Enter Shopster’s “Get Connected” Contest!

For those of you not yet aware of everything that’s been happening at Shopster, we’ve made some HUGE and EXCITING changes! Our latest release, which introduces the Shopster Merchant Network and the Shopster FREE account, is something we're sure you will love. An exclusive network for resellers and suppliers, members can now increase their selling power by easily connecting, communicating and transacting with other merchants in the system. Best of all, we’re offering our starter account for FREE!

To share with the world at large how Shopster is tackling eCommerce these days, we made a great little video that explains the concept of the network.  In true Shopster spirit we decided to take a slightly different tack with it, and had a lot fun of playing around with claymation.  

Which brings us to our contest, because we were feeling so creative we wrote several cultural references and quotes into the script and hid a bunch of dollar signs throughout the frames for viewers to find.  Find the stuff, answer the questions, and you can win a $500.00 credit for all things Shopster.  Choose from extended services, amazing products from the Shopster Network, you can put the credit towards what ever you want!  Visit http://www.shopster.com/videocontest.aspx. to learn all the details and test your skills!

How to get your customers to promote you - Ask???

For all our regular readers out there, you’ll remember that last week I offered an explanation as to how viral marketing works and discussed important strategies to consider when creating a viral campaign (Read: “Can you tell me what Viral Marketing is?” for a quick update).  Continuing in the same vein, this week I’m going to chat more specifically about getting your target audience to pass along your key marketing message and having them promote your business to others.  After all, the key to a successful viral campaign is to have your audience spread the word.

 In his article “6 Non-Salesy Ways To Ask Your Customers To Promote You” Rohit Bhargava offers some insight into why customers don’t recommend businesses to their friends and then makes some suggestions on how you can remedy this.

Interestingly enough, Bhargava, proposes that reason why clients don’t recommend you to others isn’t for the reasons that we’d initially assume. It’s not that they didn’t like your store, service, or product. It’s not that they’re too busy or they don’t care.  It’s that you don’t ask them to or make it easy for them to do so.  I’m going to take this one step further and say the reason why most people don’t offer recommendations is that they don’t think to. 

Chew on this for a second:  Let’s say you went out shopping last Saturday and stumbled upon a little store tucked away on a side street somewhere. You go into this store and buy a t-shirt, it’s a lovely t-shirt, you’ve being looking for something like it for ages, it fits well, it’s fun and best of all it’s pretty inexpensive. More-over the sales lady, who for the sake of this example will be the owner, is great. She’s polite, friendly, and helpful while not being overbearing; she’s exceptional really.  All and all you could say it’s a perfect shopping experience. So you’re immediately going to go out and tell all your friends about it right? Probably not.  Life is busy, you’re busy and there are a lot of distractions out there. Maybe traffic’s bad on the way home, maybe you have to pick up your children, or dry cleaning, we all know that the list goes on and on.  And then guess what, for most people, this amazing little shop that you found in the middle of nowhere falls off your radar. Not intentionally of course, but when would you bring up this shopping experience? Probably the only time it crosses your mind is when you’re wearing your new shirt and someone pays you a compliment.  Then you stop, think and say something like “Thanks, I got it from this great little shop just down the road, you know, just off of Sifton blvd. You should check it out.” And that’s about it folks.  You probably don’t think to go into any more detail than that.   And they probably don’t visit the store. 

Now how do you think this story would change if the store owner nicely mentioned on your way out the door that it was a new business and she was really trying to build her client base.  “Would you please be able to tell all your friends about me?” hmmm….well, that’s not so easy to forget now is it?  In fact, it's probably a fairly easy strategy to implement in your own business.  All you’ve got to do is make sure you ask in the right way.

