What’s the opposite of a purple cow?
Seth Godin defines a purple cow as a business that’s remarkable. More often than not we encounter truly unremarkable businesses, and more often that not businesses that are remarkably bad. It’s not the remarkably bad businesses Seth had in mind when he coined the phrase.
Still, it got me thinking what the opposite of a purple cow might be. I’m going for dead sheep. Here’s how to be a dead sheep.
1. Don’t answer the phone in under 5 rings.
2. When you do answer the phone, don’t ask my name, don’t check my customer history, and whatever you do don’t do an early home delivery for me - it would break the rules.
3. Don’t deviate from your inventory, list of services, menu, whatever. The customer’s not got enough taste to demand these things!
4. Don’t store my details on your website. After all it shouldn’t be easy for me to re-order.
5. Make sure your ecommerce process is beautiful. Lots of Flash, lots of stages where I can exit. And best of all make sure the final payment page is in a screen popup that will be blocked by 90% of today’s browsers.
6. Never offer refunds without a fight to the death.
7. Deliver my stuff late, without an explanation.
8. Spam me with lots of offers I didn’t ask for.
9. Don’t stock things people will want, and direct them to online competitors.
10. Reduce your staff levels in a bid to cut costs, the customers won’t notice really.
This list of 10 (I’m sure you can add more), was gleaned from real experiences with Jersey businesses this week. The good thing about a recession is that dead sheep might bleat for a while, but eventually they’ll be properly dead.
Care to share some dead sheep experiences?
How much do you care about your customers?
At HealthSpark we’re in the start-up phase, so we’ve taken to ringing customers who register but don’t order. The results have been fantastic. Customers are bowled over that we care enough to ring, and we start by asking them what they think of the site, and then we email them a £5 voucher to say thank you for telling us.
This shouldn’t just be the activity of a start-up. If someone bowls into your shop, you should talk to them. Consider LiveChat, or better still call them.
Change This - starting with a click
Quick site recommendation, and a favour to ask…
ChangeThis is a very cool site which was the brainchild of Seth Godin. It’s a site for perpetuating new ideas and new thinking. High quality ‘manifestos’ are published, and then the ChangeThis community spreads the idea.
I’m close to finishing my new book on how to become an ecommerce gazillionaire, and I’m going to pre-release the book for free on ChangeThis. To get ChangeThis to carry the book, I need lots of votes (this is the favour bit). So please please can you click this link, and forward it to your mates to click also.
Thanks to all who’ve voted already, we’re currently no.4, which isn’t too bad for 24 hours voting!
Short and to the point
Over the last three months I’ve been doing a really vicious email cull. It started by using out-of-office replies to indicate that I wasn’t wedded to my Crackberry, and that I wouldn’t be responding to emails until 4pm every day. This slowed down the onslaught, as writers started to re-consider whether they should email at all.
Then I started ignoring all emails where I was CC’d. You should try this one, it really works. If you’re CC’d it’s not important, and someone’s either covering their proverbial, or giving you information that you *might* need. Ideally, I should script Outlook to delete CC emails as they arrive.
So, emails should be short, to the point, and you should use them when they’re relevant. So, when you’re emailing your customers you are burning up a valuable right to communicate - it should be short, pithy, hard-hitting, and worth reading (and sharing).
Today I received an email from a supplier by mistake. Not only was I CC’d, but so were 200 other businesses in Jersey (BCC is a technology that doesn’t exist for some yet). 20 minutes later we all received another email, apologising for the previous mistake, but with all the emails still present. That’s one way to get your customers talking about you.
“Psst … have you heard about Dave Balter’s new book?”
Dave Balter has just released his new book The Word of Mouth Manual: Volume II. It’s free. High quality, well-written, and fantastically illustrated. If you want you can buy a shiny water resistant version with a hand-signed piece of art by Seth Minkin (Amazon: $45!).
In case you haven’t got time to read the ebook, the application for us mere mortals is create something that’s worth talking about. And give lots of good stuff away, it’s how business ought to be.
What should I budget for an ecommerce start-up?
It’s a good question that gets answered in lots of different ways. I’ve got £30k to spend on this site, and it should be better than Amazon.com is a quite frequent approach. Your web agency will always want to know what your budget is - in some ways it’s a fair question; how else can they know what they’re going to build for you.
But when you budget, you’ve got to think way beyond the site build. You should see the site build as opening the door of your new office. More often than not, clients come with an expectation that they’ll spend £8k on the website, and their Adword budget for year 1 is £2k. I’ve seen this 80/20 approach operate at all levels. It’s wrong (not Pareto, he’s never wrong). You’ve got to flip it. Spend 20% of your budget on the site build, and 80% on Adwords, link building and content work (spread this over twelve months, and don’t expect a return in year 1 - you’ll get one, but it’s nice to be surprised).
