Hair Salon Tip 2: SEO your website

February 25th, 2010 10 Comments

SEO or search engine optimisation is the process by which you make sure that the content on your website follows search engine friendly standards so that search engines may take note of your website over time and place it in the correct positioning on the search results page when certain words are typed in.

Its a permanent struggle for me to convince hair salons of the value of a website and then to take it a step even further, the value of making sure that website can be found on the internet by search engines. Why is it such a struggle to convince hair salon owners to do this, well I beleive it is for the following reasons:

  • hair salon owners are to busy and as a result they themselves use the internet very little, so how can you expect someone who hardly uses the internet to think it will be an excellent business tool?
  • no hair salons have emerged in South Africa to prove that SEO optimised websites produce more business and if they do exist they are keeping the secret to themselves.

I hear you asking yourself now why would people search for a hair salon on the internet?

There are few people nowadays that don’t have access to the internet that are not your ideal type of client. These people no longer use the yellow pages, thats t time consuming and difficult, they use a search engine like google to find a hair salon. The trick to recognise is what will a typical client search for to come out to your hair salon. My personal belief is that they will do an area specific search for a hair salon, so for example they may type in ‘Hair salons in waterkloof’, ‘hair dressers in de waterkant’ or something along those lines because it will force the search engines to give a very specific result. They may well type in ‘hair salons’ but they will soon realise that this only brings up many results that they aren’t interested in and then the next step would be to refine the search further by adding the area in.

What is a single client that spends thousands over there lifetime with your business worth in order for your company to list number one for such an area based search?

Advantages of SEO for hair salon websites

  • There are no hair salons doing this already, so to get to position number 1 in your area is pretty simple
  • Potential clients have an effective way of finding your business quickly with search engines
  • Because clients come to your website, you have an opportunity to market to that client without having to actually speak to them
  • Depending on the functionality of your website, you can allow clients to book appointments immediately with you.
  • Your website becomes a very cheap face for your business that ends up being cheaper than any other marketing campaigns you could have used before to get new clients.
  • You can outsource the SEO to companies that are able to manage this process for you on a professional basis.
  • As your website becomes more popular it will start ranking well for other terms in your website such as ‘top hair salon in South Africa” for instance

Disadvantages to SEO hair salon websites

  • It costs money
  • The salon owner needs to see their website and the internet as a business in itself, any business needs constant work and SEO is no different. If you don’t have the time, then outsource the work.

Costs to SEO a website

This varies quite a lot between service providers in the industry. Typically you are charged per search phrase you want your website optimized for. My company All Porgramming offers this service which costs R 100 per phrase per month. Keep in mind that SEO is not a process of creating a clever bunch of words on your website and then leaving it forever. You must work on these words every month, be it linking to other appropriate websites, adding new content, changing the content on your website etc.

How long does SEO on hair salon websites take?

This is a tough question to answer only because it varies depending on the popularity of a search term. So a popular search term will take a very long time to rank well on the search engines with content alone. Fortunately in South Africa area based searches for hair salons are very rare so you should rank well very quickly. Keep in mind that you shouldn’t expect to see any results in the first 3 months that your website start the SEO process. It takes this long before search engines like google consider your website to be staying on the internet to warrant that it comes to index your pages and content.

Conclusion

It takes one new client a month to cover the costs of an SEO campign for hair salons. You then have a business on the internet from which you may make other income overtime. My company All Programming is a specialist software development company in the hair salon and boutique markets. We create hair salons websites, develop hair salon point of sale systems and overall we are professionals in the hair salon software development space. Our top client is Palladium Hair Company. Easily a  top 10 in the country hair salon in style and income.

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Hair Salon Tip 1: Sell Gift Cards

February 12th, 2010 2 Comments

This is the first in a series of articles in the form of tips for hair salons.

A gift card is very much the same as a gift voucher. Someone comes to your hair salon business and purchases a gift card from you to be used by someone else at another point in time. In my work with hair salons the greater majority of hair salons have not seen the exceptional benefits of selling branded gift cards in their salon.

