Business Websites, CMS, Ecommere, SEO and CRM

Building a Customer Database

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:04:00 GMT

Garnering awareness and acquiring customers is one of the great challenges of building a business. It is so important that there is an entire business discipline dedicated to this - known as marketing!

It would be fair to say that any customers that find your business or website should be highly valuable to you - you want to capture their details so you can keep in touch with them about any products, services or offers that may be of interest to them.

That's where the idea of a database comes in. A customer database is simply a list of contact information for customers that you have dealt with in the past, whether this be by selling them something or allowing them to sign up to free advice or latest news through newsletters.

Why keep a list of them? Because they are your best source for future revenue and spreading news of your business by word of mouth to their friends, family and colleagues.

Who better to announce your latest products to than the people who loved your last product? Who better to spread the word about your new service than those who've used it previously?

But how do you go about capturing the details of visitors to your website?

Here are 4 simple strategies.

Give something away. Give every customer who fills in an online form something valuable in exchange for their email address. It could be a discount voucher, or an ebook that you have written, or exclusive VIP content.
Add a simple "Contact Us" web form to your site. You'll be suprised by how many of your visitors will take the time to ask a question about your business - they will provide you with an email address so you can reply to them...
Run an online discussion forum. People love to chat and share their knowledge and opinions. You can empower your customers to do the same, and as part of the process, ask them to give their email address to use as a username.
Sell something! When people buy from your online shop, ask them for an email address to send the receipt/confirmation to.

Once you have developed a customer base, you have everything you need to start marketing to them and increase your sales and revenue!

I would not recommend emailing everybody, every day, with every product or service you have! People will soon get annoyed by the influx of emails from you, instead take the time to segment your data into clear groups and identify the reason you ended up with their details, you can then send them targeted email campaigns that they will appreciate recieving.

Psy-Web's Online Business Console has a central customer database that automatically captures and stores the data collected using the 4 strategies above, it can simplify the process and reduce the cost of adding the forms, shops, forums, etc required to encourage people to give their email address to you - and to top it off, it has a built in email marketing suite that links directly to the customer database making sending those targeted emails that bit easier!

For further information, please contact us.

Updating your website content

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:25:00 GMT

Can you update your website yourself? by updating I don't mean big design changes or anything, just the content, latest news, announcements or the odd blog post.

If you can't, or you don't - you need to and you should!

The fact is that search engines love fresh, valuable content on websites. Each time you add or change content to your site, the major search engine 'spiders' that index your website take the time to visit you again to see what is new.

There are certain things you can do when writing your website content to again increase your chances of ranking highly. I'm not an SEO Expert as such but when writing the content for sites I work on, I use a couple of techniques to try and be as SEO friendly as possible.

Firstly, I think about things from a customer point of view - put myself in their shoes so to speak. What would I type in to Google if I was looking for this particular sort of business? I then write down the top 5 or 10 "keywords" that I think people are using to look for the sort of product, service or information I am writing about. Then when writing the copy for the site, I try and use those keywords as often as possible without being too repetetive and ruining the point of the message - it can take a while to get the hang of but seems to be beneficial in increasing the chance of appearing near the top of the results when people type in those keywords.

Secondly, I focus on quality and usefulness. If a website has high quality, focused and useful content on it, people will link to it. Links are like "votes" - search engines treat them as an acknowledgement to the usefulness of your site. Please don't be fooled into thinking linking to anybody and everybody will do you any good though! Not all links are treated equally. Links from high quality sources are given more weight than random links that have no relevence to your business.

In summary, the more useful, up to date content you can add to your site, the higher the chance that you'll rank highly in search results - meaning more customers and more profits. For further information regarding how search engine optimisation works -take a look at this article

Ok so we've thought about how to write but what do you write? This can be the hard bit!

Below are three strategies to help you figure out what to write about...

Think about what has been happening in the last month in your business or business sector. Did you reach any milestones in terms of customers, profits or product releases? Has there been any new legislation put in place that may affect or be of interest to your customers? Write about them! Customers love to read positive things about your business and appreciate being informed of new information that might affect them in someway.
Are there any upcoming events that visitors to your site may be interested to hear about? For example, I worked on a recruitment website and got lots of visits each time i let customers know about any changes to employment law that could impact them either in a positive or negative way. Keeping your customers up to date with information about you and your business sector makes you a reputable source for information and in turn increases the likely hood of peope choosing you and your business over the many other similar ones out there.
Did something interesting happen to you that taught you a positive lesson you could share? It could be an experience you went through personally or professionaly that led you to make a decision to change or improve the way you and your business work. Share these stories with your customers on a blog post! They're fun, interesting and they say a lot about the things you and your business value.

