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Hi, my name is Lisa Durrett, and I’m with AT&T Digital Marketing and Small Business InSite.
Thank you for your interest in our webinar today, "Seven Sure-Fire Ways to Increase Your Online Sales in 2011," the first in our Small Business
Webinar Series for 2011.
Our Small Business Webinar Series is designed to provide valuable insight to technology and topics that are critical to the success of today’s
small businesses.
You can find additional resources on our award-winning website AT&T Small Business InSite.
We encourage your questions during our webinar today by typing them into the "Ask a Question" box and hitting "Submit."
We will try to answer as many questions as possible during the Q&A session following the presentation.
Also, you may enlarge the slides, download the slides, or get help at any time during the presentation by selecting the appropriate buttons
along the bottom of your screen.
Now, let me introduce our speakers for today. Tad Clarke is director of content strategy for Bredin Business Information.
For nearly 15 years, Tad has been developing a range of marketing content targeting small businesses and other audiences.
Before joining Bredin, he was the editorial director at Marketing Sherpa, where he wrote several industry benchmark guides on email,
eCommerce, and search engine marketing.
Tad also served as editor-in-chief of DM News.
Also presenting today is Kelly Newcome-Coppolino, director of small business Web hosting from AT&T.
Kelly has been part of AT&T’s hosting business for over 10 years, holding positions from director of Internet data center operations to director of
small business Web hosting.
Kelly’s hosting experience spans from small business to enterprise-class solutions and is currently focused on providing Web-hosting
services to small businesses, which include websites, eCommerce, marketing tools, and branded email.
Before joining AT&T’s hosting business, Kelly held numerous roles within AT&T, including software development, EDP auditing, data center
operations management, and disaster recovery/business continuity planning.
Now, let me turn the presentation over to Tad.
Great. Thank you, Lisa, thank you for having me. I’m very excited to be here and share this information, especially the survey results.
I think we found some interesting things that will help your business as you’re trying to think about your sales strategies and grow your businesses
for 2011.
I know that many of you are very busy, so I’m going try to keep my part of the presentation to probably about 15 minutes or so.
First, we’re going to look at the research, some of the research and what businesses expect for 2011, and then we’re going to get into our seven
tips and best practices.
With each tip, I’m going to provide some pointers to help you get started, and the good news is that there really are some easy things that you can do
to improve your sales.
Even if you're already using some of these tips, you may want to take a look at your results and really change what isn’t working.
If you’re not using any of them, don't think you have to add them all at once, just if you add one or two you should start seeing some noticeable
results.
So, let's look to see where businesses are, and this is from a survey that AT&T did late last year.
They surveyed hundreds of small and medium businesses, and I'm going to be referring to these results throughout the presentation.
The respondents came from all parts of the United States and from various industries, and they reflected a range of businesses in size and
scope.
We also broke the data down into three specific age groups: 18 to 34, 35 to 49, and over 50.
So, let’s look at the first survey results.
Business owners are showing a renewed optimism compared to a year ago, and actually one in five expects sales to increase 20% or
more this year, while 90% are expecting the same or better. Those numbers are pretty much up quite a bit from 2010.
So, as consumers loosen their purse strings, you can see why it’s going to be a good time to make sure you're engaging your customers effectively.
And let's get into our first tip.
The first tip is about email.
It’s been around for awhile, and it may not be as flashy as some of the newer marketing tactics out there, but it's still one of the most cost-
effective and efficient ways to strengthen your relationship with your customers and to really attract new ones.
You want to try to make it easy for visitors to find your website and sign up for your email lists, perhaps through a box on the home page.
So, you can stay in touch and improve the odds that they’re going to become better customers.
Now, looking at the survey itself, we found the email-based programs are really by far the most effective marketing tactic among the businesses
we surveyed.
Over half are sending email offers, they’re using email newsletters, and about a third are sending email coupons out to their customer base.
And even when we broke down the data by industry, by age group, by business size, email still came out on top over all the other tactics out
there.
So, we are going to discuss some of those other results in the chart in our next couple tips after this one.
First, let’s talk about some ways that you can use email.
You should be keeping in touch with your clients on a consistent, continual basis, but you really don't want to overwhelm them with email, since
they probably, the majority of them, don't have time to read every single one.
In addition to a well-designed newsletter, you want to keep the content brief since many subscribers are going to skim the content.
You’ll always want to use bold fonts, subheads, bullets to emphasize key information, which really helps the reader catch their eye as they are
skimming the copy.
You should keep customers up-to-date on new shipments or products, that's obviously important, but you really should do more to keep their
interest, because they may get tired of that in time, so include information that educates your readers, solves a problem that relates to your
offerings.
