Royal Mail’s recent price increase has left many small businesses fearing that their business may not survive this change. The cost of first class stamps have risen 30%, from 46p to 60p, and second class 38%, from 36p to 50p, a massive burden that many businesses, at least in the short term will have to absorb themselves.

Four in five small businesses in the UK believe this change will affect their business as well as the way they communicate with customers. Recent research conducted by Pitney Bowes revealed that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are concerned that the postal rate increase will have such a negative impact that their business may not be able to recover afterwards. These are businesses that were relying on Royal Mail to send out correspondence and orders to their customers.

Cut costs with electronic mail

The change in postal rates is actually forcing businesses to look for alternative methods to communicate with their customers. Sure, you cannot download a shirt or a bike, but you can try cutting costs by switching to electronic email to keep in touch with customers and send them special offers.

With email, it’s so much easier and a lot cheaper to send e-cards, bills or marketing material. Take our professional email hosting service for instance.  You can create your email address personalised to your domain, such as office@yourbusiness.co.uk, and you can access it anywhere, anytime you want.

With email hosting, you will be able to manage all your emails, calendars and contacts from a single location. Also, you can communicate easier and faster with your customers and ensure your messages get to their inbox and are not lost along the way.

How are you planning to cut costs?

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There are a growing number of bloggers across the globe earning a proper and respectable wage from their online writing projects and understandably more and more bloggers or would be bloggers or content creators are keen to collect their slice too.

Until now that has been a bit difficult. Positive comments are nice but don’t pay the bills and pushing a link towards a paypal donation is never looked upon as the most professional approach to ask for some reward. A number of microdonation services have sprung up in recent years, claiming to hold the answer, some have been and gone, others appear to have more longevity.

One that appears to be getting a foothold is Flattr. A service aimed at all those positive comment leavers to leave a monetary tip for the content creators too. This week they have announced a deal that could at least put there service under the noses of more and more potential users, and they hope, lead to a groundswell and movement towards tipping for online content your have enjoyed. The deal is with Dailymotion, the biggest video portal behind the giant that is YouTube. Those uploading to Dailymotion now have the option to include a Flattr button onto their channels and on the credits of each video, so you can appeal for donations or tips to earn money from your shared content without the need for a pre-roll ad that so often frustrates.

The concept behind Flattr aims to avoid the barrier of constantly re-entering card details or the like, and takes on the strength of the like button of Facebook by tipping from a pre-paid ‘pot’ with a minimum of just 2 Euro investment per month of which Flattr takes a 10% service fee.  A relatively small investment but in the world of social media, becoming known as the person doing good deeds and genuinely rewarding others could have almost unquantifiable long-term benefits.

Whether this latest move by Dailymotion will kickstart the concept remains to be seen, but in a world where the debate over paid-for-content still rages, this may be the next ‘acceptable’ step for many, especially if the correct ‘well-meaning’ spin is put on the regime.

Are you using Flattr or any other micropayment service? Are there enough ‘good-hearted’ people about for the scheme to ever take off?

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Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Time: We’re always complaining we don’t have enough time to get things done. However, as a marketer no day should go by without getting up to date with your website analytics. Results matter so you have to check and see if your marketing efforts are paying off.

This article covers a few simple steps you should follow at least once a week so you can stay up to date with your site’s metrics. This is what you have to check:

Traffic

Traffic should be the first thing on your list. No matter the type of website you own/run getting traffic to your site is as important as air. And you don’t want to run out of air, do you?

When you check to see what your site’s traffic looks like, focus mainly on the number of visitors – unique as well as returning. Try to find out from this data what drove visitors to your site in a certain period of time or at a peak – maybe you ran a marketing campaign, sent an e-mail newsletter or ran a special offer. If your traffic was lower compared to a previous month, try to determine the factors that lead to a decrease – were there holidays, for instance, that could influence it?

Conversions

How is your site performing in terms of conversions? You can have a huge amount of traffic but if your visitors don’t convert, it means you’re doing something wrong. Check to see your call-to-actions, special offers or anything that would convince the visitor to convert. Take a closer look at the pages with low conversion rates and figure out how to include more opportunities for your visitors that they wouldn’t want to miss out on. Obviously, check the copy too as there might be something missing there.

Sources

Take a look at the organic searches, marketing campaigns, social media traffic, direct traffic and see if there’s a trend that catches your attention. What about the referral traffic? Anything interesting there? Use the inbound links to see if maybe there’s a linking opportunity there – maybe offer to write a guest post to generate more traffic to your site. If your blog posts are also generating traffic, check to see which ones are the most engaging and create more topics around that type of content.