The advantages to hair salon gift card sales are as follows

  1. Cash flow: You receive money now to spend on stock, expenses and anything else without having to have physically sold something to the client. This is very important and useful.
  2. Indication of great service: A person buying a gift card from your salon is a sign of confidence and satisfaction in the service your hair salon offers that client.
  3. Use it for Rewards: Almost all hair salons have some kind of loyalty or rewards program in place to thank clients for being loyal. I have seen however that many clients don’t like being forced into using a reward the next time they are in the salon. Those business rules are to rigid, rather be flexible and load the reward value onto a gift card, this gives your client the benefit of being able to use up their reward whenever they want and better yet they may lend the card to a friend to use up the reward which is an opportunity to get another loyal client in your store.
  4. Never give cash credits: Never take cash out your till drawer again if a client returns goods, simply load the value on a gift card and the client is forced to make use of that credit in your store again. This amounts to savings in cash flow.
  5. Gains new clients: most times a gift card will be given to someone that hasn’t used your hair salons services before, this is an opportunity to gain a loyal client for years to come.
  6. Clients spend more than their balance: Its a well known fact that most people tend to spend more than the balance on a gift card, in other words the card is simply the enabler to getting the client to spend more than they would otherwise have.
  7. Marketing tool: Besides the card going out to new clients you would not have had before. An excellent tip is for you to go out and give gift cards away to people. i.e load R 50-R 100 per card and then give the cards away and state that the epople can use the value to redeem services. Find creative manners to market your business through the card. Give cards loaded with money to businesses that you beleive will represent your brand well etc.
  8. It looks and works like a credit card: The beauty of gift cards is that the good ones, look just like credit cards, same size, magnetic strip on the back and encoded the same as a credit card. This has meaning to clients, much more meaning then a piece of paper like old paper based gift vouchers were. Its a sign of professionalism and success as a company. Take advantage of that.

There are however disadvantages to hair salon gift cards and they are as follows:

  1. Costs: Proper gift cards don’t come cheap. As with all graphical type work it is based on quantities and number of colours. Cards can range from R 15 for a 500 cards to R 5 for 10 000 cards. These costs need to be paid upfront as well and cannot be spread over a period of time.
  2. Extra administrative work for staff: It can become more difficult for your staff to manage gift cards especially if there are many given to clients. Cashup’s are more difficult because a gift card only effects cash up on the day the card is purchased not on the day it is spent.

In all honesty however the advantages far out way the disadvantages. My start hair salon client Palladium Hair Company in Waterkloof, Pretoria makes use of gift cards and without a doubt this has contributed very significantly to the overall service she offers her clients and number of new clients entering the store. To further add to this she has multiple branches and her clients can use a gift card purchased in her Pretoria branch at her Cape Town branch as well when they go for holidays etc.

The manners in which you can get a gift card system

There are only two ways I know of.

  1. There are companies in South Africa that offer gift card solutions, they give you an all in one solution, they bring you a new gift card machine that looks just like your credit card machine, they have the cards developed etc. This is what all the major retailers make use of such as Woolworthes, Pick n Pay etc. The costs are about R 1500 per month for machine rental, they will get the cards at an attractive price and then you must pay transaction fees on each transaction as well as pay a possible percentage fee similar to that on credit card based transactions.
  2. Get Gift Cards integrated into your Hair salon point of sale software. Our companies hair salon software, Chrome Hair provides such a a facility. We can source the cards for you, unfortunately they will cost a little more per card. You don’t have to worry about monthly fees, transaction charges and percentages either. You in additional have the added benefit of making use of the card for:
    1. Use the card a Most valued client card, ie every client that walks in your door gets a card for life
    2. Load rewards on the card
    3. Use the card for credit notes
    4. Use the card in all your branches

Conclusion

To end, don’t ever underestimate the power a single gift card can have, the impact will be massive, you simply have to ensure your hair salon offers a fantastic service to all its clients.

As always I welcome any commentary on this topic and hope that this article and those to follow can positively have an impact on your hair salons business.

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Visual Studio Crashes when clicking “Choose Toolbox items”

February 3rd, 2010 6 Comments

I decided to write this small article in the hope that it eventually is well optimized to appear before all the nonsense articles I had to go through before coming to this link. Just follow the link at the bottom of the screen and that file download will fix visual studio if it is crashing from no where. The rest of this article is mainly wording for Search engine optimization on this topic.