There's always something to write, just remember the golden rules of content and you'll be fine:

Is the content relevant to your customers or your business?
Does the content add value to your customers?

Once upon a time, making changes or updating your website involved paying web designers (like us!) to do this for you - with Psy-Web's Online Business Console, you don't need to worry about that. We supply you will all the tools and training required to stop paying us to update things for you and instead allowing you to update what you like, when you like without involving any third parties - unless you would actually prefer us to do it for you that is!

Top Tips for Email Marketing Campaigns

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:31:00 GMT

Promoting your products or services by email is a powerful and flexible form of direct marketing. With Psy-web design’s powerful email marketing tool, you can create professional HTML email newsletters using a simple 7 step wizard allowing you to keep customers up to date with all products, services, latest news and special offers.

Unfortunately our system cannot write the content for you (as yet!) So we have put together our Top Tips to Creating a Successful Email Campaign which we hope will help you carry out a campaign and ensure a successful return on your investment:

Planning your email campaign is vital

It’s very important to plan your email campaign well in advance of the date you want to send it out. There are a number of things you should think about when deciding what to write your campaign content:

Who is your target audience?

To make your email relevant, you need to identify your target audience and understand their needs.
What are your objectives?

Identify what the main aim of your email campaign is. Do you want to raise awareness of your products and services, generate leads and sales or improve customer retention?

Segment, personalise and be relevant

Use the information you have identified from asking yourself the questions above to send your audience targeted, relevant messages. Segmenting your customer database and developing specific offers for each target audience is a key step to creating a successful email campaign.

Write a great subject line

The subject line is the first thing your customer will see when they are deciding which emails to read and which to mark as spam. Keeping your subject line simple but intriguing will encourage customers to open the email and read more. Be careful not to use words like “free” which may trigger spam filters. Personalising the subject line to the recipient and including your company name works well to encourage high open rates.

Writing your all important content

Email newsletters are often thought of as printed newsletters sent electronically; but they are not! The content should be concise and to the point, perhaps a snippet of information which links to the full article on your website. Below are a few points to remember when writing the creative for your campaign

Remember that your reader is reading light, not matter (ink).

When reading light we don’t blink as often and as we are unable to adjust text size by moving the document closer or further from our eyes, we tend to scan a page, looking for key words or phrases to get the information required without reading every word.
Remember that you only have a few seconds to capture your reader's attention so write short.

I would suggest 50 percent less than you write for a printed newsletter. Each article should be at the most two page-downs with a maximum sentence length of 15 to 20 words, maximum paragraph length of five sentences, and a maximum article length of four paragraphs. Remember...these are maximums! When writing email content, less is more!
Remember to write in a conversational tone.

Let your personality show through and readers are more likely to spend their time reading what you have to say.
Remember to use lots of bullet points and numbered lists.

Lists are easy to scan and they help the reader absorb each item one at a time.
Remember to limit each article to a single concept.

Add links to your website to allow recipients to read longer articles or gain more information should they choose. Our email tracking system allows you to see when readers click on a link in the email allowing you to use your follow-up call time productively by targeting those who have taken further interest in your newsletter.
Remember that email newsletters are easily forwarded.

Never write anything that you wouldn't want the whole world (including your competition) to know!

Test before you send

First impressions count so testing your email campaign with a number of different email providers is an important thing to do before sending your campaign. I would recommend you send at least 5 test emails to yourself and your colleagues (so they can check for any spelling/grammar errors you may have missed!) and to all your test email accounts, before you send your email campaign out to your customer list.

You should test -

What the email will look like in the most popular email readers (Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Hotmail and Google Mail) - set up as many test accounts with free email providers as possible and leave them in their default settings.
That your images aren’t broken.
That your email doesn’t fall into spam or junk folder
That your unsubscribe link works.

We can provide a service which allows you to see screenshots of exactly how your email will look in more than 15 of the most popular web, desktop and mobile email clients - we'll also run your email through a number of key spam firewalls - the gatekeepers for most ISP's and large organisations. Contact us for further details

Measure campaign success

Psy-webs Online Marketing Suite allows you to see in real time actions customers took once they receive your email.

