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?
“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.
Internet Detox
Are you wishing the internet was never born? Like a newborn child that gives joy and misery in equal measure, you can’t stand the noise, but find the noise irresistible?
Do you really care that your close friends are ‘waiting for a Facebook friend invitation’ or Twittring that they’d like a coffee?
10 steps to a better life:
- Delete your inbox. Do it now. Delete it all. None of it matters.
- Set your out of office to : “I’m not reading emails until 4pm everyday. If it’s from someone I know, addressed to me (and not CC’d) I might read it, but can’t guarantee because I get 3000 emails a day. If it’s an emergency, call my cell phone + xxxxxx. Please note an emergency is an emergency, not please can you check out my facebook profile.
- Limit your internet activity to 3 dedicated tasks per day - no mindless browsing of daft things - max time 20 minutes
- Leave all Web 2.0 sites (Facebook etc) - wait for web 3.0! Web 3.0 will be so smart, you won’t have to tell anyone you’re sitting at home there’ll be a Googlebot telling the world you’d like a cup of tea.
- Look at your partner when you’re talking to them, no texting or emailing. They don’t like it.
- Don’t upgrade your phone when the contract’s due for renewal. Ask for a cash refund - you don’t need another phone, let alone one with 3G, 10 Megapixel cameras and 50GB of MP3 storage. To be honest you don’t need this phone. Talk to the person next to you.
- Don’t ever signup for a monthly subscription for anything. If it’s that useful, pay for it when you need it.
- Change your email address. You don’t need all the spam you’ve signed up for.
- Reply to your emails with firm instructions - don’t allow a conversation to emerge.
- Never text anybody, it hurts your fingers too much.
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.
Turning Customers into Broadcasters
In SEO and SEM we spend a lot of time filling the funnel. The more people we get to your website, the more chance we’ve got of creating a customer. If we’ve done our job properly, 10% of these visitors will turn into paying customers, so the more you fill, the more you make?
Well yes, but if you spend all your time focussing on the funnel, you will forget to make a business so spectacular, that your customers forget to flip the funnel, and shout down it to all their friends. Here’s some reasons why customers might flip the funnel when they use your e-commerce store:
1. Spectacular Fulfillment
Amazon has got this so right. When you get an Amazon delivery, you know it’s Amazon, even without the package branding. You know how to open it, you know that the book, cd, etc., will be perfectly presented. You’re content. It’s almost perfect, but its ubiquity gives smaller players something to aim at. Consider Seth Godin’s experience when he ordered from CD Baby:
Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make
sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the
crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can
buy.We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland
waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private
CD Baby jet on this day, Tuesday, June 18th.I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year”. We’re all
exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!
2. Coupons
Coupons are a great way to reward your customers for re-ordering, or for flipping the funnel. Why not give your customers £10 to give away to their best friends? If your product and service is great, your customers should feel great about recommending you to their friends, and even better if their friends get cash benefit.
3. Email Marketing
I do not mean spamming your customers with useless crap. Do not send your customers context-less advertising. This is a serious misuse of email. Email is so overrun with useless communications (even internal business communications have now tipped into meaningless CC drivel that we don’t need), that your emails should be carefully crafted to be extremely useful and targeted. I really don’t mind receiving Amazon emails that have book selections that reflect previous purchases, and I really don’t mind receiving holiday offers from Expedia that reflect when and where I’m likely to go.
Questions you should ask if you want to make money online
1. Are you selling a physical or a digital product?
My forthcoming book will be focussed on selling easy-to-shift physical product that people are actually searching for. It’s possible to make good money out of shifting digital product (many of you will be reading this as a free blog though!), but in general the digital market faces certain problems for the budding e-entrepreneur. The main problem is that the content that people really want can already be obtained by suppliers with massive leverage (e.g. Apple - iTunes) or illegally (e.g. LimeWire). You can pitch original content, software widgets, ebooks etc., but you’ve got a lot of work to do in establishing a market that doesn’t already exist.
At least with physical product, you will be shifting stuff that people want, and they know they want it.
