Mastering User Content in Magento using GTM Consent Mode V2

Mastering User Content in Magento using GTM Consent Mode V2: In today’s privacy-focused world, ensuring user consent for data collection is crucial. Google Tag Manager (GTM) offers a powerful tool to navigate this landscape: Consent Mode. This post dives into how you can leverage GTM Consent Mode within Magento to manage user consent effectively and comply with relevant regulations. Google enforces Consent Mode v2 for […]

How to sell more online?

I have recently been working with an affilate company, called Pennymix, to revamp their site. Having worked in the web industry for some time I was familiar with the whole concept but hadn't been directly involved.

The concept is very simple really, a web site (probably ecommerce) will pay affiliate web sites for sending them traffic. Why? I here you ask.

Well the web is a massive place and someone like Amazon (Don't worry if you are a little smaller than the big A this still applies) can never expect to reach the top position for every product they sell. In fact if you look at the web today, it is mainly the review and user generated content sites that reach the top. It therefore makes sense, rather than spending money on search engine marketing, to share some of your margin with those at the top. It will probably cost you less in the long run.

Plus it is not just one link to a product from one site, it could be hundreds of links from many sites. Similar to having a high street presence in every city... well in the world.

The really interesting part about Pennymix, is that it will pay you money back for clicking through the to ecommerce sites and making a purchase. What, what, what??? exactly. Well the margins are just cut further. Pennymix now takes some of the money it earns and gives it back to you for using its site as the launch pad into the retailer. Everyone wins so to speak. The retailer sells, Pennymix gets paid and you earn cash back on your shopping. Affiliate heaven.

This isn't limited to the big boys (sorry persons), small retailers can provide an affiliate application form on their site. You may need to make it worth their while but it starts your expansion on to every high street in the world....

The benefits of email newsletters

I have just spent some time trawling the net looking for some statistics on the benefits of an email newsletter. To my suprise I haven't found anything to report back on.

"Hang on." do I hear you say, "There are tons of stats out there."

Yes indeed there are, but none are specific on the benefits of just a newsletter. No sales, no offers just a business talking about what they have been up to. This might be that some of the largest email senders are retailers. Hardly suprising as there are stats that offer figures like $50+ per dollar spent (sorry for the dollars). Impressive figures.

But what about the humble enewsletter? I have worked with a company who, on launching their site, sent out a newsletter talking about the site launch and the what they had been up to. The response was 2 enquiries from a cold (first email) list of 400. The numbers are low, but then they aren't in retail.

I will shortly be launching a round of newsletters from my own business and will be looking to report back on the response. I will continue to look round to find the stats but there are the obvious benefits:

1. Keeps the customer up to date with your industry developments, this can be useful as it proves that you are adding value to your services, which they can benefit from.
2. Keeps them informed of what you are doing in the market.
3. Reminds them that you are there. Which in todays market is vital.

The other point is that some businesses don't suit a sales letter, as the customer base probably wouldn't accept it. Some work with a fine wine company revealed that their customers expect the personalised phone service that the business has been built on, to switch to a swarm of marketing emails would downgrade the brand.

Let me know if you have any feedback on the newsletters.

Online backup - Store your mission critical data with confidence

Online back up has many benefits, over the more traditional inhouse facilities. If you are not already storing your data, why not, but... there has never been a better time to start. There are plenty of online backup facilities available www.Carbonite.com,www.SquirrelSave.co.uk www.mozy.com to name a few found with a Google search.

I have used one recently that requires a simple piece of software on your computer. It then organises the files to backup and does the rest for you. Its low cost and the great thing is that you don't have to take the tapes off site.

There are some rules that need to be followed in order to make it cheap and lower risks.
1. Ensure everyone saves their data on to one computer (the server) on your network. This helps to reduce the cost as a number of providers charge per computer.
2. Make sure everyone saves work on to the server at all times or at least whenever possible. One of my employees lost 2 weeks work because he had been working on a piece for some time and not storing it on to the server. The hard drive went and so did the work.
3. Check that you can retrieve the data from your storage facility. No point storing if you cannot get it back.
4. Don't assume the software will capture everything, they typically have a configuration process which may need a little tweak. What you consider important may not be automatically backed up.

Storing it off site through the internet also means that you can access the data from elsewhere and very worst case, should a major disaster (fire, flood etc) happen at your office people can all access their work remotely. Which reminds me, do you have a disaster recovery plan?

Hope some of that makes sense.

