The main responsibility I have been given is the recruitment of the Sales and Marketing Placement Students for the 2012-13 year – a very important responsibility as it is the main way we recruit new members to join the ProspectSoft team. This year, we have had a very large number, but at the same time a very high standard of applicants. We are looking for the right candidates to fill the (hopefully very large) shoes that we will all have left next September when it is time for us to return to University.

One of the main responsibilities Nikesh has is working alongside the marketing manager on our websites. In this role he isn’t just simply following orders but is actually expected and encouraged to bring his own marketing ideas to the table on how we can continually improve our web presence. As someone who didn’t have a clue about what HTML was, let alone what it stood for he quickly got up to speed and is now constantly maintaining and updating the websites. This however is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we do at ProspectSoft whilst on Placement.

We work hard but play hard at the same time. Due to the young and vibrant ProspectSoft team, we are never lacking in volunteers who are willing to step back into ‘student mode’ and enjoy a night out in Oxford, whether it be a casual ‘Rum N Ting’ drink at the Jamaican bar or a full night clubbing. The company also enjoyed a trip to Thorpe Park on Fireworks Night. Although it was the last day the park was open, the queues were surprisingly short, so after several adrenaline filled hours we had all got our fix of rollercoaster rides.

Nick

P.S. Don’t forget, for more regular updates you can follow our twitter (@PS_Placements).

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Which products and services sell successfully in the online model and why?

What do you think the top selling product type is online? I’ll share that with you in a minute…

but really, it’s not about the type of product you sell, it is however about the target market.

Most business to business suppliers have a readymade market in their existing customers and best of all the credibility and trust already exists in the brand. For many suppliers their products will naturally lend themselves to being ordered via the web. The critical thing is being able to offer facilities that make it possible:

Customers will expect to be able to:

• Buy on their existing credit account
• Get the same price as when they telephone
• Saved template orders
• Multiple staff daily shared/open orders
• Re-order from a history of what they have had previously

…the list goes on, think what you currently offer on the phone or face to face. These are the critical elements to selling successfully online – it is not just about the product.

What if your products don’t naturally translate to the online model? Pause and perhaps think again…

• What do you currently sell to you customers?
• What else could you sell that is complementary or supplementary to what they already buy from you?

It may be that you don’t sell these items at the moment, but do you have a readymade market for these products – you may even be able to back to back the supply of these directly from your suppliers.

By the way books are the best-selling online products.

Delivery charges, what is the best plan?

This subject causes much discussion in the online model:

Should delivery be free? or by weight, size, distance, order value… The list goes on, but the truth is, any or all of these may be valid – in general there are two rules on the web for delivery charges:

1. The Simpler, the better
2. Be transparent & make it clear as early as possible.

Uncertainty about final cost (very often delivery charges) is the number 2 reason for abandoned baskets (I’ll share the number 1 reason with you next time).

Even if it is impossible to give exact delivery charges up front, explain how delivery will be calculated. If you can’t explain succinctly how delivery is calculated then perhaps it is time to reconsider and simplify!

Thanks for reading – next time I’ll be looking at Web Layout for Success.

A good starting point however, is considering how your business takes and processes orders.

If you take orders over the phone, a great opportunity exists for you to save money by making more effective use of your website.

Here’s why.

Your customers do not normally enjoy ringing up to place an order. They have to ring you during business hours (when they are working too), and they may need to know part or serial numbers to make sure they order the correct product.

• Quite often, they would much rather place orders at evenings or weekends
• Quite often, they want exactly the same order they placed last time
• Quite often, they want a replacement part for something you know they have installed on site

Allowing them to place orders through your website can save money, because you don’t need somebody reacting to a phone call, and you don’t need somebody re-keying the order into your accounting system. Product and price information can be automatically pulled in from your accounting system, so that your online visitors get the same experience they would get offline.

To draw on an American cliché, you can arrive at work in the morning having already made a sale. Importantly, that sale cost you very little to process.

For many businesses, the biggest cost savings in 2012 are going to be made reducing your cost of sales. While four telesales staff may take 200 orders a day costing £400, an eCommerce site costs as little as £10 for 2000 orders a day. (You might want to read that again!) Taking orders online allows you to leverage your time cost effectively.