You can see -

The number of emails delivered (delivery rate).
The number of emails opened (open rate).
The number of click-through generated (click-through rate).
Email addresses that bounced and the reasons why
The number of customers who unsubscribed from your campaign

Ideally, each time you send an email campaign, you want to increase the number of people who open and act on it. Analysing your campaign results will help you do this.

Make follow up calls

Whatever you send out, make sure you follow it up with a telephone call. Start with the people who have opened the campaign most or have clicked through to your website as this may indicate they had a genuine interest in your information or offer.

I hope these tips help you create a succesful campaign, however should you find yourself struggling to get your point across with your marketing campaign, our in-house marketing team offer a copywriting service both for websites and related materials so please do feel free to contact us today to see what we can do to help.

Why am I being marked as spam?

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:29:00 GMT

First off, lets clarify what exactly spam is, the Oxford Dictionary describes spam as irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of users.

Spam is a major issue affecting everyone on the internet. I’m sure none of us particularly enjoy receiving spam but most of us are content to simply press delete and get on with our day. What we do find more of a problem is when genuine emails we send out mark us as spam to our customer base!

Today, more and more words and phrases are being flagged as "spam" words by various email programmes, and thus will automatically block messages using them too often. This is because many anti-spam systems rely on keywords for determining whether an email should be considered spam. These programs assign spam probabilities to each word, so that some words are weighted as more likely to signal spam than others. If the overall email contains a high proportion of spam words, or if it passes a certain threshold of spam words, it is more likely to get trapped in anti-spam filters.

Unless you are careful in using the words and phrases, important business emails or marketing campaigns could end in the spam folder of the recipient.

Avoiding use of known spam words is a key step to getting your message through the over zealous spam filters that some companies use. Apart from this, my advice would be to try not to repeat words, not to use all caps (upper case) and try to minimise use of !, $, or 100% and other punctuation marks.

Below is a list of some of the words and phrases that have been known to trigger spam filters, Trying to avoid multiple use of these words in your campaign can help prevent your email get stuck in the spam filters.

50% off!	Click here	Funding	No-cost or no-fee	Save up to
Amazing	Congratulations	Get Paid	Order now	Search Engine Listings
As Seen On...	Dear friend	Give it away	Paying too much	Serious Cash
Astounding	Discount!	Great offer	Permanent low interest	Special invitation
Awesome	Don't Delete	Guaranteed	Please Read	Special Promotion
Banking	Double your income	Increase sales	Pre-accepted	This is not spam
Bargain	Earn $	Information you requested	Pre-approved	Unbelievable
Call now!	Eliminate Debt	Join millions	Promise you	Why pay more?
Cancel at any time	Expenses,	Learn how	Risk free	Wonderful
Check or money order	Free!	Low risk	Satisfaction Guaranteed	You've been selected

For further information about creating a good email marketing campaign, take a look at this post

Benefits of an online community website

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:50:00 GMT

Websites are a great way to showcase your products and services to a wide audience, but how do you drive traffic to your site? how do customers out there know to choose you over the other hundreds if not thousands of companies selling similar products or services? One of the best ways is to build a community around your site.

Traditionally, not-for-profits like churches, charities and government organisations used online community websites to get their message out. However we're now seeing savvy marketers use online community sites to drive traffic to a product/service. The community (in the form of a blog, forums and anything else user posted) generates credibility and fresh content that attracts and builds an organic following.

The main focus of building an online community is for users to be able to interact in some way - contribute their own content, register to become a member, communicate with other site users or the site owner.

Psy-Web's Online Business Websites provide you with all you need to do this in a simple, user friendly way. The console allows you to add discussion forums and post regular news on a blog to keep visitors coming back. You can make a space for photo-uploads to show what's going on in your community, post podcasts of speeches or presentations for your visitors to download in a members-only area. We can make sure your existing customers know about your improved site and that they contribute as well throught the email marketing suite provided with the console! For further information, please contact us.

Automating your Customer Service

Fri, 22 May 2009 15:12:00 GMT

Do you find yourself on the phone all day? Do your customers complain that you can't be contacted after hours? Today, Business Owners are using self-help portals to automate their customer service allowing them to work on the business, not the phones.

They're using web-forms to qualify enquiries before directing them to the right person to answer them, and they're directing customers to FAQs, how-to's and do-it-yourself articles. All this cuts down the live help load.

How can you do this without building a costly portal to attach to your website? Psy-web Online Business Websites allow you to do all of the above and plenty more...

Perhaps you need to manage your bookings through your website....