What's the best time to send an email?

In a previous post I mentioned that you shouldn't believe what you read about Tuesday's being the best day to send a mail. I have been looking at some recent email stats from emaillabs and Tuesday's is the most popular day to send an email with 25.4% being sent on Tuesdays, yet Wednesday is the most popular day for people opening the emails. This is confirmed by stats from the EmailStatsCenter.com.

But, just to prove my point I then found the following information from emailcenter that says Thursday is the most popular day. Their view is that this is the best day for consumers as they are just starting to think about the weekend.

Adding my own comments to this I would say that the most popular days are probably best avoided and your email could be lost in the sea of emails that arrive in peoples in boxes. Further to this as most people are already doing it is best to avoid early Monday as all people do on a Monday morning is delete the emails they don't want to deal with. Ultimately, the only way to tell the best time is to either ask your customers or keep trying until you find the best time. You might find that this becomes one way that you choose to segment your customer base.

What is pay per click?

In the web world people are always going on about pay per click and its benefits, yet for most small businesses the opportunity is passing them by.

Well what is pay per click?? This is a way of advertising on a search engine, where you only pay for the advertising if someone clicks on your advert.

Why all the fuss? Pay per click or PPC for those that like the acronyms allows you to try advertising on the web for next to nothing, with the option to spend as little or as much as you like without committing to future spend. It also has the added bonus of being easy to measure return on investment unlike some more traditional forms of advertising.

What do I get? If you perform a search on Google for a formal shirt you will notice that there are up to 3 listings at the top of the page and a number down the side that are titled sponsored links. These adverts have been "paid for", or at least they will be if you click on them. You don't get much for your money, a title of 25 characters and two lines of 35 characters, plus your URL (only up to 35 chars). Based on this you need to think carefully about your wording which I will cover soon.

How much will it cost? It depends. Unfortunately if you are in a competitive industry it could be quite expensive, take car insurance, rumour has it each click costs the company something like £10. If you are selling bottle widgets you may find it is as little as 5p. You will need to set up an account on Google (about £5) and run a few tests. You can bid on as many keywords and phrases as you like and you can set a maximum budget for a day. So if you have a budget of £1 a day and this gets you 5 clicks at 20p a click Google will then take down your ad. No massive bills to pay and if it isn't working for you, switch it off tomorrow.

You mentioned return on investment? Because Google tracks who clicks what in its search engine, you have a report on how many times your advert has been displayed and how many people have clicked through to your site. If you combine this with an analytics package there is a wealth of information that can be reviewed.

So with not much wording to work with you need to try a few variations to see what works best. At the end of the day you want to qualify your leads so that you are not wasting money, but on the other hand scaring people off before they get started isn't good either. You need to get your customer hat on and decide for what they search for. The great things is though, if it isn't working then change it.

I am just starting some PPC work for a small clothing company in Guildford. With a website that isn't built with SEO in mind this is a way to traffic. It doesn't require vast amounts of effort to get in place and once I have them setup they can do most of the work themselves.

SEO - Beware of images & research your keywords

It has been a few weeks since I posted on the blog, but August has been a quiet month for me, especially as I am in a new business.

I have been involved in a couple of pieces of work where small businesses aren't seeing anything from their websites.

It seems that small businesses are still missing key points during the development of their websites, which is a real shame. Could be poor or no advice from their web development companies.

Taking a look at the two examples.

1. Pictures and Graphics
It may be true that pictures say a thousand words, sadly not in the case of search engines. The site I reviewed was nearly all pictures, which looked great and someone had obviously spent a lot of time on developing these great images. Google however wasn't able to find enough worthwhile content to rank the page in the search results. Key phrases and keywords were nowhere to be seen.

The other problem with pictures is, if all your content is graphical it will restrict your ability to update the site at a later stage. Unless of course you have in-house graphic capabilities, which for most small businesses is unlikely.

2. Keywords and Key phrases.
If you are running a small business and expect to attract most of your business from the local area then check out the number of searches for your business type and the area name. EG Accountants Norwich. The Google keyword tool is a great way of researching your keywords. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

You will probably find that there are several hundred searches for in , if this is the case make sure you have them in your home page and the key phrases are mentioned a number of times throughout the site.

If you need some help in either of these areas why not get in contact.
http://www.msicommerce.co.uk/contact/contact.asp

Developing my customer proposition

As a small business owner it can be a challenge developing a customer proposition, as the easy answer is - we want everyone’s business. Personally I have decided that I want to focus on SMEs and in reality it is mostly the SEs that I can offer the most benefit to.

