The purpose of business, Peter Drucker once said, is not to make a sale, but to make and keep a customer. Think about the Internet in the same way. The key is to leverage the medium for what it does best — interacting with customers and prospects. That means having a professional, interactive Web site, using e-mail for quick-time customer service and setting up a user-friendly online store (if that's right for you).

The Net is transforming the world of sales and marketing. Nearly all the classic "P" elements of marketing — product, positioning, price and promotion — are being turned upside down. For example:

Myth 1: "Free" Sells

So you're offering something free on your site. What is it and will it be worth something to your target audience? Remember: sell the sizzle, not the steak! Ask yourself what should excite your prospects about your offer? If there really isn't anything exciting about it, perhaps you should reconsider the offer. Moral: Make sure your offer has value and that you communicate that value effectively.

Myth 2: All Site Traffic Is Good Traffic

It would be more accurate to say that most traffic is potentially good. Almost anyone can be converted to a customer, but only if they're in the market for what you provide. If you sell 1982 Mercedes windshield wiper screws, then you might want to be a little more targeted in your efforts then "all car owners." Moral: Create messages, tailor your site and list your URL in a manner that addresses your target audience's needs best.

Myth 3: Submit Your Site to Thousands of Search Engines

The problem is that what and how you submit to each of the search engines needs to be done in a different way. And such submissions are generally very low impact, especially when you are submitting the same list of keywords that everyone else is. In reality, search engines account for just under 7% of global referrals. Direct navigation (typing in the URL) and bookmarks together accounted for the largest percentage of referrals at 47%. Links from other sites came in third at 26%. Moral: Know thy search engines. Pick a few targeted sites, and make sure your submission is accurate for those sites.

Myth 4: There's No Such Thing as Excess

There is. Caps. Exclamation points. Italics. Red. Hyperbole. Blinking. Banners. You're a professional, so you must be sure to present yourself that way. Moral: You don't need gimmicks to get people's attention if what you're offering is of value.

Myth 5: We Love Free Marketing

Before you actually start setting up your site, there are a few key planning steps you should consider first:

• Take a look at what your competitors are doing. How could you surpass them? Determine what you like and don't like about their message.

• Research domain names to make sure the one you want is available. Keep in mind a name that will be clearly associated with your business or will stick out in the minds of your users. Some useful sites you can access for assistance include: AboutDomains.com, URLHog.com, Odns.org.

• Evaluate existing systems (customer relationship management systems, human resource systems, existing databases) in your organisation that might benefit from online integration. Leveraging these systems can pay off long term, though it will increase your initial investment substantially.

• Know your time frame. Look for a provider that is flexible and not frozen by rigid methodology.

• Establish a budget for your project, and communicate that budget to providers to save both parties from wasted time and effort.

• Understand the infrastructure in place to maintain the product once it's launched. How technically savvy are the resources assigned to that task? Will you be outsourcing maintenance?

• Plan to gauge the success of the project. How long before you can expect a return on your investment? What will that return look like? Is it quantifiable?

1. Start with a Purpose. Have a clear set of objectives in mind before beginning work on your Web site. Write down what action you want your site visitors to take. Every word and graphic on every page of your Web site should support your site's goals.

2. Plan for Simplicity. Keep your site simple both in design and content. Determine the image you want (i.e. conservative or a contemporary, formal or informal). Be sure your site is in line with your brand and corporate image.

3. Design for Easy Reading. Visual appeal is nice, but consider readability as one of your top design priorities. In order for your content to communicate effectively, you need to consider how colours and fonts play in your Web site.
   • The text/type should sit comfortably on the background colour. It's more than an issue of high contrast. White type on a black background is readable, but visitors trying to print out any of your site pages will only get white pages!
   • Refrain from choosing busy, loud backgrounds (for example, marble or pattern backgrounds), as they detract from content and often make text illegible.
   • Too many colours or fonts can also be distracting and give the site a cluttered feel. A few colours can go a really long way. Be smart about the colours you pick, as certain colours elicit an emotional response.
   • Consider using subheads frequently. They encourage readership by breaking long articles into short, bite-sized chunks.

4. Be Consistent. Use one design throughout the site. It's confusing if pages within a site are not consistent in design. Be consistent in your use of fonts and colour.

5. Use Hierarchies. Your most important elements need to be at the top of the page, where viewers will see it immediately (e.g., if one of your goals is to get people to call your toll free number, make sure they can see it without scrolling). Visitors do not like to scroll from left to right to see the entirety of your Web page, so you need to make sure your design fits with the lowest common denominator. Also, make sure your site is compatible with all browser types, especially Netscape and Internet Explorer. As an example, sites designed with Microsoft FrontPage 2000 may not always be entirely viewable with Netscape.

6. Make It User-Friendly. Navigation is the way your clients find their way around your site, what they click on where, what links they see and so on. It's without a doubt one of the most important elements of your design and should be as intuitive as possible. If you use graphics for navigation (such as buttons), provide alternate text navigation at the bottom of each page. Some users actually set their browsers to turn graphics off, so their only navigational aid will be the text links. Also, if your Web site has long pages, text links at the bottom will allow visitors to visit other areas of your site without needing to scroll all the way up the page.