Does your Visual studio 2008 environment crash when trying to add new toolbox items?
Does Visual web developer 2008 crash when trying to add new toolbox items?
When checking the event viewer under applications there is “.NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.3053 – Fatal Execution Engine Error (7A035E00) (80131506)”. This happens once Visual studio has crashed already.
Does Visual Studio 2008 crash after opening a code window?

Almost every article on the internet refers to Microsoft power commands causing the issue with VS 2008. I didn’t even have Power Commands installed and still got the same problems with regards not being able to add tools to the toolbox. Eventually I came across a completely unrelated article where someone reported a bug to Microsoft that VS 2008 was crashing when they opened a code window with the same application event log as I had “.NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.3053 – Fatal Execution Engine Error (7A035E00) (80131506)”. This prompted me to by chance download these files and try them out and amazingly Visual Studio 2008 is now working 100% fine again. Save yourself all the reading and wasted time I spent on this intermittently over many days (perhaps 4-5 hours) and just go to this link and install the files provided here

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=16827

For all of you that have MS Power Commands installed, just go download the latest version of the software, uninstall what you have and then install the newest version at

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/PowerCommands/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=559

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4) Have your client database current and up to date

January 22nd, 2010 No Comments

This is the fourth and last article in 4 things your retail business should do in 2010 using software. In this article we delve in the importance of your client database

Perhaps keeping your client database up to date and current seems obvious, but I have yet meet a single business that has or can even achieve this successfully. Its quite a bold statement to make. The reality is that it takes a very sophisticated software product to manage this process well. To add to that the software product would have to be constantly updating in order to take into account changes in industry and business etc.

So actually what I am really trying to get at is that it is impossible to ever really have a client database that is perfect, it may be perfect in your eyes but it will not be completely current and these are the reasons why

  1. Industry trends change in a day, whats great today isn’t as great tomorrow. This means that all the information you got and stored till now may be obsolete tomorrow through factors you cannot control.
  2. In South Africa our recession is a great example of client databases that were great before the depression but had less applicability during the recession as a result of there being less spend by your clients. For example  you used to store very little information about what a clients spending habits are before the recession because back then it was great times and companies made lots of money, now you need to track there spending habits to determine with some measure of success how often those clients will purchase from you to make estimates on future income.

So why is your client database and its content so important?

This simple.

In times when businesses need it the most there are only 3 things that will save them

  1. Your levels of service offered to your clients
  2. Loyal clients
  3. Sales

A great client database enables all 3 points above and simplifies this process very greatly.

View the other articles in this collection

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3) Use software to automate better client service

January 14th, 2010 1 Comment

In this the third article on 4 things you should be doing using software in 2010 we discuss the need to use your software solution to better automate client service in your business

  • More specifically we are interested in the areas of better bulk sms and bulk email notifications to clients
  • Using software to target more clients with the same message but they don’t know that

How to send more effective bulk sms and bulk email campaigns

I find this to be one of those topics that no one believes till they try it out.

The golden rule of bulk sms and bulk email?

ONLY EVER send messages that seem completely personalised!

I am willing to bet everyone reading this agrees completely but for various reasons they can’t. These reasons vary between but are not limited to:

  1. Its more effort. Its far easier to send a general communication to your clients then to go to the effort of sending customised messages.
    Solution: Get a new software system or get the software development company to create functionality to automatically create messages with a persons name in it. There is no effort involved if your software is good enough
  2. My client database is not up to date with all the names. Names are misspelled etc.
    Solution: Well this is actually your own fault, why did you allow your database to get to this state. Train your staff better, make them understand quality data equates to more commission, more loyal clients etc. Even if your data is incorrect, fix those that you can yourself then call the other clients if you have there numbers and get a proper name, they will be happy that you value them enough to want to record correct information on them. You can also always relplace there names with Generic names like, sir, maam till you are able to get the correct information.

Why send personlised communications?

Here are 2 examples of sms messages to a prospective client, one is personalised and the second isn’t.