Keywords

Analyze the keywords and see which ones have converted better. On the other hand, don’t neglect those keywords with low conversion rates because often these are opportunities you need to explore more. Write down these keywords and remember to use them in future content and blog posts. For an even better positioning, try to avoid general keywords and instead go with long-tail variations that are more specific to your business.

ROI

You are investing time and money in to your website, but are you generating sales to provide a return on that investment? See how you can reduce costs where possible.

As a conclusion, don’t just analyse. Review those stats but also write down some actions that need to be taken in order to constantly improve your marketing efforts.

How often do you review your site’s metrics? What metrics do you consider to be the most relevant?

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The rise of social media not only gives you the chance to reach a wider audience with your affiliate links, but also the chance to differentiate how you offer the products of the affiliate scheme you are signed up to compared to fellow affiliates.

It needn’t be just about re-tweeting the offers of your merchant provider. In fact the greater unique content you offer, the more likely your audience and engagement with them will grow. With that will come more click-throughs and hopefully more money.

As an affiliate you naturally have to ‘tell’ the story of your merchant and that’s something you can’t forget. Social media offers some great tools for that too. Using software such as HootSuite you can schedule pre-written tweets to go out at certain times – perfect for tweeting about the latest offers. It means you can still ‘run’ your affiliate marketing scheme in your spare time but to the world you can look busy during normal working hours and tweeting during those hours when more are online you are likely to pick up more click-throughs too.

However, social media really comes into its own in developing ways of making sure your affiliate links get clicked instead of those of a fellow affiliate. Via Twitter it is easy to offer your audience the links to the great offers provided by your merchant, but you can also mix that up with other relevant industry information. In this way you offer more reason for potential customers to follow you – pure sales tweets never entice many in, but interesting content does. Good content spreads across Twitter like wildfire and usually retains the attribution from where it came from too, so people can find you and come and see what else you are tweeting about.

Taking it to the full, that could mean setting up a website that has engaging blogs, or even expert guest bloggers alongside your affiliate links and pods. Yet, you needn’t got that far. Just engaging via Twitter; helping others where you can, tweeting useful articles and combining them with winning offers, will give you credibility and authority on your topic. That brings greater following, greater trust and more than likely, greater click-through and affiliate earnings.

If you’ve not yet tested the water with Twitter, give it a go now. The best way to find out how social media will work with the way you do business is by giving it a try and learning ‘on the job’, so don’t be shy.

Do you use social media to increase your affiliate activity? What have you found most useful?

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FourSquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places: What you are doing when and where is what smartphones appear to have been designed for. Even Twitter lets you search for tweets sent locally – location is a big feature of social media and still much under-used by businesses.

Most Smartphones now come with geo-location and if you’ve not used or don’t really know what it is all about you are missing out. Basically it is similar to tracking or positioning that you may be used to if you use a GPS sat nav. The location of a place or user is identified either by using the IP address of their computer or the radio-frequency identification (RFID) of the user’s smartphone. With the increase in uptake of the smartphone there it is a marketing tool with growing potential for the for small businesses.

The first to use it for marketing have been the bar / restaurants and retail sector. Networks such as Foursquare and Gowalla combine gamification with check-in at new places and by encouraging visitors to check in, the business can use that information to track trends and even target specific campaigns to the users checking in. You can even encourage new people on the networks to sign in by offering special offers when they are in the vicinity. Once customers choose to engage in this way you can almost guarantee they are more likely to be better engaged than your average ‘casual’ customer so it is well worth the investment into looking after them.

What’s more location-based social networks like FourSquare and Gowalla now offer integration into other networks like Twitter and Facebook so you can encourage your check-in customers to re-tweet or post to their wider audiences on the bigger networks too, spreading your brand.

Geo-location is still in its infancy and many even with smartphones don’t yet fully grasp it, either as a business or end-user. However, the integration and possibilities seem endless and are only likely to improve, so if you invest time and effort now you could see yourself several leaps above your competitors in an area of marketing that will become commonplace in a matter of months.

Do you already use location-based marketing? How? With what effect? We’d love to feature any innovative ideas.

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With the summer all but over, so is the festival season that has kept social networks busy in recent months with photo postings, check-ins or simple profile updates. Those active in social media like to show off where they are and what they are doing and those not so lucky to be there like to make comments back, while others in the vicinity often pipe up to say hi, come and meet me. Big ticketing events like these are immensely social but so far it has been more an informal use of social tools and not one businesses have been that great at capitalising upon. Until now.

