Smart and Simple Tips for Successful Online Marketing!Written by Dattatraya Kadikar
A vast majority of web sites today are web sites hosted by brick-n-mortar businesses who want to offer their customers convenience of buying from their offices and homes and also to add new customers from other geographical areas not directly serviced by them. Yet, most of these websites start thinking that basic concepts that apply to offline marketing are not applicable to online marketing. Over next few issues we will try to understand what are usual beliefs in minds of most marketers when it comes to online marketing and what are Similarities and Differences between your Online Business and Offline Business. You build site and visitors will come. How Wrong! When you started your small shop or departmental store you started with selection of location, proper and adequate space, other facilities as parking space and utilities etc. You then went on to get your store designed properly so that you could display merchandize in an orderly fashion. You got your Letterheads, invoices, envelopes and visiting cards designed professionally so that they will convey an image of a serious businessman who means business. You even invited your friends, family, customers and suppliers when you inaugurated store. You released at least one advertisement to announce opening of your business and then probably more ads for generating awareness about your enterprise and to bring in more business. Most probably you are still advertising your store on a regular basis in Yellow Pages, local dailies and weeklies and even in community souvenirs to generate new business as well as to build goodwill. Yet, when you decided to launch your business online you did not do most of these things, probably you were guided by belief that you build site and visitors will come! You could not be farther to truth than this! I am telling this from my own experience of dealing with more than 2000 businessmen who joined as our members at DotcomVyapar.Com. We observed that most of these members did not include details of their web site and email in their letterheads, envelopes, visiting cards or any other printed material that was going out to their customers and suppliers. Most of these members did not even include these basic details in their Print Ads published in Newspapers, Magazines, Industry Publications and even local Yellow Pages. I think that we must understand it very clearly that most important public that will visit our web site is our existing employees, friends, family members, our existing customers and suppliers. And, if we keep our eyes and ears open, this public will give us enough feedback to make our web site better in terms of content and navigation. And, what better way than to include website address and email id in every printed matter that goes out of your office. I think once we have made web site comfortable for existing users that we can concentrate of new visitors.
| | Sweepstakes: Give the Old Lady a New LookWritten by Dinko Bacun
The sweepstakes is an old marketing tool everybody is using. If you need to introduce a new product, or you need to give your sales a boost, you use sweepstakes. Usually, you will have a drawing from pool of your buyers, and each week, or month, you will draw some winners, either by some computer algorithm or hand of some beautiful or famous person. The problem with sweepstakes concept is that everybody is using it, so that a particular sweepstakes promo gets indistinguishable, and participant knows, from previous experience, that his/her chance of winning are slim. Lottery type drawing is impersonal, it has no content, and always leaves taste of possible fraud with people who didn't win. The main object of sweepstakes, which is to bring more buyers, is thus losing its power in web marketing. On web everybody is talking about content and learning experience, so, for our 10th anniversary we thought of giving old lady a new look. Being IT developers, we knew we had to give participants a better chance to win, while still be in range of acceptability for us. We understood that chance for a participant to win should be bigger at beginning, so that it should nudge him to participate (buy our product) early. In mathematical terms, we should be using such a DISTRIBUTION, which will give participant a big chance to win early, while still giving a fair chance of wining later on. We decided on prime numbers distribution, mostly because of a catchy name, i.e. we could say that our sweepstakes were "primed". The distribution would be implemented in such a way that every buyer would get an unique, sequential ID number, when he buys. If his ID number is a prime number, he wins sweepstakes. The distribution of wins is really appealing to participant: 54% chance of winning in first 11 buyers 45% in first 20 26% in first 100 16.9% in first 1000 12.3% in first 10000 So, for any sales over 100, we would be in regular range of standard 25% opening discount everybody gives away. On other hand, even if participant isn't among first 100 buyers, he stands a fair chance to win because even high numbers like 9923, 9929 and 9931 are primes. More importantly, participant has a feeling he can control wining because he can increase his chances if he buys early, which is, of course, main purpose of sweepstakes. We designed a page ( http://www.CarpioHelpdesk.com ) and showed it to some of our friends, and we were surprised to learn that most of them didn't really know what prime numbers were, and felt we were feeding them some kind of "get $90,000 in 14 hours flat" scheme. We then realized we were on Net, and that we should add "content" to our sweepstakes, participants should be able to learn something new, should learn about importance of prime numbers in computer industry. So, what's so important about prime numbers? K.F. GAUSS, one of fathers of modern mathematics, in his Distquisitines Arithmeticae, Art. 329(1801) says that distinguishing prime numbers from composites (non prime) is one of most important and useful problems in whole of arithmetics. Donald E. Knuth, one of fathers of computer programming, calls prime numbers "somewhat MYSTERIOUS" and
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