Discounts and other perks can show your subscribers that you appreciate their support.
And to get faster results, you may want to specify a time window so they have to take immediate action.
So, on to our second tip.
Because so many consumers use the Internet to research products and services, your site really has to be found easily on the search engines
themselves.
Consumers are searching online even if they plan to make the purchase offline at a retail store.
Search engine is a great way to grow sales according to the research.
Successful online marketers are continually working to improve their ranking in the search results.
Sadly, your work is probably not ever going to be done.
You may want to review your strategies around search engine optimization, this is called SEO in short, and just to give you a brief explanation
about that, all the search engines-Google, Yahoo, Bing-use algorithms to rank your website, so when people search for things, your site may
come up in the results.
Obviously, the higher your site ranks, the better it's going to be, because studies have proven that searchers really look at only the first two or three
results when they're doing their Web searches.
And the good thing is that there are many things you can do to make your site rank higher.
So, let’s dig into our search engine optimization checklist.
The first one here, by big, I mean lots of content, this can really help your ranking out in the search results.
To create a big site, you need to have more than just a home page and one or two product or service pages.
You need lots of pages with articles, product descriptions, blog posts, anything that relates to your business and what you sell.
You want to be sure to include keywords in your copy, and these are words that describe what your business does.
It’s important to place the keywords in the first paragraph, the middle of the piece, and in the very last sentence.
You also want to make sure you fill each webpage with enough copy, at least 400 to 500 words per article, per piece of content, so the
search engines are able to determine a keyword theme.
Search engines like to see fresh content, and that's why blogging is so important.
A search engine can’t index your site if it’s down a lot or if it crashes frequently, so you really want to use a reliable hosting platform.
On to our tip number three. All of the top social media sites-Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn-are gaining in popularity among small businesses.
Facebook has the most active users, and it’s allowed businesses to do a range of things to engage customers.
Looking at the data, the buzz around social media was pretty hard to avoid last year, and, as you can see from the research, businesses like
Facebook over the other social networking sites, but Twitter and LinkedIn both grew in popularity and usage quite a bit, too.
When we broke down the study results by industry, company size, and region, Facebook still came out on top.
Breaking down that data a little bit further, our research found that women are much more social in nature.
And the other stat on this page really shows just how wide the generation gap can get between the smaller, younger business owners and in the
older ones, who are over 50.
So, for the reasons I just mentioned, you may want to add Facebook to your marketing mix.
Creating a page for your business is relatively easy to do on Facebook, and these two links can help you add icons to your site, help increase
interaction. For instance, you can have a "Log In" button that shows pictures of visitors, friends who already signed up for your site.
If you decide to start social media, there are two things: The main thing to think about is do you have enough time for yourself or someone on
staff to devote to social media outreach.
Because to be active, updating pages, interacting with customers, you're going to need to devote at least a few hours each week to this.
And my other piece of advice is to be patient.
It may take a few months or even longer before you start to build up enough of a community for you to start seeing any of the results.
And we’ve seen many businesses get started and then drop off after a month or two kind of in frustration because they're thinking it's just not
worth it, but they just did not given enough time.
So, make sure you do give it enough time, and make sure you highlight your social media outreach in all of your other marketing efforts.
Put a link on your home page to your Twitter accounts, to your Facebook account, to your LinkedIn account, whatever it is, put them into
your email signature, in your print materials. And you really need to cross-promote everything, just so you do it all the time and just be consistent
with it.
On to tip number four.
A good mobile marketing strategy right now could help you ring up sales, so you can connect with customers through their smartphones and other
mobile devices.
Businesses with websites that have location-specific details or restaurants that allow customers to make reservations online, these are
the type of businesses that could really benefit by mobile marketing right now.
According to the data itself, the mobile marketing field is still pretty fairly untapped right now, so it's a good time to gain market share.
You look at the data-two-thirds of our surveyed businesses don't actually even market to customers with mobile phones.
However, not surprisingly, the younger small business owners, they’re further along in the process here.
And then, of the businesses that are already using mobile marketing, you can see the data on right-hand side, these businesses rated having a
mobile website as the most effective component.
If you think your business would benefit by having a mobile-friendly website, here are some key points to keep in mind.
The left side is how to design your site; the right side is more on programming your site.
Going down the left-hand side, you want the screen size to be small, because the screen size is small on the smart phone, you want your
mobile site to be easy to navigate so customers can find the most important information links right away.
You should use fewer images and graphics so your site loads more quickly on a smartphone, and you really want to keep typing to a minimum
because the keyboards are so small on a smartphone.