Ticketmaster last week launched a new feature in it’s Facebook strategy. Seat tagging means now when you book your tickets for your event, your friends can immediately see when and where they will be attending. Either that will make them extremely jealous, or as Ticketmaster hope, it will inspire them to book with you. An article on the changes at FastCompany quotes Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard “Each time a ticket buyer shared with Facebook friends that he was attending an event, that alert generated $5.30 in additional ticket revenue.” So already, the customers were using Facebook to inspire each other to make similar purchases, but now Ticketmaster have made that easier.

It really is an example of social commerce. Via the new application, just as you might visit a site and see the faces of your friends pop up, as other people who have liked the site via Facebook, so now when you go to book your tickets on the venue seat map, you will see what friends have already booked and where they are sitting. It is enhanced Facebook connectivity that could change the way people spend their leisure time.

Unfortunately, for those in the UK, it is a US-based application for the ticketmaster.com website powering it, but don’t expect it to be too long before the UK follows suit. As a nation entertainment ticket buying is a business sector not apparently affected by the current economic slowdown, we like to have treats like this to look forward too.

The Facebook integration feature Work on the interactive seat map that launched in the US last year and is now used in more than 300 venues  allowing fans to choose their exact seats instead of relying on Ticketmaster’s “best available” option, another feature us in the UK will have to wait a little while for yet.

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We’d like to take the praise for predicting earlier this week that online TV was soon to come to these shores most likely in the form of classic repeats, but really it wasn’t a prediction of epic proportions, just progress.

So we weren’t really surprised to find that BBC Worldwide is to start renting out classic TV episodes via the Tardis that is Facebook from today.  Perhaps playing it safe they are launching with everyone’s favourite time-traveller: Dr Who. Classic episodes available for Facebook’s own currency Facebook cover nine stories, each containing several episodes. Once rented the episodes will be available to stream online for 48 hours.

Content available includes digitally remastered versions of classic Doctor episodes like “Tomb of the Cybermen”plus a Facebook exclusive. 1988’s “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” isn’t available on DVD but will be available over the new Facebook system to viewers in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as the BBC look to keep interest in the Doctor Who brand up inbetween new series.

Have you tried subscribing? Will you try in the future?

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In traditional business would you hand your rival a clear advantage by ignoring a route to market? A new report from office and business service specialists Regus suggests by ignoring social media for your company you could be doing just that.

The report found that whereas 33% of companies successfully gained customers through social networking activity in 2010 a year on that percentage had risen even further to 41 per cent. A no-brainer?

The study of 17,000 managers and business owners across 80 countries, revealed it to be a globa trend too, so whatever your market, if you ignore social media you will probably be left behind.

In the UK one in three social network users are a fan, follower or friend of a company page or profile, meaning those not focused on building a social media following are missing out on a third of business if not more, and that figure is growing day by day.

What are your experiences of building business via social media?

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As a tech-savvy lot, many of you will already know what a QR code is or at least what it does, but as more and more advertisers turn to using it in print and even TV ads, we thought we’d try and come up with a short post of what, when, how and why QR codes are becoming so popular.

QR codes (short for Quick Response) first became popular in Japan, having been created within the Toyota group back in the mid 1990′s as a way of scanning and identifying contents and parts at high speed. Yet, it is only really the past 12 months that Uk marketeers really appear to have jumped onboard their usefulness.

A matrix barcode the uptake of smartphones mean more and more people have the ability to read them at home, in the office or on the move. A unique identifier they can be used to embed text or almost any data but their main take-up in recent months has been to pictorialise a URL.

The success of QR codes is thanks in part to their international standard (ISO 18004) and the fact that the division of Toyota, Denso-Wave, who invented them has chosen not to exercise the intellectual property rights it held although the term QR code remains a registered trademark of Denso Wave Incorporated.

A standard QR code can contain up to 7089 characters, although not all QR readers can accept that much data and as ever in the modern world’s strive for smaller and better, the Micro QR code with its ability to hold 35 characters and takes up less space, is gaining in popularity.

The ‘geeky but cheeky’ look of a QR code also means it has become popular amongst graphic artists, being used on t-shirts, on canvas, even as personalised tattoos. In Japan they have even reportedly been used to mark graves of loved ones, to keep mourners in touch with each other.

QR Codes have the ability help track and direct your customers to a single location with simple imagery. It pulls upon the concept of gamification and is an unobtrusive way of getting an additional message into any print ad. So why then are more people not using them?

It appears it is simply a lack of understanding of what they are. Many see them, many possibly know what they do, but few seem to be taking the plunge to try them – although that is changing. With Smartphones expected to become the norm by the turn of the year, almost half of those carrying a mobile phone will be able to read QR codes. Expect to see a lot more splodges and blobs appearing before your eyes as the year wears on.

Do you scan and react to QR codes? Have you used them in your own marketing campaigns?

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