Low-Budget Online Marketing. Holly Berkley

are some important factors to consider, among them human resources, the importance of consistent communication, and the need to buy online.

      Adequate human resources

      To succeed online, you must have real people working behind your website. No matter how sophisticated technology gets, websites don’t run themselves. It is the personal touches and quick responses to problems that make a website work and turn visitors into customers.

      The standard acceptable time to return a business email is 24 to 48 hours (although sooner is always better!). Take any longer than that and you have most likely lost the customer. If you do not have the human resources to return emails in two to three business days, you need to rethink your online marketing strategy. Although there are several email automation programs, you cannot depend on automated responses to answer your customer’s specific questions. Customers are still looking for that human touch, even through a computer monitor.

      My husband and I learned this firsthand when we decided to start a travel website dedicated to Baja California, Mexico. Through our website, we offered services such as Mexican auto insurance (a necessity for any American driving across the border), hotel and airline reservations, and special products from Mexico such as clothing and artwork. We honestly thought that by posting a vast amount of information on our website such as travel tips, local events, laws, and so on, customers would get all the information they needed about traveling in Baja and the site would essentially run itself. We planned to travel Mexico while we watched the money from our website roll in. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

      No matter how many links and stories we posted, we still received hundreds of emails from customers wanting more information — especially when it came to making a purchase. We were even reprimanded on our own message boards for not answering posts on a regular basis!

       Websites do not eliminae the need for customer service; they should enable you to give better customer service.

      We learned right away that building a website does not eliminate the need for customer service. In fact, it should allow you to give better customer service. A common misconception exists among companies that creating a website replaces customer service. Although websites do help customers find information they need about your product or service, in the process, they can actually create a need for more human resources.

      Consistent communication

      How you reply to a customer’s Tweet, comment, blog post, forum post, or email is an extremely important part of online marketing. If you’ve spent the time and money to get a customer to look at your website or profile and contact you, it would be a shame to lose that potential customer just at the time when you could be closing a sale. Be sure your message carries the same tone as your website and brand. For example, if your website is fun and humorous, your emails should be written that way. If your company has a very corporate, serious brand, your emails should convey an equally professional tone.

      Your brand should carry over to all your online communications, right down to your email signature. In most email programs, you can set up a personal email signature that will automatically attach to all of your outgoing messages. All of your emails, whether sent to business associates, clients, or friends, should be signed with your business signature. An effective email signature should include your full name, title, contact info, website address, and a couple of words explaining what you do. You can even add a couple of lines about a company promotion. If you have a company Twitter account or LinkedIn profile, you may wish to link to those in your signature as well.

      Here are some examples of good email signatures:

       Holly Berkley

      Interactive Marketing Consultant

      555-555-5555

      www.berkweb.com

       Download a FREE Chapter from my new book Marketing in the New Media at www.marketinginthenewmedia.com

       Jennifer Nichols

      Tria Advertising, Marketing & Special Events

      555-555-5555

      www.triaadvertising.com

       September Special: Get 500 business cards for $99.

       Keith Berkley

      Berkley Construction, Inc.

      San Diego General Contractor

      License # 833169

      555-555-5555

      www.berkhome.com

       Ask us about Solar!

      To sell or not to sell online

      After the customer service commitment, the most important factor to consider before starting an online marketing campaign is whether or not there exists a reasonable need for your product or service to be available online. Customers must find genuine value in buying something through your website, rather than dropping by the local mall or convenience store.

      Genuine value really boils down to two key motivating factors:

      • Convenience

      • Cost

       Before you try to sell your product online, ask yourself if your customers need to buy it online.

      Is your product rare or hard to find in your area? Is it easier for customers to buy your product online than to drive to a local store? Is it cheaper to sell the product over the Internet than in a storefront?

      A perfect example of e-tailers cashing in on a consumer need based on convenience and cost occurred when the new tobacco tax was enacted in New York in autumn 2002. The tobacco tax sent the cost of cigarettes skyrocketing to more than $7.50 a pack, making New York the most expensive place in the United States to buy a pack of cigarettes.

      So what were smokers in New York to do? They certainly wouldn’t all quit smoking. They would just have to buy cigarettes outside New York. Since more than 78 percent of New Yorkers don’t own cars, the Internet became the perfect medium to distribute cheaper cigarettes, and 15 million packs sold online in the first month after the tax was enacted. According to Rebecca Lieb in an August 2002 article for ClickzZ, “In only four weeks, over $100 million was redirected from the cash registers of delis and newsstands to Indian reservations and other out-of-state vendors.”

      E-tailers saw a need and acted. And the cigarette industry is not the only industry booming online. Overall online consumer sales jumped 26 percent from July 2001 to July 2002, by which time they were averaging $6 billion usd per month.

      “This is one of the only us economic sectors experiencing double-digit growth this year,” wrote Lieb. “It’s because buying online increasingly fits consumer needs . . . Look at what’s growing: travel, computer hardware, and, most of all, financial services and information. All offer solid incentives to buy online.”

      What Sells and What Doesn’t Sell Online

      Unfortunately, marketing and sales success do not always go together. An example of a company that was very successful at marketing itself online but unsuccessful at selling products online was Petopia (see Case Study). Besides pet supplies, other items that are difficult to sell online are designer clothing and large items such as furniture and appliances (the main reason www.Furniture.com failed). Besides the high cost of shipping heavy items, the chief deterrent to such online sales is that customers want to be able to touch a product before deciding to make an expensive purchase.

       Case Study

      Petopia launched a million-dollar ad campaign to sell pet products online. But no matter how