Reduce the clutter and make your site really as clean as possible.
And the best way to do this is to look at your site on several different mobile phones, different types of phones, and do this once or twice, and
you’re going to quickly realize what areas you need to address.
The other sides of these tips on the programming are things you need to think or ask your website developer about.
You should have him or her review the programming and just see what can be tweaked to make the mobile site perform better or whether
you're going to need to build it from scratch.
Optimize your mobile type of search engines, that’s going to be another thing to do, just as you did for your website.
Okay, on to tip number five.
Even with all this new technology, we can't forget one of the most basic sales tactics, and that’s valuing your customers.
Pretty much everyone who answered our survey sees the importance of good customer service.
During perhaps the busiest time of year, correspondents said they were going to be relying on customer service to differentiate their
businesses from all their competition.
Doing more marketing came in a close second, and the other results are pretty typical-product selection and reducing prices, having sales
events and special offers, although people weren't too interested in having longer hours.
Now, a few of these tips may seem obvious, but they’re essential to building and maintaining good customer relationships.
You really need to learn as much as you can about your customers so you can build a personal connection with them.
Be attentive, offer discounts to loyal customers, create a rewards program.
If the shopper emails you a question, don't sit on it, answer it right away.
The longer you take to answer, the more likely they’re going to move on to a competitor of yours.
And it's important to build a community so that you have a common interest, a common bond with your customers.
They already got a common interest among themselves by shopping on your site, whether it's a certain clothing style, a fondness for Italian
food, a love of yoga, whatever it is, you may want to host demonstrations, have giveaways, to gather them for reasons to come to your site for
things beyond just shopping.
Tip number six is the natural extension of having good customer service, and it can really encourage customers to buy from you again,
recommend your site to other friends, associates, whomever.
When we asked our surveyed businesses what they're going to be doing to drive sales this year, following up after purchase came in number one,
and it was a pretty sizable jump over 2010.
Breaking down the data further, we found that the follow-up is already important for younger business owners, more than twice as many of
younger business owners are doing follow-up after purchase as business owners over 50.
And the only strategy that drops was offering special offers for preferred customers, so that still is used by more than half of the businesses
who are in the survey.
Now, to think about ways to follow up, there are several ways you can do this.
You can set up an automated email campaign so your customers automatically receive an email after purchase just to confirm everything, or you
can send a custom note or email on your own.
Sending a short survey soliciting feedback, these are ways they can provide valuable data to help you improve your offerings, and it lets your
customers know that their satisfaction matters.
You could send an email suggesting other products and services, along in a way cross-sell or upsell or offer a discount on their next
purchase, and highlighting previous orders can really jog their memories, prompt them to make a purchase, or it could help them think of you the
next time that they’re going to need that item.
Okay, moving on to our last tip.
For a growing number of consumers, shopping means searching online just as much as it means walking through a brick-and-mortar store, so you
really have to capitalize on that traffic.
According to the data from the survey, that first number on the slide is pretty big, more than half of our surveyed businesses said they added
more forms of payment over the holidays, they expanded the types of payments you accept can help so you’re not going to miss out on a big sale
whether that’s in store or online.
If you already have an eCommerce site, you may want to consider accepting more types of credit cards or adding an online payment service.
As you can see, also important with beefing up their website so pages would load faster and improve the general customer experience just as
much as possible.
So, you can see why all of this is important.
Of the businesses we surveyed, they expect over half of their sales to be online this year-56%-so an eCommerce site can really help
increase your sales considerably.
But if it’s unreliable, if it’s slow or difficult to navigate, it’s going to hurt you in the end.
You want to use a Web hosting service that can handle peak traffic heavy times, especially during the holidays, and offer helpful features like site
search. Look at the numbers there and you can understand that.
Also be sure shoppers can find what they're looking for by positioning your site search box at the top of the page and test to make sure it
provides relevant results.
So there are seven tips, and as you think about what I just talked about today, remember you don't have to do all of these at the same time.
Instead, you may want to test one or two and see if they're actually helping.
Keep the ones that do well, and drop the ones that don't.
If you don’t use email to keep in touch with your customers yet, now would be a really good time to do that.
You may also want to search the Internet for products and services that relate to your company and see where your site comes up.
And if it’s lower, see what you can do search engine optimization-wise to increase your ranking.
And finally, my last bit of advice would be, as with any marketing effort, you’ve got to test what you’re doing, you need to monitor the results and
adjust accordingly.
So there you go, and now I give it back to Lisa.