Bhargava has several suggestions on how you can do this and I’ve included a few of them:

• Let them be a fan: Offer some way for your customers, friends, family etc. to show that they support your brand.  If you’ve got design skills, creating a badge for them to put on their blog, is always a great idea (text links work too).  As an added bonus, because this badge will link back to your site, there are SEO benefits to be reaped too.  Or get customers to join your Linked-in or Facebook group, Twitter too.  Sweeten the deal by posting/tweeting out promotions that are only available through these networking sites.
• Encourage online reviews: Encourage your customers to go to prominent online sites or social networks, (if they blog that’s another fabulous channel) and ask them to discuss their shopping experiences at your store.  Because these positive opinions are public and searchable, they’re far more valuable to you than something you just post on your own site.
• Refer a friend: Find ways to get your customers materials so they can pass on information about your store to their friends.  “Tell a friend” buttons work if you’re tech savvy, as does having friends and family pass along your business cards to their personal networks. Even getting your customers to forward on newsletters if they’ve found the subject matter particularly interesting that month can be effective (Just remember to offer a link back to your site in it so that friend can easily get to it).
• Pass along an offer:  To build on the concept above, create promotional offers that your customers can share (encourage them to do this) with their friends and families.  This is a great enticement for them to forward your details to others and get people to visit your store.

So what’s the moral of this little story?
There are lots of ways to encourage people to promote your store, get creative.  I’ve listed off a few ideas, but don’t let these limit you. There are plenty out there that I haven’t touched on.  The point here is to get as many people as possible telling others about you and your business.  Do what it takes and get them what they need to do this. 

Finally and most importantly, all these suggestions are great, but remember the key to everything is one magic little word (and no it’s not “please” for once): ASK.  You can set up all the Facebook groups and Twitter pages that you want, spend days coming up with clever promotional offers, but if you don’t ask people to join and encourage them to get their friends to do so, you’ll only have done half the job.  And you won’t reap any of the rewards.  Always remember to ask.

References:

“6 Non-Salesy Ways To Ask Your Customers To Promote You”, Rohit Bhargava  

Can you tell me what Viral Marketing is?

You know those buzz-words that people toss around in meetings and day-to day-life?  Those little phrases that get a very serious reaction from the world at large (read: lots of head nodding).  The ones that if you actually stop and think for a minute, you quickly realize you can’t really pin-point a clear definition for them (or for that matter be a 100% certain that you’re using them in the correct context).  I’m talking about terms like “Actionable”, “Leveraging Knowledge Capital”, “Information Touch-Point”, so on, so forth (FYI –“Actionable” is an adjective). Let’s be honest with each other here, if someone asked you for the definition of the word “Self-Liquidating”, do you really think you’d be able to offer up a concrete definition within 10 seconds or less? Exactly!

I find that the concept of viral marketing is a lot like this.  For the most part, anyone who does anything online has a broad understanding of what viral marketing is. They can definitely name a few examples of how to do it: blogging, viral videos-Susan Boyle anyone?  They can easily state a few companies who have made it work for them: PayPal, One Red Paper Clip, Hotmail (the classic). BUT they struggle to clearly and concisely define the concept itself, or more importantly turn this ambiguous idea into a usable business strategy.

In my most recent web-browsing adventures I came across an interesting (and very well-known) article on viral marketing.  In “The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing”, Dr. Ralph F. Wilson does a fabulous job of explaining viral marketing, with real-world examples.  Admittedly this article is a lot older than my usual picks, but I like to think of it as an oldie, but a goodie. 

Getting into the meat of the subject, Dr. Wilson describes Viral marketing as:
“…Any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence”.

Okay fair enough, but how does one encourage this growth? Because the one caveat to viral marketing is that much like a real virus, a campaign that’s gone truly viral takes on a life of its own.  The marketer/business owner no longer drives the push to the target audience. Rather the target audience takes the reins and passes your message on to everyone else. The implications of these types of campaigns is that while you, the business owner, can take certain actions to make something more likely to turn into a viral campaign, the audience (who you do not control) makes the final call on whether the campaign will fly or flop.

The point I’m trying to get across is that while you can’t truly drive a viral campaign the same way you can a normal marketing effort, you can consider several strategies to ensure your ads/marketing efforts are more likely to be picked up by your audience and passed on.

According to Dr. Wilson an effective Viral Marketing Strategy:

• Gives away products or services – people like free stuff, it’s noticeable, it’s attention grabbing and you can get them in the door (at which point you sell them stuff)
• Provides for effortless transfer to others – Your message should be simple so it transmits easily from person to person without losing its meaning.  
• Scales easily from very small to very large-if your campaign takes off make sure you can manage the influx of customers, you’ll do more harm than good to your brand if you make a promise and can’t deliver on it
• Exploits common motivations and behaviours – People as a rule want to be cool, make money, fit in - design a marketing strategy that targets these behaviours and you’re more likely to have people pass it on to others.
• Utilizes existing communication networks – Find a place where your target audience goes to socialize (chat rooms, Facebook, MySpace, favourite websites) and make sure your message can be found there.
• Takes advantage of others’ resources – Get other people to spread your word, give away free links to your content or copy so other people will do the work for you.  It’s a heck of a lot easier to have 1 million people each send out a single message, than to have 1 person send out 1 million messages (if they can even find 1 million people to send it to).