Using the Online Business Website you can add forms to your site to collect all the required data such as Venue, Date and No. of Guests. The system will then alert you, the business owner of the enquiry via email and/or text message. You can then contact your customer with an accurate quote based on the form fields. Or if it is a pre arranged event, you can advertise it on your website, allow people to book themselves onto the course and take payment if required. You can preset the amount of places available and the system will manage the booking process for you, it will advise people how many places are remaining and once the event is full it will state that on your site and show when the next event is.

Spending a lot of your time answering the same questions for your customers....

Using Psy-Web’s Online Business Website you can add an unlimited amount of FAQ’s to your site that provide up to date, relevant answers to your customers questions. For example, clicking "Can I call to place an order over the phone?" provides customers with a direct phone number they can call. FAQs are a great way of organizing the most important information for your customers in one, easy to navigate page.

Providing customers with ongoing support...

Many companies, including our own, sell a product or service to customers that may require ongoing support. There are many ways to support your customers but we have found one of the best ways is to set up a secure support zone for them. Once an existing customer logs in, they are provided with links to a knowledge base of self-help tutorials, video training, and forums. Setting up a secure support zone for your customers will help ease the demand for time-consuming Live Help.

Although employing different tactics, there's a familiar theme present in all three examples we've looked at - they all succeed providing customers with the information they need in an automated and efficient manner. This strategy is about taking the stress and distraction away from you, the business owner by streamlining the customer service process and allowing you to focus on running your business.

The little blue "e" on your desktop is not the "Internet" button!

Tue, 19 May 2009 19:28:00 GMT

Almost every person using a computer has some personalised settings, whether they be layouts, colour schemes, applications or programmes - all fine tuned to suit the needs of the user and make everything within easy reach.

However, with all this personalisation we see on all the different computers we come across, we are often amazed how people unknowingly neglect arguably their most-used application: their Internet Browser!

To many people, access to the internet, along with emails, is the only reason they even own a computer - and with good reason considering the amount of information out there today on the world wide web!
People the world over have learned that thay can do almost anything online, from gathering information and learning new skills to communicating with people all over the world. They can even do their weekly shop from the comfort of their own houses.

This is good news for us, as our mission with the Online Business Console is to make all of this easier for business and customer alike - providing a full framework to make promoting your business easier and to also make it easier for your customers to use your business online.
Nevertheless, with all this online activity, lots of people we meet still think that the little blue "e" on their desktop is what they click to get to the internet, and that there is no other option.

This couldn't be further from the truth!

So, what exactly is the "Little Blue e"?

The icon that so many people click to access the internet is actually a Microsoft Application - Internet Explorer.
It is installed as standard on every PC on the Windows platform, and considering that around 90% of people using computers are on the windows platform on one way or another ( http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp ), it is little wonder that many people have become accustomed to just clicking the "little blue e" and seeing the internet appear before their eyes.
They then understandably associate the "little blue e" icon with being "the Internet Button".
This would be fine, and we could live with many people believing the "blue e" to mean "internet" if it wasn't for one huge problem:

Internet Explorer just isn't a very good browser!

What's wrong with Internet Explorer?

There are many reasons why Internet Explorer and it's different incarnations over the years (IE 5.5, IE 6, IE 7) have been regularly classed as a below-par browser. The main ones for us here at PsyWeb are shown below:

There are security issues with almost all versions of IE - barring the most recent release IE8.
Many browsers make it difficult for malicious applications to run and potentially damage your computer, whereas the ActiveX way of doing it in Explorer gives things such as spyware a relatively easy ride.

You don't have to go back very far to see the last time this Serious Secruity Flaw in IE last hit the headlines ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7784908.stm ).
Internet Explorer does not display websites properly!
This is probably even more of an issue for web designers, as Internet Explorer to date has never been a Standards Compliant browser.
Web designers like us spend large chunks of their lives learning new languages, such as HTML, CSS etc. so that code we write on a computer displays to you as the nicely laid out websites you see online.
The W3C (the Worldwide Web Consortium ) came up with specifications and guidelines in the early days of the internet to make sure that this code was universal and the world wide web was being used to its full potential.

However, Microsoft and their Internet Explorer browser have repeatedly ignored these standards and, instead of fixing the problems with their browser, they have simply provided "workarounds" for us designers to use.