Thanks, Tad. Now we’re going to transition over to Kelly from AT&T, and she will discuss how AT&T can help implement many of the strategies
that Tad has discussed.
Kelly?
Thank you Lisa. AT&T is very proud to offer continuum of hosting plans designed to meet the diverse needs of small businesses.
Whether you want to build your own site using products such as FrontPage or Joomla, or whether you need an easy-to-use website
builder that anyone with a browser basically can use to build a professional site in minutes.
And since we know that small businesses are oftentimes are time challenged and don’t have a lot of opportunity to focus on their website,
we’ve also introduced a set of design packages that can help you get a Web presence online in as little as a week, and yet still allows you the
ultimate control over the look and feel of your site.
And, of course, as Tad outlined, email is king, and all of our hosting packages offer branded email, which is critical in establishing a professional
appearance in all of your electronic communication, particularly through things like email marketing campaigns.
Our website builder also makes setting up blogs quick and simple, and in the coming months we will be introducing capabilities that allow any of
our customers who have created websites using our website builder platform to have a mobile website with a single click.
So, in essence, it will take the content that is on your standard website and put that into the format that Tad described, which has been
optimized for hundreds of smartphones and cellular devices, and make that very easy to have yet a website presence and a mobile presence
with very little additional effort required on your part.
Our eCommerce plans include Shop Sites, which is an award-winning, easy-to-use software platform for shopping carts.
And that allows you to basically create a new store in as little as eight easy steps.
If you already have a website, no worries, you can still use Shop Site to add product pages and/or shopping cart to your site.
Or, if you prefer, you can simply add "Order Now" buttons within your site.
Our eCommerce plans also allow you to implement many of the capabilities that Tad outlined today, including extensive payment
options, such as PayPal, major credit cards, purchase orders, etc.; advanced search capabilities; product cross-sell and upsell;
allowing you to recommend products to someone who has bought a particular product or put that into their shopping cart; coupons, reward
programs to reward loyalty from customers; and links to your social media, which allows Facebook friends to share links to your online
store via their wall or to allow you to collect Likes.
We would invite you all to take a test drive of our Shop Site product by visiting our website at www.webhosting.att.com.
And then, second to email in Tad’s list of success criteria, was increasing your search engine rankings.
And anyone who’s ever attempted to achieve this has quickly come to understand just how challenging that can be.
So, that will simplify this for our customers, we have invested in a full suite of marketing tools to help crack the code on search engine rankings.
All of our hosting plans come with search engine submission, but also include a manual review of your website with tips on how to improve your
search engine presence.
Not only do our tools allow you to identify issues with your site, such as broken links and meta tags, but our toolkit also includes resources that
perform an automated evaluation of your website against the most common search engine guidelines and identify possible violations that
might prevent your site from ranking highly.
It also provides tools that allow you to see how your site stacks up against your competition.
And finally, although there are many reasons for you to trust your website to AT&T, I’d like to wrap by saying that there are a couple of key benefits
for why you would want to choose AT&T. First and foremost, we're here for you, whenever you need help, 24 hours a day, with toll-free customer
support. Many of our competitors either make you interact with them via electronic means, emails, filling out a form, chats, very few often provide
an online, live person, domestically based support, and we do.
So, just as customer support is important to your customers, we want to make sure that you have that same opportunity, and if you need help, we
want to be there for you at any time, day or night.
We also provide a convenience of payment options, which include not only credit card billing, which will allow you to charge your Web hosting
services to your local AT&T phone account, and for those customers who already purchased qualifying AT&T services, you’ll receive up to a
15% discount and we’ll waive all set up fees.
So, with that, I’ll turn this back over to Lisa.
Thank you, Kelly. We will transition now into our Q&A session, and we’re starting to get questions coming in.
Kelly, I’ll give the first one to you-Do you have any recommendations on email software or services?
Depending on what the question is really aimed at, we will be introducing a product called Constant Contact, so if we're looking for products
that allow you to do email marketing, Constant Contact is a good choice, and we will actually be integrating with Constant Contact later this year.
If you're talking about email in general, our products do, including the Shop Site product, allow you to collect email addresses and allows
you to interact with customers via email campaigns that are embedded in our products today.
Kelly, thanks. Tad, the next question is for you-Can you go into more detail about how to increase your Web ranking?
Sure, I can talk for days about it.
Things that you need to look at are, are you using specific keywords within the site.
I think AT&T’s Search Manager tool has a way to look a keywords and things like that, you just need to use the proper keywords that relate to
your site and are specific to your site.
Does the body copy contain enough of those keywords and are they placed in the right places?
