A great article about trying to be all thing to all people – which we all know doesn’t work, but so many of us try it anyway!
(via grokdotcom)
An interesting video about a poor customer service experience. There’s nothing spectacular about it, but it shows you how little things can lose a customer. So many companies (such as HP in this one) will spend millions on advertising, but then alienate the customer once they have them hooked.
I was in my Gmail account today (which I love) and noticed this ad (a friend had sent me an email mentioning a projector).
Hmmm. I wonder if that’s against Google’s Terms of Service? If not, it’s not very ethical in my opinion, to try and bypass a click.
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A great discussion and great example of viral marketing on Stephan Spencer’s blog.
There’s one great feature on this site which not many people take advantage of (I can see it in my stats). A problem lots of people have is they want to find a cart that does some unusual requirement. My site only lists a few dozen things, but if you want specific support for Canadian taxes or whatever your unusual requirement may be, no site can help you with that. Or can it…?
What you need to try is my ecommerce resources search. This is powered by Google, but what it does is searches the sites of every vendor lists on this site. If you did a Google search for Canadian taxes you’d get all sorts of irrelevant results, but using my search you only get results from vendors talking about Canadian taxes. Perfect!
Give it a try and let me know what you think.
http://www.shopping-cart-reviews.com/search/advanced.aspx
One of the most famous quotes in advertising which most people have heard is:
“Half my advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half.â€
Never have truer words been spoken. Except… that doesn’t have to be true any more. One of the great things about online advertising is that, with the right tools, you can work out exactly how effective every single last cent spent is. It’s an advertisers dream! So there’s no need to argue about which online ad is better – Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture), or any other type of advertising – one of the other ad networks, direct advertising or whatever.
All you need is a decent web analytics package (hint: Google Analytics is perfect for this, and free) and a bit of time and expertise to set it up and you can work out which ad, often even which version of which ad (eg. which headline) resulted in the most sales. More later…
For those of you in Australia or planning to be here in April, I’d suggest you check out Online Shop 2007, and ecommerce conference in Melbourne on April 18.
They have got a great selection of speakers lined up and it should be a good day. I’ll be speaking as well about integrating usability into your day to day business.
If you are there, say hi!
“Oh yes, we are customer focused”.
It’s a bit like an ad – “New and improved”. What do you expect them to say? Old and boring? Everyone today is customer focused. Which is why everywhere you go, online and offline, you are overwhelmed with places stocking exactly the products you want and exceptional customer service.
Right? Hmmmm.
I suggest that most of us only pay lip service to customer focus. Sure, we say we are, and we probably think we are. But have you really thought through what customer focus really means to your business? I challenge you to write a list defining what customer focus looks like. It’s up to you what goes on it, but here’s some suggestions to get you thinking:
- I spend at least an hour a day talking to customers. Yes, that’s a lot, but imagine how productive the other 7 (or other 12+ depending on the hours you keep!) would be if you were totally in tune with your customers needs
- Every purchasing decision is based on customer data
- I run a usability test on my site once every 3 months, and strive to make sure at the next test none of the same failure points are hit
Food for thought.
PayPal have a lot of offerings for merchants: Website payments pro, payflow payment gateway (including payflow pro and payflow link) and a bunch of others. Massimo from ProductCart has blogged about all the different versions and which is best for different merchants. Very useful indeed!
I found this interesting site about the future of marketing. This contains the thoughts on the future of marketing by some of the top clients & ad agencies in the world.
Especially interesting was the slide on confidence in return on investment for different media.