Your website can help in other ways too.

If you operate a field sales team, you already know that operating a field sales team is expensive (especially if your role includes signing off their expenses!). With a typical sales visit in the UK costing over £200, you need your team to be closing as many deals as possible.

Unfortunately, your sales team can only attend so many meetings a week. Encouraging your customers to place orders online can eliminate unnecessary site visits, allowing your sales team to focus on high value deals.

If your customers cannot currently place orders online, and your accounts staff currently have to re-key orders into your back-office systems, then you really should take a look at creating an online store or trade portal. Depending on your website traffic, it can pay for itself in a matter of months.

Most of the information online about eCommerce is about making money and increasing sales; which is fine (and true). Quite often however the real benefits come as cost savings from faster, 24/7 order processing. Your customers win because they can place orders at a time convenient to them, and you win by receiving less inbound calls.

We are not saying you should get rid of your telephone order takers; some of your customers will never buy online. What an eCommerce store does do is allow you to leverage your time and effort, allowing your team to focus on proactive order getting, not reactive order taking. If they are going to buy anyway, why not let them buy online?

If you would like to learn more about how taking online orders can save you money, we recently put together a free special report called Real eCommerce for Real Companies. Based around five years experience of helping ‘bricks and mortar’ companies extend their business model to the web, the report includes case studies of industries as diverse as bicycle distribution and industrial lifting equipment.

The report is available for free to registered website users, along with our other reports and recorded webinars. Registration is fast and free, you can access the report here.

The extensive training consisted of a basic product knowledge course, mostly aimed at the Sales & Marketing interns, but highly useful for our side of things too; a look into the installation and configuration of a ProspectSoft system, and a few sessions on development processes within ProspectSoft.

Still, you can start a new job with all the training in the world; it’ll still be a bit daunting. Fortunately, the veterans of Operations and Client Services were very friendly and understanding, and knew that mistakes aren’t just likely, they’re inevitable. The hardest lesson to learn is that the timescales and the structure of the working world is not like University. We need to constantly make sure we’re on top of our time-keeping, and learn to prioritise tasks in order to get things done.

Four months on, and we’d definitely integrated well, each with our own ‘areas of expertise’, and in some cases nicknames. Our day to day activities included bug fixes, enhancements to bespoke projects, and fairly often exciting new projects and making the department generally more efficient and capable. At the moment we’ve just finished working on quite a big project (but for various reasons I can’t say what this project is)!

Beyond the working day, we’ve felt welcomed by our colleagues and have been invited to a number of big events such as the company BBQ, with our managing director and excellent cook Andy, and recently the office Christmas party. A few of us have also started highly competitive 5-a-side football matches every Thursday after work. And nothing helps the bruised and battered on a Friday, like the monthly Pizza Friday!

After the Christmas break, we arrived back at ProspectSoft feeling refreshed and rested, greeted by some very interesting news: a company-wide reshuffle! As such, Simon was moved into the expanded development department, while Operations and Client Services were merged into one super-department, to allow the full customer satisfaction. A couple of days into the new year and with a new structure, we are now anticipating the new challenges and new opportunities which come with this.

Matt

P.S. Don’t forget you can get more regular updates from our Placement Twitter, PS_Placements

I wanted to give you an overview of our day to day lives in the office, but when it actually came to writing something down I realised, no two jobs are the same. From planning events to getting us shortlisted for a Rate My Placement award and running customer days to helping develop our software, we have all had the chance to put our own individual stamp on the company. It’s safe to say that we have all been encouraged, not only to utilise our existing skills, but take on new and challenging tasks.

So that’s a very brief overview of the types of tasks we have taken on in the last few months, but don’t worry we’re not going to leave it there. Over the next few weeks we will be releasing our ‘The life of…’ series to properly fill you in on what exactly it is that we get up to.

Look out for ‘The life of…’ posts beginning on the 9^th January.

P.S. For more regular updates follow our Placement twitter (@PS_Placements).

Never is this more true than in a recession.

The question then, is what should you spend your marketing budget on in 2012? What is likely to bring you the best return on investment?