7. Create Strong Content. The more valuable information you provide on your site, the greater the service you offer, and the more reason you give people to visit your site. Repeat visitors are always desired, so give them something to come back for. It could be a series of articles, your newsletter, or a white paper published on a regular basis, trivia, a poll, anything that visitors may get hooked on.

8. Keep It Fresh. It's important that you assign a team member to the task of updating some sections in your site on a regular basis. There's nothing worse than visitors seeing events, articles or newsletters that are outdated — they'll get the impression the site has been abandoned and that there's nothing new to look for or come back to. If your Internet Service Provider (ISP) provides statistics showing you which pages were accessed most often, be sure to measure them as this will help you focus further development in your site on what your visitors like the best.

9. Make It Interactive. If you're not asking for some kind of response — a sale, information about the customer's preferences, product feedback — you're wasting the medium. Just as in any advertisement, you need to provide a hook and a reason for the reader to feel compelled to call you.

10. Make Contact a Priority. It's a good idea to include contact information on every page because people often save pages to disk or print them. If you don't include this information they may not be able to contact you, or find your site again to get that contact information. So make it easy for them. Include your company name, address, e-mail address, and your phone and fax numbers. If you don't want people calling, include your e-mail and mailing address at the very least. And make sure to follow up immediately on any enquiries. Treat email and form responses as phone calls. Automate for greater effect (whenever possible, a follow up email should be automatically sent to the user as a confirmation). Assign a team member to check on responses and get back to them as quickly as possible. If visitors have taken the time to contact you, they should be treated as valued prospects ready to buy. The longer you take responding to them, the more chance they'll lose their urgency to buy — or will buy elsewhere.

According to E-Biz Solutions (summer 2000), two-thirds of people who receive unsolicited e-mails don't like receiving them and consider them spam (41% delete them right away). On the other hand, only 3% of requested e-mails go unread. That means almost all solicited e-mails reach their targets. This is how you want to build relationships with your customers and prospects.

By obtaining a person's permission before sending e-mail information, you can expect people to become active participants and to not be irritated when they receive e-mail communications from your company.

The first rule of permission marketing is that it's based on selfishness: Consumers will grant a company permission to communicate only if they know what's in it for them. A company has to reward consumers, explicitly or implicitly, for paying attention to its messages. That's why the Net is such a powerful medium. It changes everything. You can use email to communicate with people frequently, quickly and unobtrusively — so long as they've given you permission to do that.

Ordinary people understand this concept, which is why they get so nervous about spam. The first time they get an unsolicited email, they say to themselves, "This message didn't cost the sender anything. If I let him get away with this, there will be thousands more just like him. Then my email box won't work, and the Web won't be fun anymore." But if you get permission to use email to deliver marketing messages, and if people agree to pay attention to those messages — well, you've changed the game. When consumers are spammed by e-marketers, their feelings are likely translated to their perceptions of the business — a company that spams is not the kind of company I want to do business with.

Steps to Launching a Permission-Based E-Marketing Programme:

1. Start by reading Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers, by Seth Godin. Then, after you have the background information you need, train your team with the concepts.

2. Send a print mailing to all clients, prospects and referral sources to obtain their permission to send them e-mail marketing communications and request their e-mail addresses.

3. Input all e-mail addresses into your database.

4. Set up a new database field in your database that will track the current disposition of your contacts with regard to e-marketing: "Yes," they want to receive e-mail communications, "No," they indicated they do not want to receive e-mail communications, or "Unknown," which indicates you have not determined the clients' choice yet.

Internet consultants will tell you that you can sell anything over the Internet. But it's not that simple. If you're thinking about an online store, here are a few considerations to keep in mind:

• Your niche. The most successful Web-based businesses include giants such as Amazon.com that arrived on the scene early with large amounts of capital. Growing businesses can't compete directly with the likes of them, but you might have success targeting an underserved market niche — for example, selling out-of-print sailing books. The same goes for market segments such as CDs, videos, drugstore items and software. Make sure your site offers something customers won't find on sites run by the Internet giants.

• Your competition. Chances are, someone else is already selling your product over the Web. Try to figure out ways to steal market share. There's a good chance your typical competitor's Web site is slow to download or has poor aesthetics. Or maybe the company isn't offering a good selection or fair prices. If nothing else, perhaps you can be the first company to sell a given product with great customer service, on-time delivery or a money-back guarantee. Or perhaps unlike other sites, your site features valuable information, hints and tips or solutions to problems that other sites ignore.

• The nature of your product. Some products sell especially well on the Internet. Music sells well on the Internet because it's easier to gather information about a CD online than in a store. Books sell well on the Web because it's easy to build a community of customers who will review books that they purchase and read other customers' reviews. In both cases, sites can track customer preferences and suggest possible purchases — as a result, customers often buy more items than they intended. And consumers know that a copy of a book or CD they buy online will be identical to a copy they'd buy in a store. The Web also is a great place to sell products that most people don't like to shop for. On the other hand, there are some things consumers need to touch or try out in person before they buy. If you have both a store and a Web site, customers can check out items in your store and then purchase them later online.

Be sure to read each article with the mindset "How could this apply to our business." Thinking of it that way will guarantee that you get value. Better yet, take notes as you read and commit to having the ideas implemented by the time the next edition arrives. Also, make copies for each team member. To really make sure something positive happens, work with your business development specialist to talk your team through the ideas and how to set a schedule for getting them implemented. We're here to help you get started. [Accounting Firm Name]

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