In order to be a viable option to this group, low cost solutions is a key point. Previously I have worked for a business that offers its services to small businesses at £86 an hour. The result is that many of the small businesses don't have any work done on their sites.

Taking this part of the customer proposition there are a number of my internal processes that need to be managed in order to maintain low cost – ie production, or in my case development. The best way to keep this cheap at the moment is off-shore. It is very difficult to compete with the resources offered from other parts of the world. With a strong pound it means good value resources can be acquired in the likes of India, Eastern Europe or Mexico.

Developing a virtual team is relatively easy these days and the internet offers access to a wealth of developers and businesses across the world. The use of business tools is vital to keep things on track. Recommended tool include:

1. Collaboration area. This is somewhere to capture all your project information. Emails are ok, but if you have more than a couple of people working the project it can quickly get out of control. People missed from emails, information captured in emails but no where else. An online site allows all the information to be stored in one place and searched at a later stage. See my previous notes on Google site.
2. Messenger service. Skype or MSN Messenger a quick and easy ways to communicate with team members. Quick questions are fine, don't try to hold long conversations though. People don't type that quickly and creativity is best done in a call.
3. VOIP - Small businesses can easily afford access to VOIP services and they provide cheap calls to all parts of the world. If you want really cheap ie free, get a headset and use skype. The people you are working with will need the same system.
4. Screen sharing - Have you ever had that feeling that someone isn't seeing what you are when you are trying to explain something over the phone. "Its next to the green circle" " What this red line?" "No, below the redline" " What the picture?" "No, to the ....." sound familiar. For a small fee per month you can remove these issues with a screen sharing application. GoTo Meeting is relatively cheap and can remove hours of "No, below that".

So now I have my team based in 3 different locations it doesn't cost the earth to communicate with them. The operations side of the business is run with cost in mind allowing me to deliver great value services at prices designed for SMEs.

eBusiness - Integration of websites with 3rd party applications

Recently I have spoken to two businesses that are interested in an eCommerce website. Both are established businesses running retail websites. One ecommerce website was more successful then other but the issues were identical. Rather than integrating the websites into the necessary third party applications someone was having to copy and paste data between two systems!!!!

The first point, in both cases, was that the "Someone" was a business owner, who no doubt has far better and more important tasks to be completing on a daily basis. It no doubt felt right at the time when they made the decision, after all, it is an important task that needs to be done right. The reality is that paying yourself £60k a year to do data processing is not good use of resources.

The second is the exposure to risk that can occur with a manual task. In one case it was the payment details, so that chance of getting card details incorrect during the process are slim as the banks have numerous checks to ensure the details match up. The other was account and order creation, which could result in incorrect orders or missing details. When the numbers are small the risks are less but as a business grows the room for error increases.

eCommerce & eBusiness should be about reducing manual overheads and the automation of processes to reduce the risk of error. Ok there is the chance that something can go wrong with the software, but with good levels of testing the risks can be reduced and with log files errors can be easily traced.

This rant leads us back into the use of Kaplan and Norton's strategy map, which I will pick up next time.

eMail subject line

I have seen some interesting result from a recent email marketing campaign that I thought may be of interest. Interesting but in reality not that surprising really.

The email was for a summer sale for a maternity company that I work with. The email subject line was set as "Re: Summer sale 50% off all clothing". On the face of it this appears to be a fantastic offer, but when reviewed against a previous email it inspired just slightly fewer people to open it (percentage wise).

Two previous emails produced better results using keywords in the title, in the cases in question "Maternity" and "Baby".

Relevancy is a key theme that plays a role here. We are bombarded with sale headlines from the hundreds of companies in our emails all the time. People are now switching off to a general sale and not surprisingly. Generally when I go to a sale it is all the rubbish that the store couldn't shift. Chocolate fondue sets was one mentioned by a top retailer recently.

Sadly the company in question doesn't have accurate data on which users have viewed particular items, we are therefore unable to tailor the emails to individuals. We can however use Google Analytics to show us what the majority of people are looking at but not buying. We can then use that for the basis of the next email, being sure to take out the customers on the email list that have purchased the product recently.

Future emails might therefore read Re: 50% in our summer sale.

I would obviously welcome your thoughts on this.

Customer Proposition Continued

Earlier in this blog I did start some ramblings about customer propositions and I thought it might be time to carry on where I left off.