Well, we don’t know for certain. It depends on what marketing you already do, and what your business objectives are. Whatever you are doing at the moment however, we DO know two things that will help with your marketing:

1. Invest in marketing you can measure…

Firstly, if you are watching your budget there has never been a better time to invest in direct marketing; marketing that aims to generate a response from an individual that you can measure.

What is the only form of direct marketing businesses are not cutting back investment on?

Email.

The number of emails sent – even excluding spam – now outnumbers Facebook posts, tweets and web pages four to one.

This is good and bad news. The good news is that email is still the most cost-effective of your direct marketing options. The bad news is that because it is the last thing to be cut from the marketing budget, competition for eyeball time in your customer’s inbox has become fierce.

Email is free at the point of delivery, so why would you want to pay for your email marketing?

A good question. To compete for eyeball time, you need to:

2. Make your emails more effective with smarter use of customer data.

Your recipients need to recognise your name, and know that your emails are going to be worth reading. Creating relevant, valuable information for your emails however is not easy.

You need to know what the recipient has bought in the past, how long ago, and how much they spent.

We have been writing about how to create emails based on this information in previous posts, however the truth is that you can pull in this information manually. Unfortunately, doing it manually requires time and effort; time you could be spending on better things.

Those of you who have been following our best practice emails will know that we offer a high end email marketing solution. It isn’t the cheapest. But what you get for your money is all your customers’ information in a central location, at the right place and time, in front of the right people. No manual work. Your customer facing staff can then see:

• What emails a customer has opened
• Which links they clicked on
• What products they have bought
• What conversations they have had with you
• What problems they have phoned in about
• What web baskets they have opened but not completed

Do you think your sales team would close more opportunities with access to this information?

Every ProspectSoft Email Marketing solution comes with our profiling plugin free of charge (normally £1000). The profiling plugin allows you to capture the likes and preferences of your email recipients, allowing them to only receive emails on particular topics, or only receive certain types of email, for example product update emails.

Providing good, relevant information is the key to making your emails more effective.

Preparing for 2012…

You are no doubt making plans for 2012. To give yourself the best chance of achieving your goals, you need the correct tools.

You need tools that help you make better use of information your business already has.

ProspectSoft Email Marketing is not the cheapest email solution available to you. If you just want to send emails, good, cheap solutions exist elsewhere.

However if you want to improve the relevancy of your emails with real customer data, we don’t know a more cost effective way.

Until 5PM on Friday 23rd December we are offering three months of no monthly email marketing charges. Of all the plans you need to make for next year, planning how to use email marketing more effectively needs to be at the top of your list.

If you would like a demonstration of ProspectSoft Email Marketing, our sales advisors can talk you through all the options. But whatever you decide, make a decision today. Orders placed before next Friday will save you upwards of £300, so take a look now at www.prospectsoft.com/email-marketing.

The economic climate is unlikely to improve. Make sure you are spending your marketing budget on media you can measure.

www.prospectsoft.com/email-marketing.

If you have never run a pay-per-click campaign, we are discussing the placing of ads at the top and on right of the search engines to drive when peoples searching for particular terms. We are yet to meet a business that does not want more visitors to their website, and buying clicks is the fastest way to increase these visitors.

Buying clicks however, is becoming expensive. When Google first introduced Google Adwords, you could buy clicks at a on competitive rate of  5 or 10 pence. Now, bidding on the term ‘email marketing’ for example can cost over £10 per click!

While email marketing is an extreme example, you may have seen this in your own industry. Clicks that used to be 20p are now £1. Clicks that used to be £1 are now £3.

It isn’t just pay per click…

Getting your website ranked organically (on the left hand side of the search engine) has also become more difficult. You need to produce great content for your website. You need to find relevant websites and ask them to link to you. You need to make sure your website is listed in relevant industry directories. Altogether not the fastest process – and a lot of manual work.

Website creation has become commoditised by great content management systems. Because it is now easier to create a website (and every business has one), ultimately there is  more competition.

So getting traffic is getting harder and more expensive. The question is what can you do to protect yourself?

Make your website more effective

For the visitors you do get, you can set up tests on your website so that more people make a sales enquiry, or more people buy your products.  Of course, this is a long term process that is easier said than done!

We recommend using Google Website Optimizer to start testing different versions of your web pages.

