Systemize Your Business

Earlier this year we studied the sites of our clients - about 784 of them. About 80% lacked elements that SEO experts say are crucial for Google to rank pages correctly. These errors had been there since day one, hurting traffic and costing the owners money.

We’ve just completed a similar study on 310,000 sites to see how many of them have these issues. We wanted to know how many are missing Page Titles and/or Page Descriptions and/or have enough text to be useful. (Just the marketing aspect.)

The results are sobering. A third have broken page titles, about half have no page description at all, and a sixth had no text!

The full report is 6 pages long, in simple English designed for our small business community. The full report of site marketing defects is here.

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Amazon has a silky smooth returns process - it completely removes the anger at having paid for something that doesn’t work properly. I’ll tell you about it in a minute but before I do that lets take a look at how it should not be done.

I returned a faulty Garmin GPS to Argos. They made me suffer.

1. Dig out receipt from my filing cabinet
2. Drive to mall and find parking
3. Stand in queue at customer service desk
4. Explain what was wrong to vacant 16yr old behind counter
5. Explain what was wrong to equally vacant 50 something behind counter
6. Wait while they phone around trying to find out what to do
7. Hold for Garmin Europe call center
8. Explain to Garmin call center what is wrong
9. Get told I should just charge the unit
10. Explain that it’s fully charged
11. Get told to take it home and charge it for 24 hours
12. Explain that it’s fully charged
13. Get told again that to take it home and charge it for 24 hours
14. Give up and go home and charge it for 24 hours

The pain continues
The next day:-

15. Drive to mall and find parking
16. Stand in queue at customer service desk
17. Explain what was wrong to same vacant 16yr old behind counter
18. Explain what was wrong to same equally vacant 50 something behind counter
19. Wait while they phone around trying to find out what to do
20. Hold for Garmin Europe call center
21. Explain to Garmin call center what is wrong
22. Get told I should just charge the unit
23. Explain that it’s fully charged and that I have already charged it
24. Hand phone over to vacant 16 yr old behind counter
25. Wait while she gets instructions
26. Hand broken GPS in and ask when it will be ready (a recent immigrant really needs a GPS)
27. Wait while vacant 16 yr old phones Garmin Europe call center
28. Get told maybe 28 days

3 and a half weeks later I got a phone call saying unit is repaired

29. Drive to mall and find parking
30. Stand in queue at customer service desk
31. Explain that I want my GPS to vacant 16yr old behind counter
32. Explain that I want my GPS to equally vacant 50 something behind counter
33. Wait while they hunt for the GPS

Amazon was such a contrast.

1. Look up website
2. Click on returns center
3. Select item to be returned from a list of things I’ve bought that are still under warranty
4. Type in reason for returning the item
5. Print prepaid shipping label
6. Pack the goods
7. Drop off at post office
8. 2 days later an email arrives saying I’ve been refunded.

What a smooth system.

The reality is that we’re going to mess up sometime. It just makes sense to build a pain free returns or refunds system.

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I can just picture the headlines - “CRAZY SURFER FREEZES TO DEATH IN BELFAST” or perhaps “OPTIMISTIC IMMIGRANT DIES FROM EXPOSURE”.

When a South African moves from sub-tropical Durban to chillier climates it takes a few years for the optimism to fade and the reality that every sunny day is not hot to set in. I bought myself a sea-kayak three weeks ago - winter had gone on long enough and it was time for some outdoor fun.

It took two days of paddling in boardshorts for me to realize that the locals shaking their heads from the shore in thick jackets and scarves were the smart ones.

I ordered a £40 wetsuit from www.wetsuitoutlet.co.uk , great service, but I think they’re missing an opportunity to systemize their marketing.

Imagine if I’d got an email that looked something like this:

“Dear Pete, I’m just about to dispatch your wetsuit and wondered if you might like a pair of boots and gloves to go with it - it’s still pretty cold right now and for an extra £30 you’ll be able to get a much longer season on the water. If you’d like me to include these in your package click here - they’ll be with you by Friday.”

Instead, I got my wetsuit in the post and froze my toes off for a week before I got around to buying the boots, and it took another week to realize that you need gloves if you’re going to pretend that it’s summer.

It’s not rocket science to work out what accessories people could use and offer them in gentle and polite way at the right time.

I bought the boat from our local canoe shop. I also persuaded myself to pick up a pair of paddles, some life jackets and 2 clip on seats at the same time. Friendly enough people but they didn’t ask for my phone number, address or email address. Almost as if they are never going to invite me back to spend more money.

How hard can it be to sell someone something they want to buy?

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Disclaimer: If you make or sell stuff please ignore this message - it’s not really for you.

Most owners of small service businesses have a big problem.

Most of our marketing efforts are ineffective because:

• When we’re marketing we’re not cutting, massaging, servicing, designing, plumbing, repairing, healing, fixing or installing. And we don’t get paid for marketing.
• We actually know what we are doing when it comes to our “ing” (as opposed to marketing where most of us fumble about in the dark).
• There is a direct correlation between “inging” and our income. We get paid for doing something that we enjoy so we do our “ing” instead of marketing.

So this often happens (maybe you recognize it in your business?):

Too busy working to market
Too little work
Lots of marketing
Too busy working to market

And so the cycle goes on.

This workload fluctuation makes it hard for us to get a consistent income or grow the business.

In the perfect world our expertise and fantastic service would be enough to get people queuing at the door. The reality is that good skills and great service are not enough in today’s competitive world.

We’ve developed an automatic marketing system that significantly increases your chance of getting repeat business from your existing clients. It runs in the background leaving you free to focus on doing the work that actually brings in the loot.

Enough said - if the thought of increasing your sales without having to spend hours marketing is of interest please take a look at http://www.salesrepeater.co.uk/service/index.html

Kind regards

Pete Bowen

PS I’d love discus how it could work in your business. Please tell me a little more about what you do.

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What do you do when the washing machine breaks and you’ve got 6 small kids staying at your house? Panic! Being male it wasn’t too much of a problem for me but my good wife (mother of 4, aunt to the other 2) was flapping big time.

It took a day and a half to track “Jim’ll Fix-it” down. Really nice guy, great technical skills - it only took him 3 minutes to sort the problem out

I’ll definitely use him again - if I can find him.

You see, hopefully it’ll be a while before the washing machine breaks again, and by then I’ll have forgotten everything about him except for the fact that he was a nice guy and did a good job. So I’ll haul out the yellow pages and probably hire the first available guy.

I might get Jim because does advertise in the Yellow Pages and he’s going to spend £1297.20 on the same advert next year… But I probably won’t because he is number 26 out of 49 competitors and his advert doesn’t really stand out.

He could get a year’s supply of business card size stickers made up for less than £100. “When this breaks call Jim on xxx-xxx-xxx”. All that he has to do is to stick one of these stickers discretely on each of my appliances and he’s gone from 26th place to gold medal winner at less than a tenth of the price.

It’s simple systemized marketing that gets high returns.

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