  1. Hi James, I thought I would let you know that our annual sale is on over the next week. You will receive 20% off anything in our store. Hope to see you, ABC Company
  2. Dear valued client. Our annual sale is on over the next week. Get 20% off anything in our store. Hope to see you, ABC Company

Can you see the difference, which one would you find more appealing if you received it?

The personalisation of smses drove me to create software processes to monitor the rate of success for personalised sms campaigns. I hope to have feedback on this sometime very soon. What I can say is that every one of my clients has gone through this disbelief process at some point in the past. They sent general messages to clients and nothing personalised. At some stage I basically needed to convince each to do a campaign as a trial to see if they could spot the difference. One of my clients that owns a high end clothing store for years didn’t send personalised messages. His database was shocking at the time, but I convinced him that just this one time take the chance at even irritating clients with misspelled names etc and send a campaign with what is in the database.

The results, well I wish I had exact statistics but after some 4 years of doing general only messages he insists that only personalised messages go to his clients now. Yes there were some clients frustrated by the fact that he got there names wrong, that was way less then even 1%, those people you simply manage and say sorry. The rest of the clients came and said thanks that he personally addressed them in messages, some still came and voluntarily gave the correct name to him etc.

I am willing to bet that personalised smses are worth at least 10% more business then a general communication. Watch this space for more proof soon.

Conclusion

In a world of huge competition the only way to best distinguish yourself and business is to make sure you offer the best service of all your competitors. Using your software point of sale system to send automated communications to clients will make a massive cost effective difference to loyalty and income spend in your business.

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2) Embrace The Internet

January 4th, 2010 3 Comments

This is the second article in a set of 4 articles leading from 4 things you should do different in 2010 with software

My company sells a retail point of sale system called Chrome POS. Its main industries of focus are the hair salon and boutique clothing industries. In all the years that we have been present in these industries the most shocking thing I have seen is just how little clients understand about technology and how that technology should assist your business. This is even worse for the internet, most clients only see the internet as a manner in which there network will contract viruses or worry about staff using the internet for non company related purposes. This article attempts to present a few excellent reasons why any retail business needs to embrace the internet and everything it has to offer. Most clients though just plain and simply don’t believe the internet can benefit their business in any way.

Firstly why should any retail business be interested in the internet?

  1. Almost everyone searches for a business on the internet now. Its critical that for this you have a website and are listed on the search engines.
  2. The internet offers many business opportunities for any retail business including but not limited to
    • E-commerce and online sales of your retail stores products and services
    • Client Affiliate programs
    • Client satisfaction and survey programs
    • Online bookings and confirmations
    • Revenue via search engine advertising programs
    • Sales of products not usually on the retail shop floor due to either price or lack of sales usually.

So yes there are many things that can go wrong, yes you could get viruses on your network, yes your employees will use the internet for non business purposes and yes someone could hack your website. What everyone needs to know how ever is that all of this is manageable and to an exceptionally large degree completely avoidable. You could get a quality virus protection such as Avira Antivirus. You can easily prevent certain websites being displayed on your network router and any good website development will make it exceptionnaly difficult for a hacker to compromise your website especially if you as website user and owner exercise some basic precautions, the most important of which is not having a simple password, always have a complex password with numbers and letters and lower and upper case characters.

Now I hear you asking yourself, so what do I need in order to embrace the internet. Well below is a list of the most important items needed in the order that they should be done.

1) Get a website for your business
2) Search Engine Optimise (SEO) your website for exposure to the world.
3) Get a BLOG and share your expertise and some of your business secrets, it sounds very odd but this qualifies you as an expert in your field and this can have more positive effects on your business than negative.
4) Encourage your existing and new clients to use your website. Give them a reason to go there.

Wow this is quite a list, lets explain this in more detail

1) Get a website

If you don’t have a web presence on the internet then I suggest you get one immediately. You don’t need anything huge with many pages, get a basic website introducing your business with pages for the following

  • Home page: this is a basic introduction to your business as well as a very brief overview of what you sell with links to pages describing all of this in greater detail
  • About us: What is your business, what is your type of client you service, how long have you been in existence, vision and mission
  • Services: If your retail business offers any services then list them here and what they are and very importantly give pricing for your services, clients find this information absolutely valuable.
  • Products: What products do you sell and describe them in more detail. Find out if your suppliers will sponsor descriptions and pictures for these products, in fact get them to give you money on a monthly basis to show their products on your website. This could in itself pay for your website.
  • Links: Though not as important, use this to link to all of your suppliers and in turn ask your suppliers to create a link from their website to your website, this will greatly help with Search engine optimization.
  • Contact Us: List all of your contact information, if you want you can list all of your employees here as well with pictures.

