Orange E-Business Advocate

Think Like Your Users

Seth Godin has a great post on his blog today that illustrates how a business buying ad words on Google completely missed the boat and lost his sale because of the lack of cohesion between their advertising campaign and the usability of their website.

I believe that a key function of any business website, especially for small businesses, is the ability to attract new customers from search engines and help them find exactly what they are looking for quickly. To quote Seth:

Let's assume for a moment that many businesses are going to grow or disappear based on how well they find the needles in the huge haystack of web searches... and that doing that well means efficiently turning that first clickthrough into a sale. If that's true, then this means a much more measured, more customer-centric approach to turning mild interest into completed transaction.

To a degree, the internet levels the playing field for small businesses. If you provide an excellent product or service and you have a well designed online strategy, the internet can make all the difference for your business.

Other Things Orange

Flickr.com is a great site for storing, categorizing, and sharing photos. For every photo you upload, you can assign multiple words (Flickr calls them tags) to make it easier to search for it later. If choose to make the photo public, you can also find other pictures that were tagged with the same word.

Anyway, I've been watching for cool photos labeled orange, hoping that I'd occasionally catch a picture of something in Orange County. Lately, I've seen a lot of pictures of The Gates in Central Park. It is pretty cool that Flickr's technology gives us access to thousands of pictures of this intriguing installation. Check out the slideshow:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/thegates/show/

Timing is Everything

I like Seth Godin's concept of permission-based marketing, and first wrote about this topic last year. Recently, Seth talks about a few lessons learned about mailing lists that I have to agree with. I like his statement "anticipated, personal and relevant messages always outperform."

Relevant messages can appeal to the customer in different ways. They can be informative, useful, or entertaining. But the most effective messages are those that correspond to the needs of a customer as they occur. Like lemonaide on a blisteringly hot day, or a spare umbrella during a downpour, the most successful messages will be those that satisfy the needs of customer at the moment they receive the message.

Businesses that appreciate the power of this concept can use their website, and related tools, to a big advantage. An unlikely example is an Auto Garage. When a customer comes in for an oil change, the Auto Garage takes down their contact information along with the mileage for their car and the date the oil was changed. Using widely available statistics for average car use, the Garage can then contact their customers fairly close to the time they are due for another oil change. These messages are direct, precise, and certainly relevant. They will outperform ill-timed messages consistently.

On a more basic level, when is a good time to email or call your customers? According to this article, the morning during the week is best.