Great piece of eMarketing

It's Alan's birthday this month (all together now, Happy Birthday to you...) and on the first of the month (yes, that's today, this blog really is hot off the press) he got an email from Waterstone's (he's a loyalty card customer with them) saying that as it was his birthday this month they'd treat him to £5 off his next purchase (when he spends £25 or more) before 14th December.

This is a great piece of eMarketing, we love it. OK, so they had to collect his date of birth as part of the loyalty card application process, but then they've used it in a brilliant way - he feels they've remembered his birthday and he's being given a present, they get a £20 purchase (within quite a tight timeframe) that he probably wouldn't otherwise have made... everyone's a winner! And everyone feels good.

Tip for all of our clients, particularly in eCommerce - if you collect data about your customers, make sure you use it to market to them, and do it imaginitively!

By Kate Wooding
Published: 1 December 2008
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An early Christmas present from the tax man!

As of the 1st December, new rules come into play, and online consumers won't have to pay customs duty on purchases bought outside the EU for less than £105 (at the moment, you have to pay customs duty on non-EU purchases over £18, so they've increased the duty-free limit quite considerably). VAT will still be chargable on non-EU purchases over £18, so will be unaffected by the changes.

Essentially, it means that if you're doing your Christmas shopping online you'll avoid customs duty on purchases up to about $150.

By Kate Wooding
Published: 20 November 2008
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Using Social Media to launch your website

A new handbag website launched on the Internet recently. Nothing unusual about a new e-commerce website launching you might think, but the people at Handbag Planet had a great idea to publicise the new site.

Every hour for the first 24 hours they were giving away a free handbag and they made it easy to enter the competition.

There were several ways to enter, you could visit their website and sign up, refer a friend and you got another chance to win. Or you could enter using a Social Media website.

If you added Handbag Planet as a friend on MySpace or Facebook or write about them on Twitter you got 10 chances to win a prize. And if you had a blog you could write about them to receive 25 chances to win the handbag of your dreams!

Now while I may not be into my handbags, honestly I'm not, I do like their use of the social side of the Internet. For very little work on their part they managed to get people to mention the new website across the Internet thus building up links to it.

This shows the power of Social Media website as part of website marketing and how to get your customers to work for you.

How would you use Social Media websites to market your website?

By Alan Masterson
Published: 20 October 2008
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The ups and downs of selling online

Recently e-consultancy has done a couple of stories about selling online and I thought I'd pull out some of the most relevant stats for you, and point you towards the original articles.

The first stat that I thought was interesting was that online sales are generally estimated to make up 7-15% of a brand's sales. e-consultancy was averaging it at 10%. Although that may work very well for high street brands, we think the story's very different for small independent retailers - if you're in a niche market and online suddenly opens you up to customers without a geographic boundary, you can suddenly reach a whole lot more people. We know that one of our clients is currently taking more than 50% of their sales online.

Interestingly, a number of the brands that e-consultancy originally noted (Feb 08) weren't selling online still have no plans to go online in Sep 08. Whether that is because they figured they'd already lost the battle (I can see that Morrison's and Somerfield may feel that Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury's have already beaten them and pilfered all their potential online customers) or because their sales are such high-volume and low-value (though with Asda's George going online, Primark and H&M have more to lose) that they figure it's not worth it, I am surprised that such big brands are still unable to take advantage of online selling.

And then finally e-consultancy summed it all up in a lovely little article that pulled together the drawbacks of not selling online - apart from the loss of a revenue stream that most retailers would be very pleased to have in today's economic climate. Two in particular stick out for me - the obvious one that without online you're limiting your customers to buying from specific geographic locations where you have stores, and to your trading hours - online neatly leaps these two hurdles. And the second one is that you are immediately losing out to your competitors - who can bid on your brand name in an effort to snaffle your customers, or where your customers choose to shop from them because your brand isn't available online. Very few brands have such customer loyalty, or such brand exclusivity, that a customer would refuse to buy elsewhere. Online makes is so easy to search for particular products and compare prices that brands who aren't online are definitely losing out on sales.

By Kate Wooding
Published: 29 September 2008
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Online winners and losers

It's been a season of weird online trading stories with some of the big players taking substantial hits on the high street and others doing phenomenally well. The one thing that can't be denied is the undoubted success of the web in this story! Below are some snippits of winners and losers in the etail environment.

Sainsbury's has announced 'exceptional' online sales growth over the Christmas period. The company said the improved etail results helped it achieve its overall £2.5bn sales target three months ahead of schedule.

Amazon was the most popular retail site over Christmas accounting for 9% of visits to all retail sites.

Shares in HMV have jumped 15% after the music and books retailer said it had a "highly successful" Christmas period. Like-for-like sales at its HMV stores in the UK and Ireland rose 14.1%, while sales at its Waterstone's bookstore chain rose 4%.

Marks and Spencers was hit by poor Christmas sales with UK like-for-like sales falling 2.2% in the last three months of 2007, however website sales were particularly healthy, up 78%.

Tesco said its online businesses had a "very successful" Christmas, with total sales up 24%, helped by strong demand for MP3 players, digital cameras and laptops.

Webs the future!

By Melanie Russell
Published: 17 January 2008
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Christmas Spending

It's now that time of year when we all look at our bank accounts and wonder how much we actually spend over the festive period. If your anything like me the answer is too much!

The British Retail Consortium reported that UK retailers recorded their worst December figures since 2004. However, online retailers have had a more successful Christmas as reported by e-consultancy.com.

Figures from the UK show that 4.4 million people spent a total of £84 million on Christmas Day, 269% more than last year with an average of £19.09 per person. While in the US £14.9 billion was spent in December up 19% on last year.

By Alan Masterson
Published: 10 January 2008
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'Mega-Minute'

Lots of press coverage today about online shoppers spending £767,500 in a single minute at 1.09pm yesterday.

Office workers taking advantage of their lunch hour to purchase gifts online are believed to be behind this record high, and the company reporting these figures, Retail Decisions, expected online sales for the full day to total around £370m, a 106% increase on the same Monday last year.

By Kerry Reid
Published: 11 December 2007
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Happy, stress-free Christmas Shopping

In an article published in The Sunday Herald recently, it was stated that more than 27 million people are expected to shop online over the festive season turning Britain into the biggest online retail market in Europe.

Total online sales are set to reach £40 billion this year and are predicted to quadruple to £162bn by 2020 when they will account for 40% of all UK Retail sales.

According to uSwitch, UK Consumers could save more than £13bn a year by shopping online! Some of the most popular products bought online are music, films and concert tickets. More than half of online shoppers (53%) by music and films online; 35% buy tickets for events over the internet and about a third purchase books, clothes and sporting goods. Grocery shopping online is also becoming more popular.

Here are links to some of our eCommerce websites:

Guitar
Scotch Whisky Shop
Just Dogs
Royal Mile Residence
Woods of Windsor

Source : The Sunday Herald, Naomi Caine

By Melanie Russell
Published: 30 November 2007
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tictoc and Patonz at Claridge's

Having been a Patonz partner for nearly two years now, I was delighted to be invited to attend one of their most exclusive black tie events in Gordon Ramsays restaurant at Claridge's in London.

The event was attended by a stunning list of incredibly high ranking business people from the top end of the retail sector around the world and was a fantastic opportunity to explore new opportunities for tictoc and the retail sector.

As always, thanks to Brendan for an amazing evening!

By Melanie Russell
Published: 1 November 2007
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