Whilst he has already taken some paternity leave he may well be a little tired from all those restless nights but don’t worry as we have more news…

As you may know over the last year Digital Design Scotland has increasingly worked with Andy Baker of SEO Services in eCommerce related projects. Andy has provided clients with PPC (pay per click) management, online marketing and conversion optimisation. Similarly we have provided SEO Services with website development and design services.

With an increasing amount of projects requiring both our input we have decided to combine resources and have launched Get Square. Get Square is a Digital Agency with offices at Lady Victoria Colliery, Newtongrange and our services include website design, eCommerce solutions, mobile development, online marketing, pay per click advertising and conversion optimisation.

With the new business launch any new projects or invoices raised after the 5th April (changes are being made inline with the financial year) will be processed as Get Square (existing contracts will be invoiced via Digital Design Scotland)

We are currently a team of 3 (looking for a 4th) meaning if one of us one of us is up to his ears in nappies others are available to help you update your website, send out an email campaigns, quote for new projects or increase your sales with a targeted PPC campaign. As such instead of emailing Ross direct we would recommend sending any support related correspondence, update requests or new enquiries to support@getsquare.co.uk. The team member most suited to deal with your request will respond as quickly as possible.

We will drop you an email from Get Square shortly to introduce ourselves properly.

On occasion a client will ask us to use an existing hosting package or customise a pre purchased template. Generally this isn’t a problem but not always… especially if the hosting package or template was a ‘bargain’. Take for example a recent clients story, lets call him Joe Bloggs* …

Joe was technically knowledgeable and prior to approaching us he had undergone some initial development work. He had set up an account with a well know CMS, applied a low cost template and populated the site with content. He asked us to assist him finish the project by customising the design of the template – a template which he was already committed to using.

He had made the correct choice for the CMS so on face value the job looked quick, simple and inexpensive. Unfortunately however when we opened up the hood we found that the template was poorly written making it time consuming to alter. Whilst we made the changes they took twice as long as they would have taken on a well written template. This additional time obviously negated any initial saving. If Joe had approached us prior to selecting a template we would have been able to direct him to a source of well made templates which could be easily customised or for the amount he finally spent we could have produced a high quality bespoke design optimised for performance.

Similarly, many previous clients have found their ‘cheap’ hosting packages are not installed with the server components required to provide the necessary functionality and as such have had to purchase a second hosting package to complete their project.

So the moral of the story is do your homework or ask the experts… and don’t worry we don’t charge for a little advice.

*We received the clients permission before recounting their story. The clients name has been changed to protect their identity

We were recently invited to give a presentation titled ‘An Introduction to Email Marketing’ to the East Lothian Coffee Morning at the Waterside Bistro, Haddington on the 19th August 2010. I would like thank Al Byrce and everyone else involved for organising these thoroughly enjoyable events. Below you can view the slides and incorporated notes used during the presentation (if you can’t view the flash slideshow you can download a pdf version).

If you are interested in attending any future events just search twitter for the appropriate hash tag for further information.

• Assuming the existing customer is signed up to a businesses contact database it should be easy to entice them to make further purchases by sending cost effective email campaigns.
• Existing customers will have previously purchased from a businesses website. A large hurdle in making a website visitor a customer is giving them the confidence to trust a website. Existing customers should not only be confident about using a businesses website they should also have they ability to store details enabling the check out process to be quick and simple.
• Existing customers will have experienced a businesses customer service. A portion of any sale can be attributed to customer service. If a customer needs to return an item is it going to be painless? If they have questions regarding the product / services is the business going to be easily contactable? A new customer will have no knowledge of how good a businesses cutostomer service is, an existing customer should already be impressed.
• and there are many more experiences an existing customer will have had when originally making a purchase including prompt delivery times, the good value of the goods / services, the high quality of goods / services, etc.

Recently a number of clients gave me an example of the value they gave to capturing an existing customer contact details and I would like to share that example with you.

As you may or may not know I work with a number of tourist attractions and along with Tribalogic, an Edinburgh based software team, I provide a booking engine called ‘Bookster Showtime‘. This engine allows Attractions, Venues and Performers to easily sell tickets via their own website and any number of third party sites.

The booking engine works in a fairly standard manner in that the user who is purchasing a ticket pays a small ‘booking fee’ on top of the ticket price. The booking fee is not seen by the Attraction but is essentially the cost of using the software. Understandably most Attractions prefer not to reduce their online ticket prices to take account of the booking fee but instead see the ability of pre purchasing an admission ticket as a service worth paying a little extra for. This obviously means that a visitor not pre purchasing a ticket but turning up to an Attraction and buying a ticket directly will pay a little less. For an Attraction however this has a disadvantage. Visitors purchasing tickets directly very rarely leave contact details and as such the Attraction has no way of enticing that visitor back. As they have no email address they cannot inform them about any new merchandise they stock, about any upcoming events or about any Special Offers.

As such a number of Attractions have or are considering discounting their online ticket price to take account of the ‘booking fee’ in the hope that a larger percentage of visitors will start to pre purchase tickets online. Obviously pre purchased tickets have a number of advantages to Attractions but the main benefit is that an Attraction captures the visitors contact details and can therefore target them in any future marketing campaigns. So what discounts are the Attractions applying to ensure visitors buy tickets online and that they capture contact details? Generally it is 10% and with the average ticket price being £10 the value of the contact details to this set of attractions is approximately £1.00.

