Archive for the ‘e-business’ Category

Purchasing a Domain Name

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

It is advisable when developing your business name to see if the domain name is available for purchase. If not you may have to be inventive. I recently started working with an SME who had already registered their domain name with www.uk2.net. At first glance they appear to be a cheaper than other domain name companies. With good reason. Once you get started you realise that they are a but like Ryan Air, everything is an extra.

Now if you own a domain name, I can guarantee that you will want to hook it up to a website. If the site is hosted somewhere else it appears that some domain name companies want to charge you for the privilege of pointing it to your website. Not just once either but every year and this is on top of your domain name registration fee.

There is a better way 123-reg.co.uk offer an all in price when you register the domain name. Unlimited updates and access to a host of other services. They might be £2 more expensive to register your domain name but it pays in the long run.

If you need assistance registering your domain name then do give me a call.

Michael Bates - Director - MSI Commerce, marketing driven e-business

Posted in buying a website, company website, e-business, eBusiness | No Comments »

The benefits of email newsletters

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

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.

Posted in e-business, eBusiness, eMail marketing, marketing, online strategy | No Comments »

Online backup - Store your mission critical data with confidence

Saturday, September 20th, 2008

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.

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.

Posted in e-business, eBusiness | No Comments »

eBusiness - Integration of websites with 3rd party applications

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

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.

Posted in business objectives, business strategy, e-business, eCommerce, online strategy | No Comments »

Simple ebusiness tools add value

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

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.

Posted in e-business | No Comments »

Building The Customer Proposition Through Segmentation

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

In order for a business to generate new revenue opportunities or to encourage our customers to spend more with us, we need to examine who our customers are. If you haven’t done a segmenation exercise in your business it can be quite challenging, especially when the segments seem to blend into one.

I recently completed one for my business, in the end I chose to break down the market by size of business, as I am working in a B2B environment. It took a while to find some useful market data, but a good trawl across the internet can usually uncover some interesting stats. The UK government typically has statistics on major industries, otherwise look in trade press and other internet sites to find what you are looking for. Esentially you are looking for a supported analysis of your markets. (Here we seen a good example of how businesses make use of IT in day to day business. The internet can be an excellent source of marketing data and if you cannot find public domain information it can be a great way to source a supplier. )

Segmenting customers is vital in all businesse, but provides great opportunities for those with an eCommerce channel. Having identified customer segments you can attribute sales and enquiries to the various groups to build a picture of their value. This then allows you to focus your resources on the most valuable groups.

Posted in customer segmentation, e-business, eBusiness, marketing | No Comments »

e-Business

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

The internet doesn’t have to be about selling products online, e-business activities should form part of your overall business information strategy. Which should be aligned with and support your main business strategy. It is vital that the choices you make for your business are not just based on the latest trends and offerings from hi-tech companies.

We can use a simple model to build up a picture of your business strategy. I have recently become familiar with Kaplan and Norton’s strategy maps. Now before you start running for the hills please hold on as the next few additions to the blog will build up a simple picture of how it works and the benefits it can start to bring to your business.

Posted in e-business, online strategy, strategy maps | No Comments »

Welcome to Talk e-Business

Friday, January 4th, 2008
This blog aims to demystify the world of e-Business, an element of business that is becoming increasingly important for all companies. The cost of owning a website has decreased dramatically, however just having an online presence is no longer sufficient. The market is becoming increasingly crowded and it is therefore vital to have an online strategy that will deliver return on investment, increase customer confidence and improve loyalty.
Using some well known frameworks we will start to breakdown new ideas, technologies and trends to examine what value they can deliver for your business.
Please feel free to comment and offer suggested areas for analysis, I look forward to hearing
from you.
Michael Bates

Posted in e-business, welcome | No Comments »