Archive for November 12th, 2011

As you finalize preparations for the upcoming holiday season, it’s important to make sure your business is ready for the busy gift-giving season. Having your store or business stocked with popular items is a great way to tap into additional sales. Another way to grow your business and meet the needs of gift-givers is to offer gift cards for purchase at your business and on your website.

Gift cards provide a convenient way for your loyal customers to spread the word about your business and their experience with you. Gift cards are also an impulse buy that you can keep close to your register, showcase in your window signage, or offer on your website or Facebook Company Page.

There are many ways your business can benefit from selling gift cards. Here are 5 ways for you to consider:

Tap into more sales for your business.

Customers who do business with you may not think of your business when they plan gifts for their friends, family, or coworkers. To let customers know that you offer the convenience of gift cards, make sure they’re prominently displayed when people visit your website or physical location. That visual reminder will increase impulse purchases—and help to plant the seed for future sales. And as research shows, gift card recipients typically spend 20% more than their gift card balance.

Make it easy for customers to promote your business.

When a customer chooses to give a gift card, they’re endorsing your business by telling their gift card recipient that they trust your business and like doing business with you. By offering gift cards, you make it easy for your customers to spread the word about your business to their network of friends and family.

Build your contact list for future promotions.

When recipients redeem their gift cards, make sure you’re capturing the contact information for those cardholders. You can use that information to send out future news items and promotions about your business. Just as gift cards help to drive new sales to your business, your contact list provides you with valuable information that can help you develop and maintain long-term customers.

Don’t think of gift cards as just gifts.

Another way to keep your business growing is to issue gift cards as part of your refund or return policy. That way, you ensure that customers come back to your business to spend those available funds.

Sell gift cards 24/7.

Although many businesses think they need a physical store or business to sell gift cards, that’s definitely not the case. You can offer gift cards for sale on your website and via your social media marketing efforts, such as your Facebook Company Page. And with more and more consumers researching businesses online and making online purchases, you can leverage your website presence and your social network to generate sales for your business 24/7.

Please note: You should spend time evaluating gift card programs and their associated fees to ensure that you find the right program that fits the needs and goals of your business.

To help small businesses tap into the lucrative gift card market, Web.com is offering a new gift card program as of October 3—just in time for the busy holiday season. Our program allows you to sell gift cards at your business location and on your website.

http://view.ed4.net/v/C4WO8M/5CNE3Q/06J3OYN/JRQTP5/MAILACTION=1&FORMAT=H?trkID=EMR722nH

Pages and Beyond

Google+ has been a useful business tool since it was launched. Immediately, people started following relevant people and adding them to Circles. People started engaging in interesting conversations and even video hangouts. There is clearly a lot of potential for business from a platform that lets you to connect to customers like this.

This week, Google launched Google+ Pages, which gives businesses even more tools. For one, they come with Google Apps integration. For two, you now essentially have a Google+ counterpart to your Facebook Page, and Google+ already has over 40 million users.

Need to know how to set up your Google+ page, we run through in easy steps here.

Google+ also has big ramifications for your visibility in Google the search engine, which is a good reason not to ignore it. When you put the Google+ badge on your site, you can tie all of your site’s +1′s to your Pages’s +1 to give Google a stronger signal of how much people actually recommend you as a brand.

You can also tie these to your AdWords account. Google has a blog post up about connecting your page to your AdWords campaigns. Here’s an excerpt:

This week we introduced Google+ Pages, a new way to get closer to your customers online. At that time we announced that you’d be able to link your Page to your AdWords campaigns, so that all your +1s — from your Page, your website, ads and search results — get tallied together and appear as a single total. We’re happy to announce that starting today, and rolling out to all advertisers globally over the rest of the week, we’re making this functionality available with a new AdWords feature called Social Extensions.

With Social Extensions, consumers will be able to see all the recommendations your business has received, whether they are looking at an ad, a search result or your page. This means your +1′s will reach not only the 40+ million users of Google+, but all the people who come to Google every day.

Read the whole thing here.

Google also gave a presentation at ad:tech in New York, talking about leveraging Google+ for marketing. The company is aiming to address five key marketing issues with Google+:

1. Fragmented marketing

2. Recommendations that lack staying power

3. Comments, not conversations

4. Impersonal messages

5. Limited insights

“Google has never had a place on Google where you could connect with all of our customers and directly communicate with them,” said Google’s Christian Oestlien. You can do this with Google+ pages. He referenced the ability to connect all of your +1′s and put these recommendations “in a lot more places.”

He also talked up the Circles concept as a way for brands to address different groups of people to deliver the right message to the right people.

In terms of insights, he talked up a recently announced feature of Google+ called ripples, which allows you to track the social activity of posts. This can be very helpful for marketing your business.

http://www.smallbusinessnewz.com/topnews/2011/11/10/using-google-for-business