Scaling Your Online Presence with Powerful Tools

By Matthew KwanPrincipal Consultant,
Adams Company Limited (www.adamshk.com)
© Copyright. April 17, 2009


There actually many ways that you can scale your company's online presence by using powerful tools or community website like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare...etc

A simple example is that you can create a blog entry, then the entry can be automatically copied to Twitter and from Twitter to Facebook. Your effort is not so much but your online presence is increase by 3 folds at least. Once you work out how to connect them with minimum effort, it is just a matter of submitting meaningful contents to your registered sites.

e-Marketing或是Online Marketing 可達到的成本效益已經越來越被大小企業所重視

雖然經濟不景氣，企業不能不宣傳！e-Marketing或是Online Marketing 可達到的成本效益已經越來越被大小企業所重視，具多項研究報告顯示互聯網於香港已經成為第三大宣傳媒體，而且有持續增長趨勢。按香港電訊管理局2008年12月統計 ，香港約有八成家庭有寬頻線上網。

Successful Customer Database Management for Winning e-Marketing

By Matthew Kwan © Copyright. All rights reserved. Principal Consultant

Adams Company Limited www.adamshk.com

So you are generating good responses from your e-Mail campaigns, online advertising, search engine marketing and etc...The next most important thing you need to do is to manage your customer database successfully. Without this, your e-Marketing strategy will always have a missing link. You can grow to certain level with success but if you want to grow from good to great, Customer Database Management is the area you need to plan in the beginning of your e-Marketing effort.

What can you do if you are running on lean budget and do not want to spend a lot to buy Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software at the start. Here are some good practical suggestions you may consider:

1. Spreadsheets

2. Mail Client Software

3. Accounting Software

1. Spreadsheets

Obviously, MS Excel is the most commonly used spreadsheet software in the market. However, you can use any kind as we are just keeping a simple list. The trick is that you create multiple files of e-Mail/Contact Lists by segregating your Suppliers, Partners, Customers, Prospects and other categories in different files for ease of management. In future, whenever you have new e-Mail addresses/Contact information, you just need to append to the relevant lists/files to keep them up-to-date.

2. e-Mail Client Software

Most of people would use MS Outlook Express or whatever free e-Mail Client provided by the Operating System in your computer when downloading e-Mails from server. It is relatively simple to keep your master e-Mail/Contact Lists within the same e-Mail system or your e-Mail Client Software you are using. The idea behind is the same as you would do using spreadsheets. You just need to create different "Distribution Lists" or "Groups"...etc to maintain your e-Mail campaign lists. One good function with some e-Mail Client Software is that when you add duplicate e-Mail addresses to the same list, the software will automatically add only one entry to the list rather multiple. This would minimize the unpleasant experience of the receivers when they are receiving multiple copy of your e-Mails just because it was not properly managed.

3. Accounting Software

As I proposed often, your e-Mail campaign should always sending to your closest relationship groups first. e.g. Suppliers, Partners, Customers, Prospects...etc. These closest groups are typically already captured by your accounting software for invoicing or billing purposes. Therefore, you may make just a little bit of effort to keep up your contact database in your accounting software to make sure e-Mails are properly input and up-to-date. Preferrably, you may ensure your accounting software could give you some options or remark fields to sort out the lists with additional criterias to facilitate better management.

Other than the above 3 suggestions, the next best option I can think of is using the e-Mail Marketing software. The price of these kind of software can range as low as US$100 to very high prices depending on the kind of functionalities they can provide.

Converting Clicks to Sales Leads

By Matthew Kwan

2008 © Copyright. All rights reserved.

Principal Consultant

Adams Company Limited http://www.adamshk.com/

The biggest challenge of e-Marketing is to convert clicks to Sales Leads. Generating clicks is not difficult but how to lead your potential customers to take actions including calling you by phone, sending you e-Mails, filling up enquiry forms...etc is an art.

Obviously, website design is the very first consideration and effort you have to make in order to invite your potential customers to take actions. First of all, you really have to encourage people to call you and send email to you by putting these invitations & your contact information all over your website. Though it may not look odd in terms of design and layout when you show these information so often, it is a mandatory thing you have to do for the sake of converting clicks to actions. Here are some suggestions on areas you may consider:

1. Enquiry Hotline Phone Number

2. Enquiry e-Mail Address

3. e-Form for enquiry or quotation request with predefined fields

4. Button function for forwarding the page or information friends

5. Button function for signing up e-Newsletters

6. Button function to respond to the content

All of the above are very basic and powerful items to include in a web page in order to capture information from your customers and increase the chances that you can get in touch with them. In addition, you may also include "Live Chat" function on your web page. Live Chat is another very powerful tool you may want to deploy as it will let you proactively monitor your website visitors and invite them to chat and start the selling process instantly. No matter your customers are leaving you contact information or connected through Live Chat, once you are connected with your customers, it is really an exercise of your conventional selling process from then on.

On the other hand, your marketing strategy behind your marketing campaign is the real critical success factor. Your potential customers would not take actions unless your content and messaging on your website or landing page is really compelling. How to make your contents compelling is a communications skill, you need to ensure that values of your products/services are being highlighted rather than just listing functionalities and specifications. Again, communications or copying writing skill is not a simple thing; it is always good to get someone acting from customer perspectives to review the contents for you.

Designing Powerful & Effective Search Keywords of Your Business

By Matthew Kwan © Copyright. All rights reserved. Principal Consultant
Adams Company Limited www.adamshk.com

Keywords or tags or labels are very important by e-Marketing term as they can help you to be searched by search engine easier or to do contextual marketing more effective and etc. You may use them for Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization & etc.

It may sound difficult but in effect it is just a matter of using the right method when designing powerful & effective search keywords of your business for e-Marketing. You may refer to my previous written article on "The 5C's of Business Planning" for detailed description on how to identify your Customers, Competitors, Complementors, Channels and Costs. The answers to the designated questions will help you to list out the top-most important keywords of your business.

After having done the analysis of 5C’s, it will be only a mechanical process to expand the list of keywords with some specific verbs or nouns adding in front or after your keywords making it like phrases to be specific enough that one would use them to search your company’s products/services as discussed in the article of “Search Engine Keywords Must Be Cost Effective”

The final result of the keywords list generated from this process can be very long but you can always to shorten the list when you have captured enough data from your search engines. It is relatively easy to remove those under-performed keywords of few impressions or clicks.