adminsize can be sold online to the whole world. Being a health and fitness enthusiast, I was stopped in my tracks at one time when I came across one health and fitness website.
What this site provided was almost a weight loss coaching clinic where you maintain a calendar of the types of food you must eat and advice on how to get moving with the activities you enjoy.
With e-commerce you can start selling your business in just a few minutes for very little and with no technical background.
In addition, your business is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year. You do not pay rent or the salaries of salespeople.
You do not have any geographical limitations that restrict your customer base, which means you can sell to any country in the world, any time zone and in any language. This allows you to automate nearly every aspect of the business.
Craig Dalton, the president of Dodocase – a company that makes iPad – cases is one man I believe uses successful marketing techniques online.
According to him, his company uses traditional bookbinding techniques, combines online e-commerce solutions with personalised offline manufacturing, marketing and sales techniques.
He, however, warns that business owners should guard against trying to follow every trend that comes along.
“Focus on a manageable number of initiatives in any given time period,” he says. “It is easy to see the 100 things you could be doing to improve your business. What is hard is picking the five things to tackle first and doing them well.”
Earlier I did mention that I am a fitness enthusiast and one of the things I love about my online personal fitness coach is the attention to detail.
You simply log in what you would have consumed that day specifying the amounts, for instance, two slices of bread, an egg with margarine and tea with two cups of sugar amounts to 350 calories and compares this to the ideal amount of calories that suits your age, height and gender.
As managers, we are aware that consumers have proven themselves to be bargain hunters. It could be dangerous for you as a business to offer the cheapest, most rock-bottom prices around. It has been proved that you are “cheapened” in the process and you are bound to attract disloyal customers that will abandon your ship the second they see a lower price tag elsewhere.
Don’t even think that if you offer them the cheapest prices they will become loyal, in fact they will continue on the same bargain-hunting path.
Also avoid being used by customers that enquire for prices online. They could be searching for the best prices and you are their third quotation they need to fulfil their bargain hunting expeditions.
Make sure if you have an online business, you are also accessible via the traditional modes — mobile, landline and social sites.
There are some powerful tools like Google analytics that are can be used to generate detailed statistics about a website’s traffic and gives you fresh insights about how your visitors used your site and how they found it.
For instance a “bounce rate” indicates the level of interest of your visitors. A high bounce rate can mean you are not attracting the right customers to your site or that you need to make some changes or updates to products or services to make the offering more interesting.
“Average dollar per visitor” is a figure that helps you understand how much you can afford to spend on driving a customer to your site and can be useful as a guide to making marketing decisions.”
Take, for instance, the audience that social networks generate. Before Facebook, Twitter or Whatsapp, in our teen days we used to rely on friends that would tell us of the best shoe shop in town when me and my friends would wait till we were given pocket money to get into town and check out the new shoes.
These day social networks have made it easier as they reach a wider audience within a limited amount of time with an instant response.
Advice — don’t be ancient, take time to embrace new technologies. Why must you drive to the bank to take your bank statement?
Till next week when we continue identifying the types of managers we work with, may God richly bless you.
Shelter Chieza is an adviser in management issues. She can be contacted at [email protected]
Online Reporter