In effect, this now causes most web designers and developers to make several different versions of each site they build.
One version is made specifically for each Internet Explorer the user may be viewing their site on, and one "standard" version is made that works in all other browsers.
Needless to say, this extra work and the unwanted headaches it provides is the main reason why most web designers universally dislike the Internet Explorer browser.

What are the other options?

In all fairness the newest Microsoft browser, Internet Explorer 8, is not as bad as it's predecessors - although it is still far from a decent browser as far as standards are concerned.
It's definitely a step in the right direction by Microsoft, but why should we all wait for Microsoft to catch up when there are already many other browsers available FOR FREE that are Standards compliant, Secure and Easy to use?
Not only that, most if not all of these alternatives allow you to personalise your browser to suit the way you work on the internet.

Check out our post on Intenet Explorer alternatives to allow your browser to catch up with the rest of the applications on your computer

Alternatives to Internet Explorer

Tue, 19 May 2009 18:10:00 GMT

Further to our post on why Internet Explorer is a poor browser , we decided to give a list of other browsers available for FREE, that quite simply do what Internet Explorer should have always done - be a secure, standards-compliant and easy-to-use internet browser!

We understand at PsyWeb that some people don't always have choice about the browser they use. Perhaps you work in an office that doesn't allow downloads for security reasons or you run an older version of Windows.
In this case, the newest and first real attempt at a modern browser by Microsoft, Internet Explorer 8, is not even available to you.
We are also aware that many people the world over still use Internet Explorer as their main browser, purely out of convenience.
This is why we always build websites using our Online Business Console to be fully operational on Internet Explorer browsers back to IE7 and in some cases back to IE6.

However, we also encourage our customers to use a better browser if they can, and so far, the feedback we receive is almost always a big "Thanks".

So, what other options are there?

Although there is by no means a perfect browser, there are still many others available for FREE that, unlike Internet Explorer, are for the most part secure and standards compliant. Here is our views on the best of the other options:

Firefox - by Mozilla

Probably the nearest contender to take over the mantle of "World's Most-Used Browser" from IE, Mozilla Firefox is often the browser of choice for people who use the web regularly - like ourselves!
It doesn't take long when first using Firefox to realise exactly what you've been missing when it comes to surfing the internet. The clever tools it uses gives the user an almost intuative way of browsing from the very first time you use it. Everything you need is somehow just where you expect it to be!
Although not the fastest browser available, it still renders websites pretty quick compared to the Internet Explorers of old, and those using it for the first time after swapping from Internet Explorer will instantly realise just how fast the world wide web can be if done right.
Couple that with enhanced security features and an almost unlimited number of add-ons available to automate and organise your online life, Mozilla Firefox is, for us at least, the best alternative to IE.
Download Firefox from getfirefox.com
And don't forget to check out the add-ons available after at https://addons.mozilla.org

Google Chrome - by Google

The newest browser to hit the internet is a somewhat overdue, yet impressive effort from Google. Chrome takes a slightly different approach to browsing than Firefox, making the same complex features available with a lot less of the fuss.
Google Chrome seems to put most of the effort into displaying websites as quickly as possible, which is what makes it by our reckoning the fastest browser available. It is also incredibly easy to use and has the same intuative and user-friendly nature as Firefox - only without the whistles and bells.
Although a bit too simple for us, anyone not worried about extending their surfing experience with add-ons or extras could do a lot worse than using Google Chrome.
It is also totally integrated with most of Google's other products such as Google Bookmarks, Google Reader and of course, the Google Search Engine.

Download Google Chrome from http://www.google.com/chrome

Opera - by Opera Software

The people at Opera seem to have re-thought the way we use the internet and has produced a different, yet fully decent browser in accordance with their new ideas. In fact, many of the features that we take for granted on browsers today usually started out life as a feature on an Opera browser first.
Opera have obviously concentrated on making the internet fast and accessible, while also trying to keep it fun.
You can customise Opera so that it's almost unrecognisable, with all the addons and features you'd expect from a modern browser - especially when it comes to social addons.
With new features such as Thumbnail previews of websites, mouse gestures and even voice recognition, it is certainly the choice for those who want their browser to be as technologically up-to-date as possible.
The downside of this cutting edge technology is that ther is sometimes compatibilty issues with some sites on the web - specially those are using the older technologies themselves.

Download Opera from http://www.opera.com/ to see for yourself!

