragging about site automation. But the fact is, there's
just so much you can do to automate customer service. In the end, you need
to allocate time to deal with real live customers who have problems. I have
a pretty automated system, but I constantly receive e-mails from customers
who can't quite figure out how to do something or have a special case that
my system isn't programmed to handle. Then I must fix it for them --
immediately -- or risk a dissatisfied customer.
also pass along the horror story of inexcusable customer service from the
original vendor. I, too, will be more hesitant to recommend this vendor
again.
I've heard that a happy customer tells one person about his good experience
while a disgruntled one will spout off to eight people. With the ease of e-
mail, it doesn't take long for your reputation to be destroyed if you don't
take care of your customers.
Every company has some problems, and all of us have had to fix something
that went wrong for a customer. Of course, customers would like products
or services to be problem-free. But they're realists. They understand
occasional problems. But customers really find out about your company
when something goes wrong. When you respond quickly to a customer
complaint and fix it generously and fully, you've made a friend for life. But
if you leave a customer to twist in the wind or just reply with an irrelevant
boilerplate e-mail, they'll go out of their way not to do business with you a
second or third time. That's what kills you.
It's a fact that with many online retail sales, you make little money on the
first sale to a customer. The marketing costs to get that customer to your
site in the first place may be considerable. But if new customers are happy
with your service, they'll come back again and again. And as your
customers, they have a relationship with you that implies permission to e-
mail them at very low cost about future products and sales.
You've heard the old joke, "I lose money on every sale, but make it up in
volume." :-) Retailers often lose money on the first sale, but make it up on
the second and third sale. If you have excellent customer service, you'll be
able to retain and sell again to these first-time customers. If not, your
customer base will dribble away and online business will become
unprofitable for you.
received a book entitled How to Make Love All Night (and Drive a Woman
Wild) -- not exactly what I had ordered. I thought it was hilarious, and so
did my wife. I telephoned Amazon's customer service number to see what
they would do. The customer service rep was apologetic, polite, and didn't
even laugh when I told him the books that got mixed up. He offered to send
me the dictionary by an upgraded delivery method and to send a post-paid
label with which to return the wrong book. Very professional, very well
done. I was impressed. And this time all I received was a boring German-
English dictionary! Will I shop at Amazon.com again? You bet. Not because
they never make a mistake, but because I know that if they do, they will fix
it promptly. On the other hand, I could name some companies with which I
have resolved never to do business again because of their horrendous
customer service.
ten to twenty hours each month. Subscribers are happier, too, since they
are now empowered to make immediate changes themselves.
But I stay close to a computer or have my editorial assistant check when I'm
away so that customer service questions can be answered within a few
hours at most. Customers are my company's lifeblood and keeping them
happy is very important to me. Do I please them all? No. That's impossible.
But I try hard to find a way to keep them happy.
How do you like the telephone menu systems? Rather than a real person
who answers, "How may I direct your call," too often you get a recording
that says, "Please listen to the following menu of eight complex functions.
And make sure you listen carefully since we change the menu every few
weeks just to confuse you."
I recommend that you only use these for routine and highly predictable e-
mail interactions. I can remember a series of customer service e-mails I had
with a large domain name vendor who shall remain nameless. Every time I
wrote an e-mail describing my problem, I received a reply that showed no
one had read my message at all. I was talking to a machine.
While these smart e-mail systems are much better than they used to be,
test, test, and test again before using one for customer service. You cannot
afford to lose customers just to save some time.
One summer, one of my tires blew-out on the freeway 100 miles from
home. I took it to a department store Auto Service Center, arriving about
12:30 pm, planning to wait until the job was done. My need was simple: (1)
replace the tire, (2) stow the spare in its correct location, and (3) realign the
front wheels. How long will this take? I asked. About an hour and a half, I
was told. The person I talked to went home shortly thereafter. I waited
patiently (mostly) for an hour and a half, but my car was still sitting where I
had left it. I asked the new clerk when it would be taken care of. Soon, I was
told. I sat down again. I got up and asked again. Oh, we'll get to it soon, I
was told. By now I wasn't so patient. I insisted in no uncertain terms that
they get it done. We have to wait until that person gets back from his break,
I was told. It went on and on, with me having to push at each step of the
process, until at 5:30 pm they finally handed me the keys. However, the
By this time I was fuming. Where's the manager? I demand. He's out of
town, I am told. I want to talk to the assistant manager, I say. Oh, he had to
leave early and won't be back until tomorrow.
The more I thought about it, I realized that complaining to the manager
would not solve the problem -- because the problem was with the manager,
not the employees. If the manager had insisted on a "customer comes first"
policy, enforced it, and rewarded excellent service, the Auto Service Center
would have an entirely different attitude. Customer service reflects
management priorities.
What should I do? I had made no promises or guarantees that the book
would include information he couldn't find anywhere else. The Table of
Contents is clearly displayed before ordering. There are no tricks or
gimmicks. But here is a customer, a dissatisfied customer, perhaps a
customer who had an unreasonable request. What should I do? Insist upon
the rightness of keeping his money? Tell him that he is an idiot to make a
request like that? No. I made a $12 investment in customer happiness. Will
I ever sell something to that customer again? Perhaps not. But I have done
what I could to leave a good taste in his mouth. I hope to keep a friend even
though I lost a sale.
Providing excellent service to your customers is the tenth, final, and crucial
step to E-Business on a Shoestring. None of the ten steps can be bypassed,
Jay Conrad Levinson, author of the Guerrilla Marketing books, tells his
seminar audiences: "There are two kinds of people at this seminar -- wise
people and buffoons. The wise people will immediately begin to apply what
they have learned. Buffoons imagine that they have learned a lot, but never
put any of it into action. Which are you? A wise person or a buffoon?"
I hope that you'll jot down some action steps right now -- before you put
this e-book away -- that are necessary to jumpstart your E-business on a
Shoestring. Put a date next to each action step write them into your
calendar for the next few months. Finally -- tomorrow or next week -- begin
to turn those action steps into reality, one by one, step by step. You'll get
there. Begin now!
P.S. When you get a chance, drop me a line and let me know how you're
doing.
Complete with hands-on exercises that let you perfect each step before
applying it, Planning Your Internet Marketing Strategy is the road
map you need to follow your route to e-business success. List US $19.95.
Amazon USA typically sells this for $13.96.