Most B2B businesses would say they don’t have an e-Commerce website … they don’t have a shopping cart and for good reason; B2B purchases are often high value items or service contracts.

I propose that most B2B sites ARE eCommerce sites, it’s just that the final transaction takes place off-line. The site plays an important role in a longer sales process. For this reason research and complex decision-making dominate the B2B user experience rather than a shopping basket and checkout. B2B sites have to offer in-depth information that you’d never normally find on a B2C site.

So B2B sites are just another form of eCommerce, but, there’s one big contrast between B2C and B2B – pricing. You rarely find it on B2B sites. In recent B2B research by the Neilsen Norman Group, wanting to get pricing (or an indication of cost) was rated as the most important information needed by B2B site visitors (29% higher than product/service availability which ranked 2nd).

The research shows that in order to make a decision to further the buying process, B2B visitors want a basic knowledge of products and services from their initial research that includes an idea of the cost.

So what’s your excuse for hiding your price?

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We’ve all seen them, the square box, with some random black squares arranged within – gradually beginning to appear on consumer products and advertising.

We’ve been thinking about how to use them in a B2B environment.

The most obvious one (to us anyway) seemed to be to pop it onto our business cards:

Business Card with QR Code

All you have to do is download a Barcode Reader app to your smartphone of choice, then use that to take a picture of the QR Code, and your phone will automatically register the contact details and should prompt to save as a V Card.

From a B2B perspective, we think it would work well in the following scenarios:

1. Email marketing & Events – include a QR code image in HTML emails that people can scan to download event venue details, someone’s contact details, special offer information etc ( as they can be scanned from on screen as well as in print)

2. Include a QR code in print ads – really handy for tracking responses as you could share a “secret” URL only accessible by scanning the code

3. Include a QR code in printed direct mail – especially great if marketing products – if you go one step further and develop your own app (if relevant) you can integrate the two to enable product reminders and ordering.

4. Web – using QR codes on the website can be a great addition to a contact us page, or to share URLs

5. Well, that was the business card idea

Want to know more about they work? The below link takes you to a great blog that has the top 14 things you should know about QR Codes:

http://searchenginewatch.com/3642255

If you’ve any other ideas for use in a B2B environment, please comment below!

B2B · business cards · direct mail · email · Marketing · QR codes · web

From the 1st March 2011 the Advertising Standards Authority will be regulating all ONLINE advertisements and other marketing communications – a power they didn’t have before. I’m sure there’ll be load of Web Freedom Fighters screaming about this one with shouts of “Free Speech” but the reality is that many claims made on the web probably do need regulating. There’s still an ongoing mistrust of online shopping that this will only help to improve.

Importantly, the regulation will cover advertising and marketing messages for ALL businesses in the UK regardless of type or size of the company. It will also cover all related communications under the control of the business including social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter as well as email and text messages.

This new regulation adds to the Disability Discrimination Act and Companies Act that already make requirements of companies to show certain company information and make their sites accessible by special needs users. The downside of course is that the ASA only has jurisdiction in the UK so consumers and business users will still have to use caution for non-UK sites.

Don’t think it’s just consumer sites that are affected – B2B companies are covered by this regulation just as much. Over the coming months, as the ASA starts to “name and shame” businesses, I expect we’ll see many business owners and marketing directors taking a closer look at what’s being said on their sites and in their electronic communications.

Read more here: http://bit.ly/gK7dfV

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The one group  of businesses I expect to have their unsubscribe process spot on are retailers – especially online retailers.

I don’t think I’m being unreasonable, they are completely customer focused, familiar with technology and have been using the internet for some time now!

I think someone needs to let play.com in on the secret – sorry guys!

In a New Year clearout I decided to purge my personal email of subscription emails….it’s a dumping ground email address for me when I buy things online, but I finally tired of all the scintillating offers and decided to decamp. This soon became an odyssey of critiquing Unsubscribe processes – teensy bit relevant to me as we run many email campaigns for our customers, and frankly, I’m a bit nosy.

Firstly, the myth of bigger companies and retailers being more on the ball – how wrong could I be!

Art.com impressed me the most, not only was the process painless and quick, they’ d taken the time to create an appealing page that said how sorry they were to see me go. Very sweet (didn’t stop me, but I would still buy from them, which is the point).

A few sites from very small retailers impressed me with their painless unsubscribes..and then I clicked on the Play.com one.

Step 1: I was presented with a login screen – well if I’m unsubscribing, I probably haven’t bought anything for ages, and I’m damned if I can remember that password!

Step 2: Yup, you guessed it, so then I had to go through a multi-step forgotten password process (I won’t bore you with that one)

Step 3: (Correct, I am persistent) finally get logged in and am presented with an Account Settings page.  The Unsubscribe feature is in a box called Change Newsletter Settings, placed at the bottom of the page, below the fold.

Step 4: Radio button located, I selected it. Sentence appears confirming update (but no acknowledgement that I had unsubscribed, or would be missed – sniff)

Then to top it all off, the next day, guess who I received a newsletter from? Yup, you guessed it, my good friends at Play.com!

This isn’t a diatribe against Play.com – they do the selling bit very well!

But, it is just lack of attention to detail- Unsubscribe is not something that’s hard to get right – just place what the customer wants at the heart of the process, make it easy, make it fast and tell ‘em you’ll miss em!!!

