Coupons still work. Consumers may not find them as often as they used to in the Sunday paper or in magazine inserts, but this doesn’t mean that coupons are no longer popular or effective – because they still are. Just do a quick check on the Web and immediately you’ll find tens of thousands of online coupon sites – like RetailMeNot and CouponSaver – offering discounts, special deals, free shipping offers, and other similar privileges to consumers. If, as a small business owner, online retailer, merchant, or Internet marketer, you still haven’t tried using coupons as an online sales tool, then you might want to start doing so – especially at a time when the world is still trying to recover from the financial crisis. According to recent studies, over 76 percent of the shopping population use coupons, which continue to gain such popularity that the number of people searching for them on the Web has grown to thrice 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
Last week we published a guide on how to monitor Google Places reviews, Web updates, and content changes. It was well-received by our readers, so we’d like to build on the post and share info this time on tools for online reviews monitoring and management. Hopefully, this list will help you track online reviews of your brand, product, establishment, service, or business – and enhance your reputation as more customers talk about you on Google Places, Yelp, online directories, local business listings, and social media sites. Or, if you’ve used any of the online reputation management tools below, do let us know by leaving a comment below and sharing with us your experience. ReviewPush Texas-based ReviewPush markets itself as an “online review management tool for small to large businesses”. It offers a dashboard for monitoring / tracking reviews, protecting your brand and reputation, engaging with customers, and enhancing product offerings and promotions (such as coupons). ReviewPush features include: Continuous social – Read the full article
Magento is an ecommerce script which is said to be more authoritative for ecommerce and was developed by Varien. Magento uses Zend PHP and MYSQL databases and is said to be an open source program. It is said to be more flexible in nature along with the modular structure and is totally capable of being scaled and also possesses a vast range of management options which most of the users of magento are fond of. Magento is more superior in nature and presents your products in a very powerful manner. You can create your products catalog easily and also manage it. Varien previously worked with osCommerce and they intended to diverge osCommerce but then decided to redraft and rephrase it and hence it resulted in the formation of Magento. Magento was started to develop in 2007 and in the month of august in the same year, a public beta version was announced and in 2010, Magento mobile was made available – Read the full article
Businesses have come to accept the fact that social media plays a big role in the Internet marketing campaign of a company. Promoting through the various social networking sites is usually free, and it provides a good platform for communicating with and building positive relationships with a business’s existing clients and prospective customers. This is the reason why most, if not all, companies have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, LinkedIn, etc. – and they use these extensively to promote their business. But let us admit it. Managing these different social networking accounts can be time-consuming and can be a real headache. For any business, every minute is important: one should therefore find an effective way of properly managing all social media marketing efforts. Here are a few tips: As you begin to create accounts in these different social networking sites, it will be beneficial to create a file with all your information on your various social networking accounts: usernames, – Read the full article
Social media is buzzing, QR codes are all the hype, and e-mail marketing is trendy, but where does that leave good old-fashioned referrals? Unfortunately for many startup companies, taking the time to consider the importance of referrals is the last thing on the “to do” list. After all, if you do a good job and someone wants to refer you, they can—it is out of your hands, right? Wrong. Believe it or not, it is not enough to simply hope someone refers your business to others. Someone may work with your business and say it is the best experience they have ever had, yet this does not guarantee that they will refer your business to someone else. In many cases, your clients and customers will have to seek out someone they know looking for your particular services. This takes some work, so you have to give your customers and clients a reason to do this work. According to activerain.com, a – Read the full article
To build an effective, profitable, and customer-driven site, you need to dedicate more time and effort to information gathering and planning. The following are some guidelines that will help you build a successful website. What are your specific goals? Do you want a brochure site? Do you intend to sell services and/or products? Are you focused on branding and company awareness? Information and content? Social network communities? You need to think through this aspect since it will form the foundation of your overall strategy. Find websites within your industry which you can emulate. It is okay to borrow ideas, as long as you personalize them. Measure of success Usually, businesses succeed when specific goals are imposed on them. By having a clear goal, be it generating online income or attracting a certain number of visitors to your site, you enhance your chances of success. Take time to list down your goals. Remember that this list could change as your site – Read the full article
Blogs have increasingly become valuable multimedia hubs where personal bloggers and companies provide information through all types of media in various categories of interest. When bloggers write posts and get them published, they expect readers to find them. The fact, however, is that your blog is one among millions of others – probably even hundreds of millions – existing in the Web universe. Instead of waiting to be discovered, you need to find a way of telling the world that you exist. The best way of doing this is to promote your blog to social media sites. Once your post is published at your ‘hub’, you should let your followers and fans find the post where they hang out. With more than 200 million Twitter users and about 800 million on Facebook, having your post promoted through social media is crucial in giving your blog much needed exposure. There are several major platforms where you can publish and enable people – Read the full article