2. What barriers to entry are there?
Ideally, you need a market which is difficult to enter or understand. Establishing supplier relationships for exercise bikes, for example, is fairly protracted.
3. Can you get good supply? Agree terms with your suppliers.
Will you be drop-shipping? (The manufacturer holds inventory, and ships when you get an order). Will you be buying stock? If so, can you buy small quantities, and achieve Amazon like JIT shipping.
4. What’s your price advantage? Put together a spreadsheet of prices
Get comparison prices using searches on Google Adwords, eBay, Amazon Marketplace and a price comparison engine, e.g. Froogle, Kelkoo or PriceGrabber. Calculate your likely margin.
5. How much will it cost to get a customer? Estimate the cost of conversion.
This is an approximate estimation, but you can do the following. Create a test page using a free blog tool (e.g. Type Pad, Word Press, or Blogger.com). Create an Adwords campaign, and look for the amount you’re paying for each keyword for each click-through (CPC). Ideally, you should expect around 6-10% click-through rate (CTR) if you’re Ad is well written, and compelling against the other Adwords being served. Of the 10% that clickthrough, you should be aiming for a 10% conversion rate.
Now, these are rough numbers, but I’ve seen them work across a range of industies. So 100 people see your Ad (100 impressions, cost of an impression = zero). 10 people click through (the exact amount you pay for each click-through is determined by a real-time auction with your competitors, but let’s assume £0.20 per clickthrough). 1 person buys, so the cost of the customer acquisition is £2 (10 x £0.20).
If your margin on a tub of vitamins is £6, you’ve just made £4 profit, and you’ve got a business.
Dunells.com - great online wine store
Webreality has just launched a new e-commerce site for Dunells Wine Merchants in Jersey. It’s an exceptionally good site, and particular credit must go to Dale Broadhead, and the whole WR team.
What makes this site a Purple Cow
Baldy riffs with THE bald guy
I had the immense pleasure of spending the day with Seth Godin in New York today. You guess from reading his books that Seth will be energetic, approachable and genuinely nice, and you wouldn’t be guessing wrong. Seth donated the proceeds from today’s seminar to Acumen, so at $2000 a head, I reckon Seth donated $100,000, which gives you some measure of the man. And at $2000 a head you’d expect the seminar attendees to be quite exceptional, and they were. Individuals ranged from significant online web app providers to a Brazilian TV magnate. Discussion was varied, but there were definite Seth themes. At the heart of Seth’s doctrine is the new industrial revolution. We’ve moved from the 1950s TV marketing - factory production model (average ad, sells average product to Mr Average). And now we’re in a ‘remarkable permission complex‘. The best brands have permission to talk to their consumers (think Apple - iPod - iPhone). 
Seth sliced and diced his way through every business represented on the day, and for Webreality this meant more focus on verticals (using our core techology to deliver very targeted solutions) and leveraging our Adword technology. Webreality’s position at the heart of ecommerce and emarketing in Jersey, does give us opportunity to deliver more traction for our customers - more thoughts to follow! For now, back to the sights and sounds of New York; a city which has just the right amount of energy!
Baldy hits New York and flies SilverJet, a real Purple Cow
This week I’ve got the pleasure of Seth Godin’s
Slingmedia magic
I’ve had 2 weeks of fiddling with my home network to get this wretched Sling Box working. The Sling Box takes your TV feed, bungs it out over the ‘net where it can be consumed when you’re on holiday or upstairs on the laptop. Very cool, but … what a nightmare.Amazingly, the Sling Box doesn’t have built in WLAN so you need to set-up a wireless bridge with an ethernet connection. I’ve tried the boxes I had lying round, the Apple Airport express, a Belkin base station which I tried to turn into a bridge, a D-link bridge that would bridge but not to ethernet, and finally a Belkin bridge with ethernet connection, which worked. Now, I’ve got an admittedly complex home network (apple wlan, and a PC wlan on different subnets), but this was an absolute mission, and I’m left wondering how anyone other than a network engineer could manage it.But what about the Sling box, well it works, it’s a bit glitchy, and jerky, but perfectly watchable, and with a full Sky remote, it’s v. impressive. £100 and no monthly, it’s a must buy.