Your next best option – we think – is to improve the quality of your email marketing, and make better use of the customer intelligence it generates.

We have covered in previous posts how to improve the quality of your email marketing,making sure you are maximising the number of emails that get delivered, and avoiding the spam filters. We also covered how to make sure your emails compete for eyeball time in your recipient’s inbox.

Doing that gets you into the game. What sets you apart however, is sharing information about who opened your emails, and what they clicked on. Extending this information to your sales teams along with the customer’s purchase history and past conversations is what sets you apart from the competition.

Pay per click is getting more expensive because the barriers to creating a Google Adwords account are low. It is possible to get your ads appearing within 15 minutes. Because it is easy and fast to do, everyone has done it and it has become expensive.

Optimising your email marketing is not as fast, or easy. Because it isn’t as fast or easy, most of your competitors won’t bother doing it. They will send untargeted email ‘blasts’ out, then claim email marketing ‘no longer works’.

You of course, know differently.

If you want to start seeing better email marketing results, you have to put in the time and effort required . You also need tools that give you the highest possible chance of success.

If you would like to improve the quality of your email marketing, and:

• Target recipients based on more sophisticated targeting criteria
• Maximise your deliverability and open rates
• Share information about what a contact has responded to

Then I urge you to take a look today at ProspectSoft Email Marketing. What sets ProspectSoft Email Marketing apart is that it comes with a fully functional CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. The CRM system then collates all of a customer’s information in the same place: the phone calls you have had, the products they have bought, the emails they opened and what links they clicked on.

It does take a little work, and what you then do with this information is up to you. But in our opinion, it is the safest way to give you a sustainable competitive advantage.

There are now less than two weeks until the end of our email marketing promotion. Until Christmas, we are offering three months of no monthly charges on all email marketing solutions.

Take a look today – www.prospectsoft.com/email-marketing.

Clicks will not get cheaper. SEO will not get easier. It’s time to make the most of what you already have.

Your marketers have spent time preparing your eshot, carefully crafting the subject line, message and audience. Amidst much fanfare, the email was sent, and a handful of responses and leads trickle back. Not as many as you were hoping for.

While your email didn’t directly generate many orders, you could be building a valuable bank of customer information…

Two days after the email…

Julie works in your telesales team, it is her responsibility to chase up initial enquiries, abandoned web baskets and organise data gathering exercises. Before calling John, a potential customer, Julie first has a quick check in the CRM system for a number of important bits of information. From John’s CRM record, she can quickly see:

• What products he has bought in the past, when he bought them and how much he paid. Julie also notices that while previous orders have been large, John hasn’t placed an order for over a year.
• A record of all the conversations different members of the team have had with John, including details of a delivery problem with one of John’s orders last year.
• That John had previously opened a web basket, and added three high value cameras before abandoning the cart.
• That John opened the email from marketing at the start of the week. She can also see that he clicked through to your cameras page, and that from the email he downloaded your winter brochure.

Do you think Julie’s call to John might be slightly different knowing this information? This is the power of integrated email marketing; collecting all of a customer’s information into a central place, and presenting it in a useful format for your customer-facing teams.

Pulling in the right data

A key part of the scenario above was accounts integration; i.e. pulling in John’s purchase history from your back office accounting system. John was targeted for the initial email because he was a high-value but lapsed customer. He was then flagged for a call from Julie in telemarketing because he responded to the email. Julie was then able to see a record of all John’s previous purchases.

An integrated email marketing solution like this doesn’t have to cost you a fortune. If you use IRIS Exchequer, Pegasus Opera, Access Dimensions or Sage 50 for your accounts, ProspectSoft Email Marketing can pull in your back-office data immediately, without any expensive bespoke work.

If you are still worried about the expense, up until Christmas we are also offering three months of no monthly charges on all Email Marketing solutions. To our knowledge, it is not possible to get started with a truly integrated Email Marketing solution so quickly or cost-effectively.

Christmas is coming – take action today. Full details at www.prospectsoft.com/email-marketing.

Because of the volume of email we all now receive, the way we read email is changing. We no longer read every email, but scan a number of key elements to decide what gets opened and what does not.

What are these key elements?

