21st century communications - a presentation at the furness enterprise online masterclass - 11th...

Furness Enterprise 21st Century Communications

Powa Technologies Ltd 2010 ©

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Practical Steps In Taking Your Business Online11th June 2010 – Furness Enterprise 21st Century Communications – Barrow.

• Why eCommerce?• Lets build a site• 10 Easy Steps To Grow Once You are Live • More information

Steve Emecz Business Development DirectorPowa

Follow Powa on Twitter @powatech Videos at Youtube – getthepowaPresentations at Slideshare - powa



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A brief introduction to Powa:

Powa, was developed by Venda – the world’s largest on-demand eCommerce provider

Venda customers all share the same platform – from Tesco Fashion, to Laura Ashley,Jimmy Choo to Wickes, Sharp to JVC, hundreds of large brands and retailers all sharing the same technology – ‘software as a service’.

Powa brings the same economies of scale and eCommerce expertise to small and mediumsized businesses

A brief introduction to Steve Emecz:

11 years in eCommerce. Grew an eCommerce business for a major brand from $6m to $200m in 5 yearsJoined Venda and Powa in 2008 as Business Development DirectorMy role at Venda is to help the large retailers with their revenue growth strategiesMy role at Powa is to work with major business groups and governments to help SMEs grow online

For fun I write books, publish books and swim.



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Why eCommerce? – Because the market is large, and growing fast

The UK online retail market is the largest in Europe, worth over £30bn in 2009

Online retail sales in the UK grew 21.9% Year on Year in May 2010, compared to 3% on the high street (a)

In July 2009, over £100 per person was spent online in the UK (b)

Note: For those of you selling a product, the Euro Zone is critical. The strength of the Euro means that your products are more than 30% cheaper than they were a couple of years ago. eCommercein Europe is worth over £200bn.

(a) Internet Retailing 7th June(b) IMRG Cap Gemini Retail Sales Index



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Why eCommerce? – Because customer behaviour is changing (c)

One in four people visiting your website are looking for ‘offline’ information[they have no intention of buying online, they are looking for your address or phone number]

Around one in three people that are given the chance to ‘pick up from store’ – take that option[if you want to drive footfall, leads and enquiries, have a great website]

eBay has more than 10 million customers, and is the UK’s 2nd largest ‘search engine’ behind Google

One in two online shoppers in the UK have a PayPal account, and 35% of those prefer that method

The next generation wouldn’t dream of using anything else than a search engine to find any type of business – and mobile is coming too……

(c) Shop.org retail survey



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Why eCommerce? – Because it’s not just possible for the big guys……

Venda customers grew their online business in Q4 2009 a staggering 86% year-on-year, like for like sales

but now it’s open to everyone:

• You can launch an eCommerce site in days/hours/minutes

• You can set up and update the site yourself, with no technical skills (if you use email today, you can do it)

• If you want a customised design the cost has reduced by more than 90%

• The growth in ‘free’ social media means you can promote and market your business at a fraction of the cost




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Let’s build a site………….

[steve builds an eCommerce site live, from scratch on Powa in under 10 minutes]

To see a site being built live come to one of our weekly free webinars.

Note: Web designers and agencies can build customised sites on Powa

If you are a retailer and want a customised site, or a designer/developer that wants to add eCommerce to their services – you can see examples and find out more herePowa Design Providers




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10 Key Things to Improve Your Website Sales

1. Keep your homepage fresh2. Have a sale section3. Add Your Products To Google Shopping4. Search Engine Optimise - Generic SEO Title Short [search engines tend to take the first 60 characters of the title]- In the home page properties, customise the SEO with your principle keywords5. Have Great Product Information- Google Adword Predictor- Google Adword Selector6. Use a shared page sections to promote key things – like “Free Delivery over £30”7. Give customers several ways to find the product that they want8. Offer related and alternative products9. Use Google Analytics to watch your customer behaviour – and act on it

10. Social media ……………..



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1. Keep your homepage fresh

Autumn range and offers Spring range and offers December 2009 May 2010

“My advice to shop owners is to keep everything fresh and moving. You have to treat it like a retail store and move the stock about. If something isn’t working, move it or take it off. Make sure your photos are good as

people want to be able to see what they are buying”.Derek, Horses and Riders

http://www.horsesandriders.co.uk/





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2. Have a sale section

Ideal to clear end of range or ‘last season’ items



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3. Add your products to Google Shopping

Google is beginning to feature products into the main search listings



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4. Search Engine Optimise - Keep your SEO Title Short [search engines tend to take the first 60 characters – i.e. the shop title plus the page descriptions



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4. Search Engine Optimise - In the home page properties, customise the SEO with your principle keywords



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Entering your products

Get it right first time and the search engines have more chance of finding your products.

a) A useful formula for product description - [brand] [sub-brand] [description] [colour]

A good description: Frank Lyman Fushia Pink Dress

Due to the strong SEO structure of Powa, this becomes:

http://www.julesladiesfashion.com/engine/shop/product/FL01001F/Frank+Lyman+Fushia+Pink+Dress

which the search engines rate highly.