Having identified our customers and segmented them, we have started to build propositions that should suit each of the segments or where segements over lap the propositions may suit more than one. It is then important to build up the messaging around that propositions.

The web allows you to easily deal with a number of different propositions, as it is realitively cheap to build 2 websites with slightly different branding to appeal to two different markets. This way you are providing clear messaging to two different groups without confusing either group.

A company that has built up the multi brand messages well, is N Brown a provider of fashion to multiple sectors. The following chart shows a breakdown of their brand propositions taken from a presentation by their CEO Alan White at the recent Drapers online fashion event.

The image lays out how the various propositions fit into the market. As a small business it is unlikely that we will be setting up quiet so many different propositions but it does provide a clear picture of how it can work.

In generating a customer proposition you need to look at a number of key aspects these are indentified as the following by Kaplan and Norton: Price, Quality, Availability, Selection, Functionality, Service, Partnership and Brand.

These are quite important as they will require an internal focus to ensure your business is set up to deliver them.

Online Fashion Retailing

I recently attended the Drapers Maximising revenue through online fashion retailing event in London. It was a well attended session with leading industry speakers. Before getting into the business end of the discussion, I must point out that their decision to serve sausage and mash at a buffet, with no seats, tiny table and only provide a fork was interesting. I managed to eat meal without spilling th e food across the floor, which is more than can be said for a previous visit to Bath University who now have an interesting red wine stain on their carpet.

A couple of key points that came out of the session:
1. It is critical that businesses pro-actively manage their online customer service. Some might say "We do this already." But are you aware of what you customers are saying about you elsewhere. Where as in the past a customer would tell 10 of their friends about a bad experience they can now tell the rest of the world. The larger businesses are now tackling this head on and offering a space for customers to feedback even if it is a bad comment. Ultimately this gets bad comments out in the open, but at least it gives the company an opportunity to respond positively. Starting a blog or forumn in a similar style provides customers with a great space to feedback and even small businesses can participate.

2. Free returns good or bad?
eCommerce businesses need to overcome trust issues in order to get customers to buy for the first time. Free returns provides an excellent means to show customers how good you think your products are. One comment was that it can even encourage larger order values as customers pick a couple of items thinking "I'll return those because I am not too sure". But as we all know once you have it in your hands it becomes difficult to send back, for many reasons. Worth noting - don't be afraid to be strict on your returns policy, if the product isn't in a fit state to be resold, send it back to the customer and explain why you will not refund. If you are worried about the impact of free returns why not give free returns as an offer.

Some great ideas. A more detailed summary of the key points will follow on MSI Commerce site.

Developing eNoise

The web provides a great way of generating some eNoise for your business. e-what I hear you cry.

The internet has numerous channels for interacting with your audience. An example would be a blog similar to this one where you can post you ideas and thoughts and allow others to comment.

There are many other similar outlets that allow you to generate a buzz around your company and many of them are free. Search for networking opportunities online and you will find hundreds varying in size from regional sites (business scene) to multi nationals such as LinkedIn.

Most are free to join and some will let you publish articles and general ramblings for free. I have recently joined a number of these as a means of generating some online activity for my site. Business Scene offers the chance for local face to face networking which can be a great channel for driving traffic to your website through your business cards.

Other ways for generating a community around your business include the generation of groups on sites. These are more appropriate for some businesses rather than others. An example would be Facebook, here you can generate a group and showcase your products and company.

As with any online activity there is an overhead associated with it all so you need to choose the one that is most appropriate for your audience, don't be afraid to ask your customers where they look.

SEO for small businesses

It has become clear over the last few months that SMEs really struggle with SEO activities. Although it all sounds easy it is very time consuming trying to make regular and worthwhile updates to your website.

I have found the same situation recently, as well as trying to develop the business I am constantly trying to keep the website up-to-date and make alterations as I go. 

As search engines require you to maintain a level of recency in your site it is worth ensuring that the site is developed with a number of key areas available for editing. 

At least one page if not all should be available for editing so that you can add new content to your site as your business develops. A static site may seem like a nice cheap option but it will cost you in the long run. Especially, if you have to go back to the agency to ask them to make changes. With the ability to edit at least one or more pages the facility to edit the following becomes more critical.

Page titles - these indicate to search engines what is going to be on the page that they are looking at. Make sure you can get into these to make edits to the titles otherwise it will be difficult to stay ahead of the competition if they are making changes.

