Netallianz

If you are a local business and currently marketing on the Internet you should be very excited about e-commerce.

Your customers are increasingly turning to the Internet to find businesses like yours.

Last year in the US, it is estimated that more than 70% of households use the Internet as a source when shopping locally.

What is more astounding is that more than 40% of local searches had a buying intent.

With the growth of internet usage and broadband subscribers in Malaysia, I believe we are also riding a similar wave.

The question is – when a prospect searches for your type of business on the Internet will they find YOU? or will they find your competitor?

And if they find you, will you have an Internet marketing system in place that converts them into a profitable customer?

If you cannot answer “Yes” to both of those questions, then you may have a problem.

As a local business owner you are probably struggling to figure out this whole “Internet Marketing thing”.

From our experience, the key barrier that a small business confronts when attempting to market online is complexity and confusion.

Just today, I visited a family business in Kepong and they were looking to sell their products online. They are using an accounting & inventory system and looking to integrate an e-commerce website with the system. So I had to go to great lengths to explain that this may not be possible without access to the program source codes or some sort of API (application programming interface). Even if it were possible, the amount they had to spend on integration can easily fund quite a huge internet marketing program that could drive sales for them.

Clearly the focus of the client was on minimizing their paper work and double handling. This is good, but it does not have anything to do with driving sales on your website.

There’s obviously a learning curve and the whole process takes time.

E-commerce solution providers aren’t helping much either. Most people want to sell you “solutions”. They want to sell you a website solution, an e-commerce solution, search engine marketing or SEO solution, e-mail blasting solution, and the list goes on.

What should you be looking for?
The reality is that you will need a web conversion system… one that sucks in prospects and churns out profitable customers. There are 3 areas to consider:

• Website Building
• Prospecting
• Conversion

Website Building
Most local businesses are simply too focused on the absolute cost of building their websites and getting the cheapest service provider. Instead your potential return can be so much higher if you look at ROI.

In the end, many websites just end up being nothing more than an online brochure.

The reality is that you need to educate yourself on the basics of how to make the Internet work for your business. They are few who are capable of doing it for you. If they were, they would be doing it themselves.

Once you understand the basics, you will know what to look for in a solution and how much you can afford to pay to develop a true web conversion system.

Prospecting
Not only are more and more people turning to Google to search for their needs, the Internet offers the opportunity to significantly reduce your customer acquisition cost.

Consider an ad in your local paper – a decent size ad is in the thousands of Ringgit. In contrast, pay per click (PPC) advertising such as Google Adwords lets you acquire highly targeted traffic to your website at a fraction of the cost, usually less than 30 sen per click.

Customer Conversion
Just think about the above example… if you had an ad budget of just RM500, you could be buying 1666 targeted clicks. If you do some homework and depending on what you are selling, you could be converting 5% of those clicks to sales, ie 83 sales.  If you make just RM50 per sale, your gross profit is RM2,490. Of course if you are a trusted name, your conversion could be much higher even.

Technology allows you to not only interface with customers, but also to interact. Through regular updates, email newsletters, auto-responders and interactive programs, you can develop a trusted relationship with customers.

Your will want to turn your customers into repeat customers and maximize the lifetime value of your customer.

As a result, much of your conversion process can be automated.

While you are not open for business, your web conversion system is still in the process of converting.

Are you starting to get a feel of how the Internet can impact your business? With the right strategies and mindset, you can be on the cutting edge of the Internet wave in Malaysia.