(Wilson also mentions that while you don’t need to include all of these elements to have a successful campaign, the more elements one can include the more powerful it is likely to be.)

So what can we learn from this:

1. When trying to create a viral strategy be sure to consider your target audience, the media you can use to best reach this audience (twitter, Facebook, news releases articles etc), your marketing message and how you’ll measures your success.  Then go crazy! Try it out and see what sticks!
2. If you follow our Shoptalk blog regularly you’ll remember a post called “It's Free!”. Viral marketing harnesses the idea of Free, and if effective, capitalizes on it to bring in revenue. Read the post and see how it can work for you.

P.S. -A self liquidating expense is an expense that also carries with it the means to its own repayment.

Read “The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing” by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant

Shopster's 5 years old!

Five years ago in a galaxy far far away an idea was being conceived over the course of several happy hours in some of the most pocket book friendly taverns in Calgary.  It was exciting, it was new, it was such a simple idea...shhh...don’t tell anyone or they might steal it.  The best part was, that after each beer the idea became easier, better and more brilliant.  Make retailing easy by solving the supply chain issue, make building stores simple so our users could focus on the part of retailing they were best at.

I am of course talking about Shopster.com

Looking back on 2004, when an idea became a company, I see the delusion in all its glory, the delusion of entrepreneurs about to start a bold adventure. 

Delusion?  Sure!  We thought it was going to be easy.  We thought we had all the problems thought out.  We thought this would be quick and successful and like the conquering heroes, three young(ish?) men would shake up the retailing world.

Over the next few months Shopster is going to undergo a massive transition.  I will be sharing the goings on here on this blog, if for no one else, than my mom. 

(As always, with each major new release, our existing customers get to move onto the new product with bonuses.  We don’t forget where we came from.)

The next release of Shopster is the culmination of 5 years of tireless effort to create a retail business system that transforms the entire industry.  Many facets of retailing haven’t been sustainable.  The recent crash and upheaval in the industry has been a catalyst for Shopster, driving both our customers and us faster towards the Shopster Power Merchant Network.

Today I want to talk about delusion and those first days.

Our first real (lots of test orders before) sale didn’t occur till October 29, 2005.  One of our websites – gamingforless.com – sold an iPod – yes an apple iPod – the classic, the first and already a global phenomenon.

The website went live and magically out of the internet forest someone found us and went shopping.  In 12 not so easy steps...

1. They looked around and added an iPod to cart.  Check
2. They hit checkout. Check
3. They entered their personal info.  Check
4. They entered their credit card.  Check

All done… nope, not yet

5. Order came to Shopster.  Check
6. Order passed fraud review.  Check

All done… nope, not yet

7. Order was sent to supplier.  Check

All done. Nope.

8. Order cancelled by supplier – out of stock.

When will supplier get next shipment of iPods – 2 - 4 weeks…? Oh crap.
Now what?  Cancel the order?  Not our first one!!

9. So, pull out personal credit card.  Check
10. Go to Amazon.com.  Check
11. Buy more expensive iPod.  Check
12. Ship it to the customer.  Check

That was our first order.

The heady rush of going live, of watching our first customer buy something, followed quickly by anger and dejection of being out of stock, followed by a rueful acceptance of having to pay more for an iPod than your customer paid you just so you don’t let the customer down.  Followed 42 months later by regret at realizing that the company never did re-pay you for buying an iPod on your personal credit card.

That wouldn’t be the first time or the last we lost money on a sale... but there were some valuable lessons learnt along the way. Today we have a custom fraud detection system to protect our customers, real time integrated ordering with suppliers, and detailed reporting on supplier performance, which allows us to identify potential problems before they become serious.

Getting into business isn’t for those that can’t deal with emotional ups and downs. Even when you try to do the right thing, customers can get mad, but many times, sometimes quite unexpectedly customers shower you with praise.