This is the basis for a website, over time you can add significantly to this website, on this topic make sure you get your website developed into a content management system (cms). A CMS basically allows you to change the content of the website yourself, add new pages etc. This will save you time and money in not having to call the company that developed the website originally every time you want to change something on your website.

2) Search Engine Optimize your website

This is best left to professionals and there are a great many on the internet that offer this service. In essence though SEO is the process of listing you on the major search engines (Google and Bing) and making sure that the content on your website is such that it is seen as favorable on the search engines so that it ranks high. Its is always best to localize your SEO, so for instance if you are a hair salon in Waterkloof, Pretoria, then make sure your SEO works well for hair salons in Waterkloof and hair salons in Pretoria because this is typically what people will search for to find a hair salon. Always try to optimize your website for what you believe people will tpye in to try to find your type of business. Being number one in the search rankings in itself will very significantly increase your business should you have a appealing website. This isn’t  a presumption, its a fact.

Other things that will always help your SEO efforts is to list with appropriate directories in your industry on the internet and to blog about your business industry etc, more about that next.

A website without SEO is in my opinion absolutely pointless, the chances of your business paying for itself is very slim.

3) Get a Blog

What is a blog, well simply put it is a specialized software program that allows you to create articles about anything. Blogs are the new in thing and they are an exceptionally good way to promote your website over the internet, in particular it is excellent in promoting your business to similar businesses in the industry and or the same types of businesses.

Being perceived as a professional in your industry will always provide many advantages and less disadvantages, so what are these?

Advantages to SEO

  1. You will get to know people all around the world that rely on you to help there businesses.
  2. You will see that there are many people around the world interested in the same things that you are.
  3. You get to enjoy the free intellectual property that these other industry experts share to you.
  4. You will over time get free advertising if you write excellent articles as people and publications find that your insights are so great that they want to share it with their consumers.
  5. Your search rankings will increase well the more people link to your blog and increase its importance on the search engines

Disadvantages to SEO

  1. You will be giving away some of your intellectual property and secrets that you have discovered over the years.
  2. Time to write the articles especially good ones.

Now I hear you asking yourself what you should blog about well think along the lines of:

  1. Share some of your industry secrets and tips. Keep some of your secrets well guarded though. Try to provide information that will make the industry stronger. For instance blog about how your business implemented a loyalty program and some of the advantages and pitfalls to look for in this process. This sort of information is very valuable to businesses considering doing the same thing.
  2. Share new things that have happened in your business. ie Blog about company news
  3. Share any personal thoughts etc as well, show you are a human being but keep it professional always

Always submit your blog to the appropriate media in the industry, they will keep an eye on it overtime and request use of materials if they want to redistribute. Always allow comments on your articles and always reply to comments.

4) Encourage your existing clients to go to the website

This is also fairly critical to your website success. You must find a few good reasons to encourage a client to go to your website. Some of the things you can do are as follows:

  1. Let clients enjoy a cheaper price for internet sales than in store sales (this is attainable because you don’t have to carry this stock on the floor in order to sell it on the internet).
  2. Give clients the chance to make bookings on the internet, there is always going to be a small percentage of clients that prefer the internet to calling on a phone, you will massively satisfy them by offering this service.
  3. Get clients to rate your service from the internet via surveys etc.
  4. Get clients to update there contact information on the internet so that you have their latest information, motivate them by offering them a special on there next purchase if they do this.
  5. Encourage clients to refer new clients to you from the internet.
  6. Create special discount vouchers or redeemable vouchers on the internet that a client must print out and bring to your business in order to get a discount. It doesn’t have to be a discount but hopefully you follow the train of thought here.

In all you simply want to encourage and get clients used to using the internet and your website as the means to view all your promotional information and do some purhcases, in the long run this will save you thousands of rands as it is much cheaper to advertise and sell on your website then what it is through other traditional marketing means.