Safari - by Apple

The browser of choice for Mac users for some time now, Apple's Safari has recently been made available for use on the Windows platform. Using the same browser 'engine' as Opera and Google Chrome to show web pages, the functionality of Safari is much the same.
However, it does seem to sacrifice the customisation options available in other modern browsers in favour of being (extremely) fast and user-friendly.
It doesn't really do as much as we'd like it to here, and the new Windows version of Safari certainly still has some problems yet to be ironed out, but if you like the trademark 'Apple Experience' given by Macs, iPods and iTunes, and also want some no-frills surfing , Safari is still a viable option.

Download the Safari browser at http://www.apple.com/safari/

Increase your online sales

Fri, 22 May 2009 15:18:00 GMT

Every business owner wants to increase conversions, whether you’re trying to get browsers in your high street shop to buy, or your website visitors to add a product to their cart, we're all playing a game of converting browsers into buyers.

Obviously some browsers are in your shop or on your website with the serious intention of buying, but there are also many people, like myself who ‘window shop'.

I like having a walk around the shops looking at the products on offer but to be honest, a high percentage of the time I do this; I have no intention in buying anything! I do the same online and I don’t think I’m alone.

Window shoppers, the lovable little creatures that we are, share some similarities in the way they think.

I think there are two things that are true of online window shoppers -

They are actually looking for a product that they want and you have, but they're not ready to buy yet. This is sometimes called pre-shopping - finding out information and prices etc before the purchase.
They're interested in some information that you have, or just like to look at the latest gadget’s and gizmo’s. They are a fan. In any case, they're not buying anything in particular, but you probably sell products or have information that they're generally interested in.

Thankfully when your shop is online your visitors are usually fairly targeted already. You're not so likely to get people wandering onto your website who are just waiting for their friend to show up as you do in many high street shops!

So we have established the potential reasons for window shoppers to be on your website, next we need to think how we can encourage them to return? How can we keep them happy? How can we convert these browsers into buyers - even though they're not really thinking of buying?

Chances are they are not going to buy a product from you the first time they look at your site; they may be looking around for a product but waiting for pay day before they put their hands in their pockets.

So how do you get them to come back to you when they are ready to buy?

Have you got an email newsletter?

Throughout your site, think about how you can prominently display your newsletter sign up. Make sure you are using the right words to get the customer to sign up - remember, you have to answer their inevitable question "why should I sign up? Phrases like "Sign up to receive updates on our products" are ok, but not as good as "sign up and receive discounts inside our monthly newsletter". Make sure you follow up on these promises though!

Search engines love content; so do fans.

Write honest reviews of your products. Take photos and post them. Allow people to sign up to add reviews themselves, or sign up to a newsletter so they can be alerted when another user reviews a product that is of interest to them. These things make your site a hub of information for people, and make you their top-of-mind store to buy their favourite gadget from.

Build a community around your website...

People like to hang out. They like to discuss and post their thoughts. Give your visitors a reason to stay! You can use Forums - why not link your forums to your products, so that people can discuss particular products? Or you could simply enable comments on your online store so that people can tell others what they think.

Psy-Web’s Online Business Websites give you all the tools you require to do everything above. You can have an Online Marketing Suite, a bespoke HTML Email Template and 10000 emails inclusive every month to keep in touch with those window shoppers. You can add and update content, blog posts, forums and more in a simple, user friendly manner. Please contact us to discuss how we can add value to your business.

Remember - keep what your customers are looking for at the top of your list of priorities, and you'll be heading in the right direction.

Getting your business through the economic downturn

Fri, 22 May 2009 15:27:00 GMT

You don't need another reminder that we're working through a period of slow economic growth and a jittery business climate, what you do need is some answers and advice as to how to get through it! When times get tough you need to get creative and innovative with your products, services and, most importantly, marketing. It's a time to invest in the future and look inwardly at how you can improve, all so you can prepare for the next boom.

In this post we shall look at what you can be doing to help you through these tough times.

What's In Your Marketing Plan - Is it working for you?

One simple activity I like to do is line up all my advertising spending and how many leads each one is generating for me.

'Leads' can range from phone calls, direct emails, site registration for forum participation, leaving comments, etc - only in doing this do i realise I have a problem - Whilst I can tell exactly what is going on with my online marketing activity through the analytics suite I don't actually know how many customers I'm getting from all my offline advertising...

Print ads like classified ads in the local paper and yellow pages are expensive and have declining reach and readership, so am i using my time and marketing budget effectively? Answer is I dont know! why dont I know? Well I cant see what part of the advert makes people call, or not call, through any reporting facilities and I dont always ask customers why they are calling me, i'm just glad they have!