It does matter where they are appearing in the copy that you've written, so you’ve written an article, you need to place it in the first paragraph,
you need to have it again in the middle, you need to have 3 to 4 keywords pretty much for every hundred words of copy.
It sounds like you're writing formulaic and per the search engines, that’s what they're doing because it really is an algorithm that they're
looking at, and somebody’s not going through there personally looking at your site and saying Okay this is a good site.
It’s all done by computers, so you’ve just got to satisfy the computer needs.
Sadly, all of the search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, so as soon as you think that you've got something mastered, boom,
and you check your site three days later or a month or two later, your site may have dropped just because they’re now evaluating things
differently.
You want to have a big site, a site that has a lot of content and several optimized articles and pages of content, and just enough information to
make the site as relevant as possible.
Is the content on your site unique so that it’s really yours and not lifted from another site?
Because the search engine can rank you down and penalize you for having content that you’ve lifted from other sites.
Is your site updated frequently? Do you update the content? You don't have to do it daily, but make sure you're adding information for sure on a
weekly basis, that’s probably enough there.
Thanks, Tad. Kelly, I've got a question for you-What is the typical cost per month for hosting a website?
Actually, website hosting is one of the most affordable ways to reach out to your customer base.
You can get a website for as low as $10 a month, and if you think about it, that’s actually pennies a day.
And as far as our eCommerce plans go, they start at just shy of $30 a month, and so you're basically spending a dollar a day to allow your
customers to be able to buy your products and services of online.
I have one more question for you, Kelly-What if my business is growing rapidly, what Web hosting plan do I need?
That’s the beauty of the AT&T portfolio-we have a full continuum of services that can go from a pure basic shared hosting account all the way up to a
full and dedicated server, so I would encourage anyone who has questions about which might be the right plan for them to call our sales folks at
1-888-WEBHOST, and we can certainly walk you through picking the right plan.
We also have on our website, again at www.webhosting.att.com, a plan advisor, which asks you a set of simple questions and can help
advise on the right plan for what you intend to use your website for.
Thank you. Tad, this question is for you-Does text messaging marketing have a negative impact on brand?
People seem to be annoyed by the text junk mail.
Well, you just have to be sure it’s not junk mail. By text messaging, you’ve reached out to customers, and they’ve actually said, Yes, I want
to receive text messages from you.
So you need to make your text messages important to them and make sure what you’re telling them is valuable information.
It could be a coupon or a special offer that you’ve done, just done for text, and so you just don’t want to spam people saying, Hey, do this
and this. Focus in on what they want, and provide services that offer that.
Again, Tad-Do sites that offer eCommerce rank higher than non-eCommerce sites?
That’s not taken into consideration by the search engines.
It really depends on what you want your website to do for a higher ranking, and making sure that you’ve done everything properly, so eCommerce
doesn’t matter there.
Just a few more minutes and I’d like to get maybe two more questions in.
Kelly, I’ll give this one to you-Does the Web Marketing Toolkit help with keyword selection?
Absolutely, there are actually a couple of tools within the toolkit that help with that.
One will help evaluate your website based on the content that you’ve submitted as to determining which would be viable keywords.
You can also use it to see how your website is ranking for any particular keyword that you may have invested in for paid search or those types
of things.
And finally, our highest-level toolkit feature is a keyword spider, which actually helps you find top keywords and pages on your site, and provides
recommendations for optimization around those keywords.
Great, and we have one more question for Tad here-For small businesses (one to two employees) is WordPress a good platform for a
site that is combined with a blog?
That is fine. One thing to think about is do you want your blog to be www.smallbusiness.wordpress.com or do you
want it to go to your website domain.
And I believe that WordPress and the other blogging tools out there, for an additional fee, will let you switch the domain so that it’s yours.
That’s better, because the optimized content is going to your site and not to WordPress, but yes, WordPress is fine.
And then, Kelly, one last question, we’ve actually had a few of these come in.
There were a few folks that missed the details of the 15% discount that you mentioned. Is it possible for you to repeat that again?
Sure, absolutely. So basically, any customer who is buying AT&T's services, and that could include things like DSL, mobility, any of the AT&T voice
network products, qualifies for up to a 15% discount.
That’s 15% on our shared plans and as much at 10% on some of our higher-end plans, and we also then waive the setup charges.
I think we are at our time limit for today. Thank you, Tad and Kelly, and thank you, everyone, for attending today.
We look forward to your participation in our next webinar, and we are going to be pushing a survey to you.
If you could take a few minutes to complete that survey, we will be using that feedback from today’s event as we develop future events for
you.
Thank you again, everyone, and have a great afternoon.