I want to do all of this, So what next?

You need to source a company that can help you develop your website, do the SEO and give you training on how to write the articles and change your website.
My company All Programming is able to help you with the website design and website development, the blog creation, the SEO and train you on how to run all of this.

What should you typically expect to pay for all of this?

A fair estimate for a CMS website, blog and training would be in the region of about R 10 000 to R 20 000 if you would like to have everything uniquely created for you. We offer cheaper alternatives by following a templated approach to websites, where by we give you a choice of a couple templates, you choose the one you like the most and then we populate a website from this. Its cheaper because these templates don’t require us to come up with new designs all the time.

There is also always a monthly cost assosiated with a website to host it on the internet, this will be any where from R 250 per month to R 1 000 per month depending on the websites popularity and whether you want SEO, just website hosting, online sales etc.

An online sales portal will require that you have a merchant account and incurrs an additional monthly fee similar to the rental of your credit card machine in your business. This cost is usually R 450.00 per month.

In Conclusion

A website is an indispensable tool for your business and will generate extra revenue for your business over time. The key to the success in your website is that you as business owner must treat the internet just as you would any other component of your business. You must see and treat the internet as a business in order to succeed.

About the Author

I have been involved and owned many companies over my 10 year career. Unfortunately I have also gone through my fair share of bad business partners (another story). In February 2009 I started All Programming after deciding finally that I would need to do business on my own in order to be happy. I left everything I had worked for behind and started a new. I knew nothing about search engine optimization except very basic information, I didn’t feel I was great at website design but could definitely develop complex websites. Today less than a year later my company ranks as number 1 for “programming company” in South Africa and number 3 for “software development company” and 9 for “software development”. Out of the hundreds of SEO companies on the internet in South Africa, I now rank on page 3, this may sound terrible but take into consideration a year ago I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, now I am in the space of all the top SEO companies in the country (thats how many there are) and these are companies that have been around for decades, there head start on me is massive.

How did I do it, commitment, in years passed I was skeptical about how the internet will benefit an IT company in South Africa so I didn’t bother. I had a new company with no income and hence I couldn’t market other than through the internet and teaching myself how to do it. I had no choice but to make the internet work for me. I now dedicate at least 6 hours a week to reading other blogs in my industry and taking ideas here and expanding on it for my own clients.

Today I get at least 2 inquiries a week from my website, although this still isn’t a lot, this year it will easily triple. My website paid for itself a long time ago in terms of the time spent creating the website. I know that in order to improve my business and website I need to continue working hard at content for the website and offering a great service. I personally am not a marketing professional so I don’t have the personality to go knocking on doors to get work, cold calling etc, I rely purely on search engines and referrals.

You can do it just as easily!

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Cheap and Effective Marketing in 2010 with software systems

December 30th, 2009 No Comments

This article is the first in a series of articles follows from my first article “4 things a retail business should do different in 2010 using software”

In this article we delve into more detail about the specific types of cheap marketing a business can use and how a business should be using that with software systems.

In my experience with my hair salon clients and men’s boutique clients, in the retail space, the cheapest forms of marketing are.

1) Bulk SMS
2)Bulk Email
3)Affiliate Marketing

I specify them in the order of profitability that I have observed over the years in my clients businesses and as I have veloped my point of sale software with these clients and their needs.

These days most retail businesses are making use of one of the 3 marketing methods from above with varying levels of success. What is critically important in using any of the above is that you must put the software systems in place to track, sms, email and affiliate programs 100% accurately.

In order to track this marketing correctly you need software that can store or display:

  • The cost of the campaign
  • The success rate of the campaign
  • The income value of that campaign, ie how much money did you receive from sending the campaign and lastly
  • The profitability of that campaign.

In a previous article I show you a manner on how to measure the return on bulk sms campaigns. I highly recommend you read this article. The basis for recording and tracking your marketing efforts 100% is that you must develop a manner in which you know exactly that the sms/email resulted in the sale. The most simple manner in which to do this is to simply attach unique numbers/ voucher numbers/coupon numbers to the sms or email and force that in order that the client can benefit from the marketing effort, that your system requires that you must provide the code that the client received.