B2B Marketing · customer service · play.com · unsubscribes

Well, this week has been a mixed bag! With the snow staying away, business has actually been able to proceed!

We also visited the TFM&A Exhibition (along with Confex) – with a view to looking at exciting developments in technology to support marketing.

What did I learn?

I now know there are more CRM and automated emailing systems than you can shake a stick at.

I also discovered that “Marketing Automation” is the new buzz phrase.

I also learnt that while a lot of companies talk about Marketing Automation, what they actually mean is “automation of one part of the process” such as email sending for example.

Marketing Automation in itself is in its infancy – which I suspect is why many are talking about it, but still working out how to do it. What concerns me is that the term itself will become diluted as organisations jump into the sector, but have offerings that don’t stack up.

It was also interesting to see the divide in these systems when it comes to B2C  and B2B – while B2C platforms looked very robust, and talked about understanding B2B it was clear that the systems could not easily translate between the two. Not surprising in that the two disciplines require different approaches, processes and management – what is suprising is that the providers didn’t seem to want to specialise in one or the other.

Which brings me to my point (there is one) – ultimately, like any technology platform, unless the system is completely aligned to the goals of the user then it won’t do what’s needed.

In marketing, there is definitely a place for technology that enables the marketing process – but without the underlying expertise and process management, the success of campaigns managed through these technologies will be limited.

Take email platforms for instance – they have enabled a large increase in companies bringing email sending in-house (37% increase in 2009 according to the DMA), but this has been accompanied by a decline in the quality and effectiveness in email communications.

Why?

Imagine if you could bring TV-quality production in-house using a video camera and some fancy software – would the company be guaranteed to produce successful and good quality TV shows? Probably not. Some might, but most wouldn’t.

It’s the same with email – the DMA acknowledges this and found in its research that a large percentage of companies sending emails from their internally managed systems are ambivalent about the technology (which can impact how your reader sees the email in their email client), and worse, aren’t processing unsubscribes, and hard and soft bounces correctly.

I don’t want to pick on email, but it highlights that we probably need to wait to see a solid marketing automation platform that covers all the bases, and that we shouldn’t rely on the technology to ensure we do the right processes, but on our own disciplines – as technology sometimes lets us do things we shouldn’t!

B2B · Confex · CRM · Lead Generation · Marketing · Marketing Automation · TFM&A

We have been asked many times by our customers about developing Flashbased websites. There has been a trend, partly driven by fashion, tohave websites that whizz around and magically transform under yourmouse pointer, but there are some downsides:

1. The first and most significant is problems with search engines. Flash content cannot be indexed by the search engines and flash based websites deliver very little text content that the search engines can use thus reducing or eliminating your search ranking. Even sites that just use a flash based menu can reduce scoring on search engines as “real” links go towards a site’s score. Google have recently announced a partnership with Adobe that will allow them to read through Flash content but the success of this is still unknown and all the other major search engines, like MSN and Yahoo, won’t see the content.
2. Flash often breaks some important standards and features that users rely upon:
   

   1. You can’t copy and paste text
   2. The back-button won’t work
   3. Bookmarking of pages in flash sites often just takes you back to the home page or another page higher up in the navigational structure
   4. Browser features like zoom in/out and text resizing won’t work

3. Flash is not supported by all browsers so some users just won’t see anything. There has been a marked increase in the use of mobile browsers, which don’t support flash. There’s also the issue of flash versions – which version do you develop in? While most desktop users have flash installed there’s no guarantee that the end user will have the supported version installed or may even not be available – Linux users had to wait months for version 9 of the player to be released by Adobe leaving them unable to view the newer Flash 9 sites.Just to top it all there are some users that disable Flash in their browsers to avoid advertising and longer download times.
4. Then there’s the cost … Updating a flash website usually requires programming skills as there is very little content management support for flash sites. Normal HTML sites on the other hand have a huge variety of content management (CMS) platforms available from bespoke, to open source, to commercial. So if you want to make text changes to your flash site expect to hire a programmer!

OK it’s notall doom and gloom … Flash does have it’s place when used inmoderation. Flash can augment a site and add value by placing flashanimations in key places where dynamic functionality or “eye candy” areimportant, for instance an animation on a home page showcasing aproduct in action.

The daft thing is that the standardscompliant technologies (Javascript and HTML) can often achieve many ofthe effects that flash offers without loss of function for ordinaryusers, search engines or special needs users.

Microsoft haverecently launched “Silverlight” which is their equivalent to Flash inan attempt to get a slice of the Flash pie, but even this doesn’treally solve the problems and adds an extra one – does the user haveSilverlight installed as it’s an optional update from Microsoft?

So do use Flash, but with care.

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I was dubious – but yesterday attended a seminar on Social Networking for B2B – and am converted!

Greatpresentations – LinkedIn, Microsoft, Sun among others – showed how youcan use social networking to generate leads for B2B as well targetingconsumers.

One presentation discussed how the Obama campaignedleveraged Social Networking and created a huge following in arelatively short time – and how they used it to connect with voters inthe week leading up to the election.

What was particularlyinteresting was how you can build a reputation and awareness withouthaving to spend a huge amount (although the opportunities are there tospend!) which will be good news at the moment.

The overriding message was to be authentic – if you are selling say so, if you are advising – do it honestly.

Food for thought….

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