Meta Descriptions - this is what appears in the search engine results page and is a users call to action. 

Meta Tags - These further allow you to flag to search engines what they are going to find on the page. Although these are now seen as less important (due to abuse) a consistent message across titles, meta  data and content is important.

Recently I was speaking with a company that didn't have access to these features as standard through their site and they were now looking at a large bill to add these changes. Make sure you get these as standard.

Google sites

It has been pointed out that the example link has been removed by the website. I wasn't aware that this occurred. Are you happy to proceed without having seen this?

Software development projects can be a tricky business at the best of times, but if you throw in a virtual team, some time differences and possibly different cultures and there is definitely some cause for concern.

The following can be applied to any business project and is more about making use of ebusiness activities rather than software development.

Projects require a massive amount of communication depending on the number of stakeholders involved. The bigger and more complex the project the greater the number of stakeholders. Equally the larger the project team. Developing communication within the project team is critical and ensuring everyone has all the communication can be a challenge. If the project is over an extended period there is a danger that one member of the team may leave or be off sick. It then makes it difficult to get new project team members up to speed.

Recently I have used Google sites to overcome these issues, providing a free collaboration space for developing your project it offers small businesses a great way to communicate as a team.

In my case all project documentation has gone on to the site and designs for websites are uploaded as pages. This then ensures that everyone is working from the latest documents, plus you can add comments or questions against screens or documents. It is key that all questions that would usually occur in emails are captured in the site. This provides a stored conversation that other or new team members can reference at a later date. It also prevents side conversations occurring. The whole thing is searchable which makes it easy to find things and like a wiki people can add to it as they like. (Although various admin rights can be granted)

The project team have liked it as a collaboration tool and the consensus is that it has really helped with the communication. It also notifies people when changes occur so no one is left in the dark about updates to the project.

You don't have to use Google there are other options, but as an out of the box solution it has worked well so far. I will probably start to use the same function to collaborate with clients in the near future as we operate an open and honest policy.

What's the true cost of owning an ecommerce website?

The other day I was speaking to a website owner about their disillusionment with their current ecommerce website and supplier. Don’t get me wrong it was doing the job and selling products over the internet, but now that business was growing they were uncovering the true cost of going with a sizeable agency. As a small business they had recognised the need for an ecommerce website but on reflection they hadn’t asked the right questions.

As a small business you know you need an ecommerce website to keep and attract customers and grow revenue. The problem is with no previous experience of owning a website what questions do you ask. It would seem fair that with no experience going to a large agency would solve these issues. However the sales people at an agency are focused on the sale and may not cover the implications of some of their costs. As a client you may well be focused on their current client list and the lure of emulating some of those existing clients.

Here are a few questions that you may want to consider asking. The following provides more eCommerce supplier questions.

1. What is the cost per hour of future work? Ok you may have paid £15k for the market leading website, but what happens when your business grows and you need to add a best seller list to the category page. What if the cost of this addition is £1000 or it may stretch to £2000 depending on your requested functionality and the hourly rate of the agency. The big one, and it will hit all businesses that grow, is the integration with other back office systems this could be anywhere from £3000 upwards and can cost nearly as much as the original site. Consider how much this will eat into your profits for the year. The link above will show some typical pieces of functionality and services that you may want to enquire about.
2. Is the cost of hosting fixed or does it rise with an increase in usage? If it does rise with usage what is the cost per Gb. Sadly with many hosting solutions there is a quantity included in a base price but once you go over that there is a charge per Gb. Now consider that as sales go up, so will the number of users browsing the site. This variable cost based on sales can feel like the agency is taking a percentage of your sales. It therefore pays to work out what it will cost you per month as sales rise or worse what happens if sales don’t rise in proportion to the numbers browsing the site.
3. How many clients will my account manager be dealing with? The main reason for going to a large agency is that you feel you will be reaping the benefits of their experience and you would hope to get some advice for free. What happens if you account manager has 20 clients that they need to deal with? That’s less than a day a month, take into account holidays, admin, sickness and you are probably down to half a day and if that is spent selling you a £2000 best seller list then you aren’t maybe getting the value you had hoped for.
4. Can I access my customer data? Ok you may get orders sent to you, but what other questions might you have about your customers. What have customers added to their basket but not purchased? Where do my registered customers live? How many people have registered but not ordered? What products have customers viewed but not purchased? What do people search for on the site? All of these are very valid questions and can provide valuable information that will become critical if you want to grow your business, but can you get it? Or will it cost you?