What makes this marketing so cheap?

Well we all know that sms and email is relatively cheap in comparison with advertising in magazine/tv/radio. What are the costs however?

Sms Costs:

In general smses will cost anywhere between 22 cents and 45 cents depending on your service provider and the quantity of smses sent at one time. A sms campaign to 5000 clients will there cost R 1100 and R 2250. For this you will receive delivery reports (useful for knowing which clients cell numbers are no longer in use), replies to your sms via sms, targeting a specific set of clients from your database.

To put this more in perspective, in the case of my clients, lets use the hair salons for instance, it takes at the very most 5 clients out of 5000 to take advantage of your campaign to cover all your costs. That means you need to get a 0.1% success rate on your campaign in order to begin making a profit. If your business offers a great service your clients will come, typically my clients will experience a 10% – 50% return on their campaigns, this is not to say that they are sending 5000 smses everytime cause they aren’t they might send 600 – 1000 smses per campaign. This being the case they are still getting atleast 60 clients responding to and spending on a 45 cent sms sent to the customer. I am in the fortunate position that I can boast that I don’t have any clients that make less than a 100% return on the cost of sending the campaign. Without a doubt, sms turns a serious profit in any business and the costs are a non factor in actual fact.

Keep in mind as well that in South Africa SMS is very well received and there are very few people that don’t have cell phones.

E-mail costs:

Well email will in actual fact cost nothing but bandwidth if you send your emails manually. If however you are using your software system to send email for you, the changes are that emails will costs anywhere between 10 cents and 30 cents to send. For all the reasons above, email is just as effective as sms. Email has the added advantage of being able to add more content and more marketing information in the campaign. The other major advantage to email is that you can track what links have been clicked in your email campaign etc, this helps huge amounts in determining what was popular in the email campaign, what wasn’t well received etc. ultimately it helps you develop better emails in the future. Finally another added advantage is that because you can produce more marketing content, the potential is there to earn a even higher return from the campaign by virtue of the fact that you can market more than a single product for instance.

The down side to email is that you are reliant on a more technology savvy customer than with sms, there are many more people with cell phones that email addresses and more importantly still more people will see you sms campaign immediately with sms than email because many people don’t check there emails every day, everyone checks there cellphone when it beeps with a message. Basically a cellphone is more critical to a customers life then there email.

Cost of affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is the process of rewarding your clients for bringing new clients to your business. The cost of this is simply the cost of whatever it is that you are willing to give to the referring customer as discount, for free etc in order to get a new client or more. This is obviously a great means of marketing and is indicative of a business that has happy clients cause ultimately only a happy client will tell there friends about your business in the long run no matter what you are giving back to the referring customer.

I know very few retail businesses that implement affiliate marketing, I know for one it is something that I need to put in place for my clients this year as well so I will keep everyone posted with developments in this area. Again a good software system will be able to tell you the sales worth of all your referred customers as well as all te costs (discounts, products) given as reward to get these new customers.

Conclusion

I hope this article has been useful and gotten your business brains thinking a bit. I would really appreciate any commentary on this, Its my passion to devise manners in which to get my clients to generate money with the absolute least amount of effort.

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4 things a retail business should do different in 2010 using software

December 21st, 2009 1 Comment

I have various clients in the retail industry and it got me thinking, what can all these businesses do better next year, and how can I help them to better do business with the custom software products they use from my company.

I came up with 4 key things that will definitely make a difference to their levels of service and definitely result in an increase in income for their retail businesses.

I mention in brief the 4 points here and then in separate articles delve in more detail about each article with examples.

1) Conduct CHEAP EFFECTIVE marketing:

The cheapest forms of marketing in my opinion with the best return are as follows
1) Bulk Email
2) Bulk SMS
3)Affiliate marketing

If your company isn’t doing any of the above 3, then you need to start immediately. Most companies are to some degree using one of the three but they don’t effectively track any of this marketing thereby making it near pointless.

Read more about Bulk sms, Bulk Email and Affiliate marketing

2) Embrace the Internet

This is the most contentious issue I tend to have with my clients as the greater majority don’t see how the internet can better there business significantly. In brief, how do you embrace the Internet.

