Lakeshore Branding is offering an unheard of special that is first of it’s kind for a web design company. We are offering a 20% Black Friday Discount on our web design, social media or online marketing service for new clients that contact us today through cyber Monday. Our office is only open for a few hours today, but you can email us, submit a request, give us a call on Monday at (312) 299-0038 or even send us a tweet on twitter to take advantage of this blowout sale! The Details for this HOT Deal Valid only for new clients who submit a request for a proposal today to Monday, November 30th by Midnight. Once proposal is received you will have up to 14 days to approve the agreement to take advantage of this special price. Not valid for existing clients, discount can not be applied to existing proposal or agreements. New client is defined as someone who has not – Read the full article
So yesterday we decided to venture out and try our luck with the large herds of people venturing out for the door buster sales on black Friday. It is traditionally the day when retailers go from the red to black (profit). After some discussions we decided to start our journey at the local outlet mall, which opened at midnight. Yes, they were open for 24 hours on Friday. I was unsure what to expect, all of the group were virgin “busters.” The mall had the same jumpstart last year and people were packed up for miles on the expressway. We decided to start a little later to avoid the large group, heck they weren’t giving anything away. We woke up at 4 am, even Grandma Verge who is 86 made it out for her first bust. We walked into the first store just before 5am and it was jamming. All I could think to myself was I as nuts as – Read the full article
There are enormous benefits to communicating with your customers via E-mail rather than over the phone. Most customers prefer E-mails to phone calls any day of the week. Put yourself in their shoes. Would you want to receive a call at 10 a.m. from a company you recently did business with? Chances are that most customers are at work when you try to call them, and they may get off work after your business closes. So, they have to go out of their way to return your call. This can be especially aggravating to customers when the phone conversation will be about an error on your part. If you’ve been having some trouble with your computer system or shipping and realize you won’t be able to deliver a product to a customer on time, let them know by E-mail. Most customers prefer to receive an E-mail from your company and would rather skip playing phone tag with one of your – Read the full article
Every website owner engaged in e-commerce knows how critical it is to get more visitors to become customers. Getting the visitors to come to the site is one thing, but persuading them to convert to customers is another. E-commerce is a rapidly growing sector of the business world, projected to overtake traditional retail outlets sooner rather than later. Running a business website is a lot like running a store, with several obvious differences, one being that visitors arrive virtually instead of in person. An e-commerce website has to monitor and track its visitors very carefully to generate key statistics. One of these key statistics is the conversion rate, which is generated by dividing the number of customers by the number of visitors. It tells the website owner how many visitors are being persuaded to become customers. The conversion rate spells the difference between success and failure for a website. Websites can take advantage of several tools to improve the conversion – Read the full article
If you’re planning an online business or e-Commerce site that will sell products or services, or require membership fees to access content through the website, you must have a way to accept credit cards. You simply won’t be successful if you expect your customers to stop using your site, write and mail a check, and wait for it to clear before they can buy something from your website or access content in membership areas. Indeed, consumers have come to expect instant access and ordering through the use of their credit and debit cards. But how can a small online business or startup company accept credit cards affordably and securely? Two Credit Card Processing Options for Small Businesses With an Internet-based business, you have the option of getting a merchant account or working with a third-party processor. For most new businesses, particularly those selling exclusively online, a third-party processor is the ideal method for getting started. Once your business is more – Read the full article
FourSquare is an emerging social network that specifically joins consumers with local businesses and local, regional and national brands. Consumers can determine what FourSquare providers are in their area and discover discount coupons, reward programs and heightened FS status, all of which lead to more discounts, rewards and status advancement. Local Businesses Let’s say you own a dry cleaning business. You advertise effectively in the terrestrial world with newspaper ads and even a billboard or two. You have sales regularly, and you are located in a very convenient section of town. You even have a terrific website through which you have a loyal email list to which you send periodic notices, information and yes, sales pitches. However, you want to do more. Enter: FourSquare. If a potential customer finds you among the local FourSquare businesses, and the discounts you post in your business profile presents a lower price than that customer’s usual cleaner or you offer a service the other – Read the full article
So you’ve e-Commerce’d your site up. (Hopefully with Magento, our favorite.) And you’re ready to roll. The homepage is ready. The product shots have been Photoshopped to perfection. The design and the color schemes look very cool (ahem, an aesthetic term) and you’ve set up your checkout process with a secure third-party payment gateway. That’s it, right? Well – not if you haven’t dedicated as much effort as you already have to your product pages. Here’s a list of awesome tips for turning your product pages into awesome sales magnets: Optimize it. This, really, is a given, since you want the search engines to find you as easily and as often as the human visitors do. Great ways to make your product page SEO-friendly include: avoiding duplicate content and duplicate URLs; writing up unique and compelling text descriptions for each product (don’t just copy the manufacturers’ descriptions); and editing this content in a way that makes it relevant to your – Read the full article
Most businesses and websites that invest in Pay-per-Click (PPC) campaigns know the basics of running one. They’d also know that the most important element of any PPC campaign is keyword research: spending time on finding out what phrases will be the most useful for your website when set against the cost of the most commonly used phrases in your business sector. Keyword research and keyword selection make up the single most important job for any website, and finding the balance between the most commonly used phrases and value for money when competing with your rivals can often make or break the performance – and value – of your campaign. Once you have mastered the basics of keyword research, it is possible to dig deeper into the more sophisticated arts of Pay-per-Click and hone your PPC strategies and skills even more. One way of doing this is through Pay-per-Click tracking. PPC tracking allows you to evaluate the Pay-per-Click campaigns you have – Read the full article