So, you’ve got a £10k budget. Spend £2k on the site, and £8k Adwords. Or, £20k on the site, and £80k on Adwords. That’s how it works.
How to eat an elephant, (how to make an online mega-brand)
Making a new online store really work often feels as unachievable as eating the ubiquitous elephant. The answer, of course, one mouthful at a time. Here’s a selection of tasks you could consider as a mouthful. You just need to do one of these a day:
- Negotiate or create a meaningful hyperlink from an external website to your site (ideally, on a content link from a site with appropriate context, e.g. Rosehip. Reciprocal links (where the other site links back to you) are not worthless, but have less value.
- Add new and compelling content to your site. If you keep improving the content on the site, the GoogleBot will revisit more frequently. And frequent content changes are a powerful signal to Google that your site *must* have relevant content.
- Make a tweak on an adword campaign (but do remember to split-test, and pull weak ads quickly).
- Read your Analytics Data, find the most exited page, and change it!
- Write a blog entry that someone will want to share
- Approach a possible affiliate partner
- Make a cheese and ham sandwich
- Drink a cup of coffee
- Will be at ten soon, all good blog lists come in tens
- Remember to forward this post to a friend.
37Signals rejects Photoshop
Great post on the 37Signals Blog - Photoshop and elaborate mockups just don’t work for building good UI (user-interface). And they should know Basecamp etc are benchmarks in UI design.
Don’t accept the finished item from your web designer, insist on getting launched straightaway, and then iterate and iterate.
The joy of payment (gateway providers)
If you’re making money online, you could be raising revenue through Amazon Marketplace, eBay or affiliate traffic. It’s a doddle, you’ve got no exposure to credit-card fraud, no chargebacks, no settlement periods to worry about, you just collect a cheque or watch an electronic transfer go kerching in your online account.
But sooner or later you will make the jump into a full ecommerce store (get the book!), and when you do you’ll need to get a payment gateway provider (PGP). Well actually, you’ll need a few pieces in the jigsaw.
Last month, we launched Healthspark. Healthspark is an OScommerce site we built for £200, and it broke even on day 2. When we launched the site, I tried to bypass the PGP route, and went instead for just PayPal and Google Checkout (see earlier post on Google Adwords Checkout).
Both PayPal and Google Checkout are not PGPs - they’re complete payment solution providers. You don’t need an SSL certificate (the thing that gives you a padlock on your site). You don’t process credit cards, you don’t keep the data (in fact with Google Checkout you might not even get the email address of your customer).
The Paypal/Google checkout thing has worked well for HealthSpark in its infancy, until Google Checkout decided that the natural remedies for male problems might infringe its stringent policies. I don’t mind Google having anti-gun, anti-natural remedy policies, anti-everything but their response was strange. When Google complained, we pulled checkout. When we removed the offending items, Google wouldn’t re-instate Google Checkout until we’d put the buttons back (even though they didn’t work) on a LIVE SITE! Long story short, Google Checkout is back, but now we push on with a PGP.
If you want real control (and better credit card commission rates) you’ll need to process credit cards using a payment gateway provider (PGP). Your bank (Merchant provider) will give you a Merchant account. You then need to look at a PGP.
Your website can interface with the PGP in two ways. First (and best) it can transmit credit card details from a secure page (SSL - padlocked), the customer never leaves the site, and the PGP handles everything in the background. Second, you can pass your customer from our site to a branded page (hosted on the PGP’s servers), the payment is handled, and the customer returned to a thank you page on your site. This latter route is a good alternative, there are no SSL costs, no security risks, and the brand of your PGP can help secure the deal (e.g. NatWest).
Your bank will be keen to push their own PGP - most high street banks are now running their own PGPs, but look at the small print carefully, you need to consider commission rates and payment terms.
The joy of payment is a joy often deferred, whichever route you choose.
Chitika Premium Units - AdSense watch out!
I’m really impressed with Chitika’s behavioural targeted Ads. The Ads show in the context of the blog, and only show when the blog/content is directly relevant. This makes AdSense look like a scatter-gun approach, and surprisingly ham-fisted.
Chitika’s model is based on much less traffic, but it is highly targeted. Moreover, the quality of the click is higher, because the traffic hasn’t been irritated by lots of other irrelevant advertising. This is a bright future for context advertising - where you only get the advertising you want.
Nice to see Google’s monopoly being challenged. If I was Google, I’d do even more with Google Checkout, and make sure that adverts are only served to those likely to buy, so that Ads are served not just on context but on your previous buying patterns. Then you’d only get really useful ads when you need them. You don’t need a holiday ad when you’ve just got back from holiday.
You can see the Chitika Premium Unit in action on this page, by clicking http://baldysblog.com/#chitikatest=mortgage