This is not to say offline advertising is valueless - but contrast this with a fully fledged online business. With concrete and clear metrics, you know the exact ROI of your online marketing campaigns. Best of all, you can optimize and redeploy online campaigns in a few hours - pound for pound, online is where the smart money is.

People are staying home, and staying online more - what are you doing about it?

The current economic downturn has led to many people spending a lot more time at home in front of the TV and the computer. Where are they hanging out online? Have a think about this - you need to be advertising in their space, participating in their blogs and becoming an authority in their forums.

What's your Freemium Strategy?

People love free stuff and they love it even more when they haven't got much to spend. I'm not saying give away your products for free but what about online 'cash' coupons or discounts that they have to register on your website to receive? Once they've registered you'll be able to market to these customers in a monthly e-newsletter. We all have to move stock and attract new customers - so think about some clever online marketing strategies to do it...

Have you had a makeover?

Is your website from 2003 looking a bit tired? Does it match up with your bricks and mortar branding? Does your customer service live up to your promises? Is your content up to date? Are your landing pages and catalogues well laid out and easy to use? Let’s spring clean your whole online business and entice those customers back.

Psy web’s Online Business Websites can provide you with all the tools you need to increase your online presence in these tough times. We can use your existing site and add all the functions of an online business website to it or we can create a bespoke design for you form scratch. All Psy-Web’s Buisness Websites are fully scalable so if you want to start off with the basics and add to your site as you increase your revenue, we have a number of plans that will suit you. Contact us today to find out how we can help YOUR business Do business

Loyalty Campaigns

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:31:00 GMT

Are you sending out loyalty campaigns? You should be! If you're not sure what they are, or how to do it - read on...

For almost every business, there is something that you could be reminding people of.

For example, if you are running a children’s party venue, you could remind parents each year about the great time they had the last time they had a party at your venue, Dentists may need to remind patients about their check ups and so on.

Now that could take up a lot of time, what with developing a process to allow you to remember the events in the first place and then personalising an email to remind the customer - would it actually be worth it?

Yes! Customers appreciate the personal touch, the fact you have remembered them and taken time out of your day to get in touch about a specific, relevant subject makes them feel good. They see your company as a reputable organisation that looks after their customers and they will probably become more inclined to recommend you to their friends and family.

Now here comes the answer to how to do this for your customers in the easiest, most cost effective method - Loyalty campaigns! They allow you to do this via email without you actually needing to remember any dates!

There are 3 main types of loyalty campaigns -

Birthday

Send an email out on a customer's birthday. Tell them happy birthday and offer them a special birthday discount on the next product or service they have from you.

Campaign Join

Send an email based on the day the customer subscribed to your email newsletter. You can use this sort of campaign to send out a series of emails after a customer subscribes. A great example of this would be if you signed up for someone to send you their top 10 tips, sent as 10 emails over a period of 10 weeks. No matter when you sign up, every person gets the same ten tips, in the same order after they sign up.

Anniversaries

Send an email based on custom anniversaries that you can set and define for each customer. Take the party venue for example. When a customer books a party through your online business website, their details create a record in your database. You will then probably need to contact the customer via phone or email to confirm the booking, once in the customer record you can simply set an anniversary date in their record and the system will automatically email them next year inviting them to book their party again. You can keep in touch with customers who have used your products and services for years to come without having to remember a thing! The system allows 5 custom anniversaries to be set for each customer.

For further advice or information about how Psy-Web’s Online Business websites can improve your customer relations, encourage previous customers to return and over all increase your online profitability, contact us today

Small Business Marketing

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:32:00 GMT

I was reading an article the other day about the uphill battle that many small business owners face fighting for business against larger, better funded competitors.

It got me thinking, being a small business ourselves, how we have overcome these problems.

I looked back at the marketing strategy we put into place when we first launched Psy-Web’s Online Business Websites. We were working to a budget and decided to use the system we were going to launch to do most of the work for us!

Psy-Web’s Online Business Website comes with an excellent email marketing suite allowing users to send as many professionally designed HTML emails as desired. Being part of a larger business solutions company, we had an existing customer base we could market to and so we utilised our own facilities to gain more business for ourselves!

We sent the emails, and before we even got around to following them up we were receiving phone calls and contact forms through our website asking us for more information! Great result!

After speaking to the customers who had enquired, we then used the email marketing suite’s analytical reporting to gage interest from customers we had emailed but not heard from.