1. The sender name. Do I trust this sender? What have they sent me in the past? Is it likely to be worth reading?

An email from your company MD is likely to be read before an email from your intern. The from address or sender name is the first thing we check when deciding what to read. If your recipients do not recognise the sender, they are far less likely to read the email!

In some cases, setting your sender name to be your company name or department name can lead to better open rates. The answer lies in testing what works for you!

2. Subject line. Am I interested in the content of the email?

You email subject line is generally the next most important factor in getting your email read. We scan the subject line, and make a mental judgement of what the email is likely to contain, and whether we want to read it.

In nearly all cases, including a subject line that appeals to the self-interest of the recipient will out-perform one that does not. (Although don’t take our word for it – test it!)

Instead of using ‘November newsletter’ as your subject line, sell your recipients on the idea of opening and reading your email. Including the term ‘how to’ can often increase responses, for example ‘How to use [your product] more effectively and save £19.99 this month’. We love to know how to do things, and most of all we love to save money!

You will need to be creative, and test a range of appeals in your subject lines to find what works.

3. Preview pane. What do I see when I scan the email?

For recipients reading your email in Outlook, Thunderbird and a range of other email clients, it is now usual for the email to be initially viewed in the preview pane, typically only exposing the top six lines of your email.

In the preview pane, images are not normally downloaded by default in most email programmes. This means that if you are sending HTML emails, having a large banner image at the top of your emails means that when your email is scanned in the preview pane, all the recipient sees is a box with a small red cross! As one of your 110 email a day, would you prioritise this email? Probably not!

Instead, try making use of the first six lines by using a subheading and introduction paragraph that gets the reader’s attention.

Also, test putting a call to action (link to your website) within the top six lines. In your recipient’s inbox, competition for eyeball time is high! Make a goal of your email to get the reader away from their inbox and onto your website.

Hopefully this post has given you plenty of ideas for getting your emails opened and read. If you found it interesting, until Christmas we are offering three months of no monthly charges on ProspectSoft Email Marketing.

ProspectSoft Email Marketing allows you to scientifically test the effectiveness of your sender name, subject lines, and preview panes. You can learn more at www.prospectsoft.com/email-marketing.

Sending emails from your own ISP (Internet Service Provider).

If you mailmerge your emails through Outlook, then you are sending emails from your own IP address. This can cause big problems for you down the road.

Each email you send through Outlook contains an ‘email header’ which contains information such as the subject, sender and recipients. The header also contains a series of ‘received’ lines, that document the path your email took. Every computer that handles your email between you and your recipient adds a line, describing the server from which it received the message, when it received it and so on.

The first ‘received’ header line will therefore be made by the outgoing email server to which your email program (Outlook, Thunderbird etc) connects. That line will contain your own IP address, granted to you by your internet service provider.

Effectively, when you send emails using your own ISP you leave an audit trail pointing back to your own IP address! Any spam complaints (legitimate or not) ultimately point back to you. Spam blocking services have become more sophisticated at looking not only at the servers passing them the message, but also looking back at the audit trail to see if any of the machines in it should not be trusted.

If your IP gets blacklisted, your recipients will not receive your emails – even personal ones.

Still think sending bulk emails out through Outlook is a good idea?

For sending out large numbers of emails, the answer is to use a hosted Email Marketing program which sends your emails using a different IP address.

Our recommended provider Communigator (who power ProspectSoft Email Marketing) use a pool of rotating IP addresses to send your emails, meaning that if an IP address receives too many complaints it is taken out of use.

The end result is that as many of your email recipients receive your email as possible!

Of course this only gets you in the game; you then need to create emails that your recipients open, read and want to receive. I’ll be covering that next time.

In the mean-time, until 23rd December we are offering three months of no monthly payments on email marketing. If you are still sending emails through your own ISP, there has never been a better time to upgrade to a hosted solution.

ProspectSoft Email Marketing comes with a range of additional benefits, for example:

• Reporting which contacts opened and clicked on your emails (and sharing this information with your sales team)
• Targeting contacts for your emails who have purchased particular products
• Targeting high value but lapsed customers
• Integration to Google Analytics (what happens once they get to your website?

Learn more at www.prospectsoft.com/email-marketing.

Next week’s post will look at getting your emails opened and read.