Note that we also put the part number into the page address – great if customers search for that particular part number

5. Have Great Product Information

http://www.julesladiesfashion.com/engine/shop/product/FL01001F/Frank+Lyman+Fushia+Pink+Dress



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b) Use good quality multiple images. If you don’t have extra images, but have nice packaging show it – you can often use a generic packaging image there.

5. Have Great Product Information



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5. Have great Product Information

Some ways to identify good keywords

Google Predictor – type into Googleand see the prediction of keywords

Google Keyword Tool – type in your chosen keyword and the keyword tool tells you other suggestions and how many people have searched for them



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Really useful for things you want to promote on lots of place on the site:

6. Use a shared page sections to promote key things – like “Free Delivery over £30”



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Really useful for things you want to promote on lots of place on the site:

6. Use a shared page sections to promote key things – like “Free Delivery over £30”

Ibson Menswear for example put their email signup form throughout the site and capture quite a lot of signups on product pages as well as the home page.



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7. Give customers several ways to find what they want

Manx Heritage use the brands function to add another attribute to all of their products

“e.g. Three Legs”

Categories in the traditional manner

Search



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8. Offer related and alternative Products



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An overview of the site’s key trends.

A vital component of analytics is the geographical data provided.This allows us to find out from which cities / countries site visitors are

visiting from and also which brands / products they are looking for. Thisenables us to target advertising, prioritize which products we displayonline and structure site content to suit our different target markets.

9. Use Google Analytics to watch your customer behaviour – and act on it

We use Google Analytics to monitor the characteristics of visitorsand their navigational behaviour whilst viewing the site.

Esquires



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The traffic sources area of analytics is extremely useful. It allowsus to track the effectiveness of online marketing (referring sites), offline marketing (direct traffic) and hits via search engines. We are then able toreact accordingly in relation to marketing or search engine optimization.

The content analysis allows us to view which areas of our site aremost popular. We can therefore identify any issues of concern

for customers, such as shipping costs, and pin point which brands are receiving the most attention online.

9. Use Google Analytics to watch your customer behaviour – and act on it



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10. Social Media

(including Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and many others)

Lets take a look a couple of case studies:

Esquires using Facebook to acquire new customers

Ibson Menswear using social media and email marketing to acquire and retain customers

http://www.esquires.im/



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Picture gallery

Basic info such as our brands and opening timesare prominent on our Facebook site.

Photos of new products are uploaded on a regular basisand provide direct links to their related product page on our webstore.

Using Facebook adverts has proven an extremely cost effectiveand highly targeted way of driving traffic to

our webstore and Facebook site.

We have recently started using Facebookas our primary marketing vehicle.



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Ben Sherman adverts

Facebook insights

Our fans

Insights allow us to discover the demographics of our “fanbase”in terms of gender, age, location etc - we can also evaluate trends

over time to find out when we were gaining or losing the most fans.

If a person “likes” our page they receive a notification if we addanything to the page - a high number of

people “liking” our page helps to provide credibility.

Along with other types of content posting TV adverts featuring our brands has been popular - people are

then able to tag that they like these adverts.



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Newsletter – every 2 weeks

Since launch a few months ago they have hundreds of subscribers

Campaigns outsourced to their service provider due to time pressures

Regularly sell directly from the newsletter – often using specific promotion codes



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Small but loyal Following – Twitter is about ‘quality’ not ‘quantity’

Promotion codes are great for Tweets and Blog posts as well as email

Ibson Menswear (UK)



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Engaging and interesting content

Drives traffic and gains subscriptions

Demonstrates to your commitment to your brands

Simple and easy to update – perfect for quiet moments in the store



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More information:

Free weekly webinars on how to get trading online:



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More information:

Other useful resources:

Enterprise Nation - excellent support and help for home based businesses

Webjam - easy to implement community sites

My Warehouse – ‘on-demand’ outsourced warehousing

http://www.enterprisenation.com/

http://www.webjam.com/

http://www.mywarehouse.me/