1) Get a website for your business
2) Search Engine Optimise (SEO) your website for exposure to the world.
3) Get a BLOG and share your expertise and some of your business secrets, it sounds very odd but this qualifies you as an expert in your field and this can have more positive effects on your business than negative.
4) Encourage your existing and new clients to use your website. Give them a reason to go there.

I know from personal experience the difference a website can make along with working hard at the website to ensure people visit your website along with search engines often.

Read more about getting a website and SEO here

3) Automate the process of offering your client better service

This is a very interesting and challenging topic and revolves around using your Cheap marketing methods from above and your database from your software system to communicate with your clients thereby giving the impression of an excellent and qualified client service.

Read more about automating client service using Bulk sms and Bulk e-mail here.

4) Have your client database current and up to date

Perhaps this seems obvious, yet I have yet meet a single business that has or can even achieve this. The reality is that it takes a very sophisticated software product to manage this process well. To add to that the software product would have to be constantly updating in order to take into account changes in industry and business etc.

So its my opinion that your client database is only ever up to date from day to day, one day its up to date, the next it isn’t etc.

Read more about keeping your client database up to date here

I would really appreciate any feedback you may have in this regard. Business owners are welcome to share their thoughts and advice here as well.

My company, All Programming does custom software development and has a range of products the major of which is our Point of sale system called Chrome. Other products include bulk sms and bulk emailing programs as well. Its through my experiences of working very closely with these clients over a number of years that has given me the experience to write this article today. Perhaps I will do a real case study over the course of next year to display how putting these things in place can make a dramatic change to your income in a year. If there is interest then I will do it.

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The problem with WPF programming. Memory Useage!

November 13th, 2009 No Comments

My software development company does a fair amount of WPF programming. We after all have a point of sale system created in Microsoft Blend 3 and Visual Studio 2008.

Anyone reading this article already knows that WPF is like the holy grail of easy to create stunning user interfaces. The issue however is that WPF is a really memory intensive technology, that in itself isn’t so bad, the reality however is that no matter who or what your program is, the chances are 99% that your program is leaking memory and that there is absolutely nothing that you can do about it.

What baffles me is that Microsoft can be forgiven for getting this wrong in its first version of the technology but at this stage with dotnetframework 3.5 out, they have had plenty of time to iron out the bugs and for me memory leaking is the most inexcusable bug you can have. I am not sure if it is WPF or the garbage collector that doesn’t do a good job, the chances are its both, but it is a huge frustation. My point of sale system goes through a process of opening up the same screens over and over in a particular day. The program starts with about 48mb loaded but by the end of the day I have clients calling to say the application is more than 300mb in memory. 300mb!!!!

This brings me to my next point and this is an important point I beleive. Yes I have done the research into memory leaks and yes I have made numerous coding adjustments with varied success. The reality is this…WHY SHOULD I!!!

When you buy a programming language that claims to take care of memory issues, that’s exactly what you expect it to do. I don’t care that I may have event declarations still in memory or that I am referencing other pages etc…when I close a page, I expect it to unload completely. The irony is that the page does unload, according to the programming language, according to the memory on the computer however, that unload increased my programs memory by another 1mb. Microsoft needs to get there act together, the exact technology that is supposed to make designing professional graphical user interfaces (and it does) is occupying more of my time debugging for memory issues that are not my fault.

The unfortunate truth is that WPF is still so great that I can’t move from it and use a different technology, maybe in dotnet 4 things will be improved, I doubt it however.

I would be very interested in knowing other peoples frustrations with this technology as I am sure there are thousands of developers in exactly the same situation as me.

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Software development and programming services in Cape Town

November 8th, 2009 No Comments

We are very proud to be able to announce that All Programming now offers all its software development and programming services in Cape Town.

Click here to view the offical company page

This has come about with one of our partner companies moving its head quarters to Cape Town. We also have various hair salon clients in Cape Town that we service.

Our list of programming services includes in summary: You can click the links to view the offical pages describing these services

- Custom bespoke software development and programming.
- WPF Programming
- Windows Mobile Development
- Touch screen development
- Software maintenance services
- Software consulting services

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