I hope this has given you some insight into the sorts of questions that you need to ask. What you need is an agency that can understand you marketing issues and provide solutions, not one that sells you an website. After all you can buy an ecommerce site for £99 a month over the internet.

Site User Tracking

A recent experience of pay per click advertising has shown the benefits of tracking customer activity from a number of sources.

If you take out some online advertising you will get built in tracking to show you clicks, cost per click and impressions, plus more stats than I have time to mention here. However what happens after users have clicked through to your site is your responsibility. Therefore as a minimum it is advisable to have a free tracking tool like Google Analytics (GA) on your site and where possible ensure that server logs are switched on and are available to you as required.

I had set up some advertising and allowed "content match", as you would assume that large companies are on the ball with who is displaying their adverts and you would hope that they are getting the best for their customers. I was wrong as it turns out.

There were several distribution partners that display adverts in directory style websites and if you actually look at these sites they have very little in common with some of the adverts they display.

The adverts I had produced were carefully worded to target specific customers including a price that should keep those looking at the lower end of the market out of the site in question.

Luckily Google Analytics clearly shows where people have come from how long they were on the site and which pages they navigate through (Document on how to find this out to follow). With an average time on the site of less than ... well zero seconds it was obvious that someone was taking advantage.

Having referred this to the advertising company, they then asked for server logs. If you are unfamiliar with these they involve thousands of line of code and look like something out of the Matrix films, but buried deep with in them is confirmation about pages opened and the time on the site.

The issue has now been referred to a fraud team. A couple of points have come out of this:

1. Make sure you have a form of site tracking on your site, even if it is an information site.
2. Review the data, especially if you have PPC advertising on the go.
3. If you think something looks suspicious do check it out and do report it to your PPC company.

eMail Marketing

My recent experience of this with one of our partner companies has shown that as well as customising the offering in the email to segments of your customer base, you also need to be playing with other aspects of the mail to see what works. Don't expect instant success either building familiarity with customers takes time.

Here are a few examples

• Alter the subject of the email to find what works best, different calls to action work for different customers. Consider using product names in the subject line as these can be of more interest than another sale.
• Typically the email offers similar links into a site as might be seen on site menu system, however with limited space this cannot be identical. Therefore make sure the menus maximise the opportunity for that segment, if you are promoting jeans in the email replace the jeans link with another sales opportunity.
• The best time for sending an email campaign needs to be established over time. Don't believe what you read on the web that Tuesday's are the best or Wednesday's or ... if you look hard enough you will find every time is best.

eCommerce During a Recession

eCommerce sites provide an excellent form of marketing during economic downturn. When the high street is starting to feel the pinch it is guaranteed that shoppers will be heading online looking for greater value.

The internet also offers a wider source of customers than you might receive from your other channels, obviously the market is virtually world wide.

However simply having a site isn't going to be sufficient, it is now that extra work is required in order to capture market share at a time when others might be starting to cut back. Investment in search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising will prove money well spent when you start to build your customer base.

eBusiness also offers a cheaper alternative for keeping in touch with your customers. Email marketing is a very cheap method for keeping in contact with your customers and shouldn't be ignored. It does need to be combined with data from other sources to gain the most value though. Providing personalised and segmented emails to your customers is a great way of showing them that you care. Similar to the mail that comes through the door people pay more attention to mail that is relevant to them.

Many view marketing as an expense that can be cut to save money. I have personally witnessed the implications of such a mistake, a company I worked for previously saw a drop in sales for 6 months, due to reduced marketing activity.

Simple ebusiness tools add value

Some recent work with a business has shown that even the simplest of ebusiness tools can help to cut costs in the long run.

A maternity company work working with MSI Commerce had wanted to include catalogue requests from its ecommerce website in an email marketing campaign. The data was sent from the site in a standard format to the company’s inbox.

Up until this point the company hadn't used the data which meant a significant backlog of processing had built up. Initially this looked like a manual copy and paste job, but this wasn't sustainable over the long term, especially as the site grows.

A search of the internet revealed a number of useful tools for dealing with such occurrences. At £99 to purchase email2db provided a simple long term solution to the problem. As well as managing the extraction of data from emails into a database, it can also be used to send automated responses to email signup requests.

The tool was relatively easy to set up and for those with programming experience can provide more powerful features. Other simple ebusiness solutions such as this can provide powerful cost savings to small businesses. Plus without access to the internet it is unlikely that such a software solution would have been found.