Michelle Rodger: Businesses can't afford to ignore net results at fingertips

Published on Saturday 9 May 2009 14:25

SMALL businesses are missing out on valuable online sales opportunities because they are consistently failing to take advantage of the digital revolution.

According to BT Business research, one in six businesses has no facility for customers to buy goods through their website. More than 40 per cent of sites have pages containing missing or broken links and, tellingly, one in ten small businesses rates their own site as "very poor". Yet predictions indicate that about 25 per cent of retail spending this year – about 78 billion – will come from online sales and, by 2011, 32 million UK consumers will be shopping online. We are clearly missing a significant opportunity.

But it's not just about spending a small fortune on an all-singing, all-dancing website. Once you have established that digital marketing fits with your overall business growth and marketing strategy, it is vital to optimise your online presence; all the bells and whistles in the world won't disguise a poor digital marketing strategy.

You should be using a mix of different channels to create an identity, such as a blogs and/or video, and eNewsletters can be very effective. Try developing a customer community and link your site and yourself to social networks – 62 per cent of those 32 million internet consumers I already mentioned will consult online communities before making a purchase.

Just sitting back and waiting for your customer to find your flashy website won't work. You need to drive, measure and analyse traffic to your site (Google Analytics or Omniture can help with this) to plan future developments.

Ask for and then use feedback from your customers and also from those who visited your site and then left without making a purchase (Poll Daddy or Survey Monkey offer free/very cheap applications).

And look for ways to engage with your customer, offer them something of value and keep in touch with them. Even if they aren't buying now, they may well be in a better position to do so in a few months – if your company name sticks in their mind because you took the time to send them some relevant market info, then it's you they will come to when they are ready to spend.

The best example is e-mail marketing. Cleverly managed, an e-mail marketing campaign will deliver a number of benefits to the SME, not least exceptional levels of speed, reach and simplicity.

Currently about 60 per cent of UK businesses are running e-mail marketing campaigns right now. Of those who aren't, 85 per cent plan to do so and 86 per cent of businesses say they will be increasing their e-mail marketing budget.

For every 1 spent on e-mail marketing in the UK in 2007, a generous 48.56 was returned to the coffers.

According to Stephen Ng, who specialises in e-mail marketing, this is a significant opportunity for Scottish businesses. Prospects and clients are turning away from more expensive large companies and turning to SMEs to supply them. Using e-mail marketing to attract and retain these organisations is a simple, cost-effective tactic .

Ng, owner of Cubic Design and a former BT Young Entrepreneur of the Year, says it is 20 per cent technical and 80 per cent people focused. Simple things like giving your customers – and potential customers – a valuable, relevant piece of industry information they can't get anywhere else, putting a short testimonial in your e-mail or giving them a guarantee of your service delivery are more important than the nuts and bolts of the process.

An example: think Christmas, think cards, think postage and the environmental impact of heavier postbags and increased deliveries. Then consider the benefits associated with an e-mail version of corporate greetings cards. The Children's Hospice Association Scotland (CHAS) recruited a Glasgow-based digital marketing agency to devise an e-mail marketing application which offered them full control over branded eCards, with personalised messages, which were sent out to thousands of contacts.

As a cost-cutting exercise, it was hugely successful. But it went much deeper than that. Alienation Digital's e-mail marketing initiative allowed CHAS to accurately measure the success of its campaigns by accessing statistics about how many people received and opened their e-mails, and how many of those then clicked through to their website. CHAS actually used this facility to track the value of the donations on their website which resulted directly from the eCard.

Delivering a tangible return on investment is particularly beneficial in a recession, says Alienation Digital's David Johnstone, and he is adamant that e-mail marketing delivers this far more cost effectively than many other marketing channels.

It's not a one-off initiative though, it's building a relationship, developing a network across your customer base. And, as Ng said, you shouldn't get caught up with the technical wizardry of digital marketing – leave that to the experts – instead concentrate on getting the tone of the message right for your customer and for your brand, on delivering solutions to your target market, and enhancing your reputation both on and offline.

This is back-to-basics stuff. It's not hi-tech but old hat. Think common courtesy, think old-fashioned, people-focused service delivery – with a smile ;)