The reporting shows you how many times the customer has opened the email, which links they have clicked on within the email and the times and dates of all these actions.

One recipient had clicked the contact link a couple of times but we had never heard from them, just one quick phone call to the customer explained that they were very interested in the Online Business Website but had been interrupted with customer calls on the 2 occasions they had tried to contact us and then they simply forgot. That particular customer no longer has the same problems; he now takes most his enquiries through his Online Business Website allowing him to complete tasks with less disruption.

Psy-web Online Business Websites are available to suit most budgets, whether you are looking for just the Email Marketing Suite to add to your existing site or a Bespoke Ecommerce Site built for you we are sure we can help. Get in touch today to discuss how we can help YOUR business DO business.

In this climate, smart marketing is a thousand times better than deep pockets.

SEO - The Basics.

Tue, 19 May 2009 18:32:00 GMT

The question we get asked the most about in web design is:
"How do I make my site come top of Google?"

Unfortunately, it is never a question we can answer fully, as the truth is - There is no steadfast way of ranking top on Google's search results, regardless of what some companies say.

Many companies claiming to get your site to the top do nothing more than submit your site URL to hundreds of irrelevant search engines, or devise obscure (and expensive) keyword purchases that will rarely get your site noticed.
Even though paid or "sponsored" links can, in theory, get you to the top of the listings (if you outbid everyone else, or don't mind paying every time someone clicks on it), you site link will still appear in a "sponsored link" area, which is often overlooked by many Search Engine users as studies have shown.

So how do you get to the top of Google's Rankings?

Google themselves say at their Webmaster Help Centre :
No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.

The advice they give is simple and, more importantly, doesn't cost anything to do.

They advise that the easiest and most productive way to get the top and stay there is to have a useful, information-rich site, with pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
So, clearly, Google prefers a site that is of use to as many people as possible and contains fresh, relevant content.

As well as this content, the way that websites pages are built is almost as important as the content contained within them.

Allowing Google to access that all important content as easily as possible is a must if you want it to repay the favour by ranking your site URL highly.

So how do we let Google access our content?

Google does this all the time! You don't need to do anything.

If your site is online, it will eventually be "crawled" or "spidered" by Google. Basically this means that your site is indexed.

This does seem slightly odd, as many business sites have been online for years and have never ranked highly in Google, if at all.

Surely their pages would have been indexed by Google by now, and would at least appear somewhere in search results?

Well, their pages would have been indexed, but if Google couldn't find that content it was after when it visited the site, it won't index the site half as much as the next site that does contain that fresh, useful content. The result is that the sites probably do appear on the search results, but a long, long way down.

How does Google index my site?

Each search engine has its own automated program called a "web spider" or "web crawler" that literally crawls the web.

It really does start at one end of the web and keeps going until it reaches the end - then starts again.

The main purpose of the spider is to crawl web pages, read and collect the content, and follow the links (both internal and external). The spider then deposits the information collected into the search engine’s database called the index.

When searchers enter a query in the search box of a search engine, the search engine’s job is to find the most relevant results to the query by matching the search query to the information in its index.
So, if this spider can't get to or "see" any of your site's content, that information is never indexed and is not available to be called into question when a search query is made.
Google, as well as other crawler-based search engines (like Yahoo and MSN) have programmed these crawlers to go through websites in a certain way, looking for certain things. They are programmed on a basis that a site will be structured conforming to certain 'unofficial' rules/guidelines set by the World Wide Web Consortium.
Unfortunately, very few sites actually do conform, making life for these search engine spiders a lot more difficult.
Therefore, by building websites to allow these spiders to get exactly what they need, we are allowing them to index more information about our site, and is giving our site a lot better chance of being selected by the index computer to appear in the search results. That leads to more people seeing your site, which in turn lets Google know that it is a popular site for the subject area and will make it a lot more likely to be ranked higher the next time the crawler passes through.

Summary - Content is King!

Although there are other ways of getting your site higher in google rankings, there really is no substitute for having fresh content that is relevant, up-to-date and interesting to viewers, and has a logical structure and layout that allow search engine spiders, as well as human users, to gather and digest the information on offer easily.

We at PsyWeb build all our websites to conform to these rules, and only build sites that are standards compliant .

After we've built the site, we also provide easy ways for you, us or even your own website users to provide that all-important fresh content via our Online Business Console.

Not only this, but you can also check how your site is doing with visits and search engine phrases at any time, using the in-built analytics suite available as standard in every Online Business Console Price Plan