Special Offers can be great hooks. They can entice a user to your site and convert them into a customer. But making a Special Offer into a successful campaign requires more thought than ever. In the past retailers would have been able to reduce old stock to half price and someone, somewhere would have likely bought it, but not any longer. In this economic climate everything is on sale, all of the time, which means you may even struggle to give old stock away.

You have got to get inventive with your Special Offers, Promotions and Sales. It is no good to promoting a BOGOF (Buy One Get One Free) offer when any normal person would only want a single item (i.e. 2 toasters for the price of 1) and although discounts can be effective you often have to slash the price to a point that there is little or no profit in a sale. Big discounts can work in the form of loss leaders, i.e. getting users to your site in the hope that they will buy additional items at full list price but there is no guarantee that the all important additional sales will materialise.

A potentially effective Special Offer to help you sell off old stock would be to group items into a set. Take for example the ‘old stock’ toaster, if you combine this item with a Kettle you then you have a Breakfast Set. The discount you were going to apply to the Toaster (say 50%) can now be spread across the two items (lets suggest 25% off the set). This still gives you an attractive selling price for the set but more importantly you are essentially selling a full price item (i.e. the Kettle) every time you give away a Toaster. Additionally the new ‘Breakfast Set’ is far more marketable than an old Toaster and as such would attract more attention and inevitably be more appealing.

So don’t just stick up a ‘Half Price Sale’ banner on your website in January. Get inventive with your promotions and they in turn will be more successful.

Over the last few months we have been building a working relationship with an Edinburgh based firm called Tribalogic, who provide high standard technical products and services for a range of online buisnesses.

We first worked together when we were contracted by TheEdinburghAddress.com to propose a marketing and promotional strategy.

Tribalogic had developed the very powerful directory engine within the website and also provided the booking engine to enable users to check availability and book online.

Within a month we were once again involved in the same project as we had both submitted proposals for VisitMidlothian.com (soon to be launched) and ultimately worked together throughout its development.

Subsequently we decided that as we make a good team we should develop a joint project and as such we are now thrilled to announceAttractionBank.com

Tribalogic has brought the data and their experience of directory engines to the website and we have undertaken a feasibility study and made a number design changes. In the forthcoming months we hope to build content in the form of events / news and to introduce an online booking engine for ‘Admissions’ and ‘Tours’. Whilst we intend to offer free attraction listings and event listings throughout the UK we hope to monitise the site by offering an enhanced listing which includes online booking facilities.

We are very excited to be working with Tribalogic and if you have any questions about either of our services or would like further information about AttractionBank.com please do not hesitate to contact us at mail@digitaldesignscotland.co.uk

Whilst we can post tweets, blogs and your facebook status on your behalf it is always the personal touch that will entice fans or followers. People are naturally hesitant about following businesses assuming that posts will either be marketing based or boring business facts. It is therefore essential for businesses who want to become a part of an online community that they come across with a friendly, helpful and fun persona and undoubtedly the best way to do this is to have someone (internal to the company) with these same attributes regularly (daily) post.

Mixing up the news, promotions and personal posts will ensure people pay more attention to your feeds. This helps develop a community, builds stronger customer relationships, helps to increases your level of customer service and is likely to encourage existing customers to recommend your business via their online networks and secure you further sales.

An additional benefit is that for potential customers your community will allow them to learn more about you before making a purchase – they can discuss your services with members of the community, view your feedback and see how you have resolved any issues which may have cropped up in previous transactions. They therefore feel reassured when making the first purchase as they no longer think of you as an anonymous business.

Essentially you want potential users to feel at ease when visiting your profile – don’t make people think of you as a hard faced business.

The Audio Mp3 File is available by clicking here.

And the presentation notes can be downloaded here.

Any third party videos used in this presentation have been purchased for this explicit use. Excluding third party videos all content is Copyrighted by Digital Design Scotland 2009.

A big Thank You must go out to Les and Paul (showerguys). Follow them on Twitter at http://twitter.com/showerguys or visit their website at http://www.theshowershop.org/

During the selection process for deciding which networks you want to appear you should consider whether your customers use the same network, whether you want to keep your profile private and how easily it will be integrate into your daily life. For those networks you will not be actively updating you may still want to register accounts and populate the profile with where you can be found e.g. LinkedIn status may read – Although we don’t use LinkedIn feel free to follow us at http://twitter.com/ddscotland.

Another thing worth investigating is whether your network(s) of choice can push / pull updates to / from other networks. On Facebook, for example, you can install a Twitter application which updates your Facebook status everytime you post a new tweet (although this is a great time saver make sure your Facebook audience will appreciate your tweets as you don’t want to alienate any friends or followers).

Concentrating your efforts across a selected number of networks will ensure your profiles quality and in turn increase the networks effectiveness at securing new business and keeping existing customers informed.

Unfortunately these changes cannot be made overnight and generally they require the help of consultants such as ourselves. When we are approached to perform these services for a client we must first fully research their business, their products/services, consider the demographic of their existing customer base and gauge the success of their existing website. We will then prepare a report which will outline the changes we would implement to increase conversion rates and customer satisfaction and how we would promote the site to increase visitor numbers.

As these changes, or more importantly the results, can take weeks to materialise it is understandable that not all businesses wish to pay in full for these services upfront. It is therefore advantageous that one of our most productive methods of working is to spread the cost of our services over the period of our working relationship (although we are more than happy to provide one off services for an upfront payment). This is achieved by discounting the cost of any development and linking any revenue we may earn to the success of the website.

If you are interested in finding out more about the services we offer or our various payment options please feel free to contact us with any questions you may have - contact details found here.