7 Tips to Increase Profitability by Retaining Customers

Pareto’s principle is that businesses get 80 percent of business from 20 percent of their clients, meaning that retention of these customers is crucial to success. According to a study conducted by Harvard Business School, “The high cost of acquiring customers renders many customer relationships unprofitable during their early years. Only in later years, when the cost of serving loyal customers falls and the volume of their purchases rises, do relationships generate big returns. The bottom line: increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.”

Research conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Small Business Administration revealed: “Businesses could greatly improve their customer base if they focused more on retaining customers than spending marketing budget funds to get new customers.” Numerous studies have shown it takes more money to acquire a new customer than it does to retain a current client.

Here are some additional statistics:

• The average U.S. business loses 50% of its customers every five years.
• It costs six to seven times more to find new clients than it does to keep existing clients.
• Bain Co. states; a 10 percent increase in customer retention is equal to a 30% increase in company value.
• You are four times more likely to do business with an existing customer versus a new customer.
• The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 to 70% versus 5 to 20% to a new customer.

To help you improve customer retention, we’ve compiled the following seven tips for small businesses to identify, engage and retain valuable customers.

1. Set expectations early

Businesses should build strong and trustworthy relationships from the start. For example, when your team delivers faster or more than promised, you build a foundation of excellent service delivery. You can reinforce this by responding quickly to questions, maintaining a record of communication and commitments and exceeding expectations. You should go even further with the quality of your after-sales service and support.

2. Involve your customers in all decisions

Many times, just involving your customers before going ahead with decisions saves time and effort required later to make fixes. Any change in operations or strategy is likely to be more successful when it is accepted and endorsed in advance by your clients. So why not involve them and get their input while planning? Surveys are one of the best tools to measure your clients’ satisfaction levels if used properly. Here are some tips to design survey questions that lead to actionable insights:

• Define customer satisfaction parameters and ask questions around each. To illustrate, a voice call software application provider needs to ask questions on the quality of calls, bandwidth issues, call packages offered, etc.
• Measure satisfaction by using the appropriate scale for each parameter.
• Make inferences from data by studying all aspects and related context.

3. Share your business values

All established brands have a set of values for which they stand and their clients typically identify strongly with them. While developing your brand, work to establish unique values rather than copy from other companies. Your brand has to work itself into the hearts and minds (especially hearts) of prospects and customers and you can’t do this by being like everyone else in the segment. Companies like Google, Apple, Coca Cola and Walt Disney are distinct and a customer who buys Microsoft is very different from a Mac fan. Know your potential customers priorities and communicate values that match.

4. Reach out to customers regularly

As explained by Kelly in her earlier post, “today’s email is different than the blanket campaigns of the past. It’s precision marketing, not blasting. It’s a campaign to market products or to market your customers’ products. It’s email marketing.” Once, you understand what is important for a particular set of customers; tweak your messages and campaigns. Provide them information that will empower them to live their lives and conduct business in a better way. Blogging is another powerful tool that lets you share your knowledge and passion, leading to two-way communications. Social media spreads the word about your brand and gives your customers an opportunity to share opinions and give feedback.

5. Think and act beyond actual sales

In order to make a relationship last beyond the immediate sale, think beyond it! Instead of concentrating on one transaction, try to know each person or company better. Dig deeper to know learn their processes and systems, their pain points and ways to help them. In a consultative style of selling, you should offer advice, let them know about complementary products and provide tips for maximizing the value of their purchases. Your clients can benefit from your products but they should also be able to leverage the relationship with you. Once there is trust in you, they will ask for help openly; resulting in long and fruitful relationships.

6. Provide value with automation

Automation converts time-consuming tasks into standardized processes which greatly improve efficiency. Businesses who automate are able to distinguish themselves from competitors. One example from our company is the Affinity Express Service Bureau 4.0 (AESB 4.0), an innovative, cloud-based workflow solution that enables publishers to evolve into complete marketing resources for their advertisers, while increasing profits, lowering costs and improving productivity.
Some of the advantages of AESB 4.0 are as follows:

• Supports a complete range of digital and print products
• Increases the profitability of orders by making the process faster and easier
• Provides extensive business intelligence on an enterprise level
• Integrates the entire process from sales to billing
• Allows salespeople to access from anywhere and using any device
• Stores past campaigns, proposals, contracts and other details

As we have seen with AESB 4.0, automating and standardizing processes increases customer loyalty and pays off with improved customer retention rates.

7. Get Personal

If a restaurant manager remembers me from my last visit and suggests a new dish or drink that is close to what I preferred on my previous visit, I feel valued enough to visit again and share the incident with my friends. Customers like attention without someone getting in their way. Small tokens of appreciation like emails with customized offers, thank-you notes to returning guests and personalized greetings on special occasions are good practices. Involving your business in community events is a special way to give back to your patrons and customers. These small but very critical steps can become deciding factors when you are compared to competitors.

Are you paying attention to what’s important to your customers? What else have you done to improve retention rates and build loyalty?

Putting Visual Marketing to Work for You

In our fast-paced, multi-tasking world, our attention spans have been dramatically reduced. We are bombarded with so much information that often the easiest way to reach consumers and cut through the clutter is with visual marketing. This is the strategy of using visual aids to communicate, increase authority and be more memorable. Photos, videos, infographics, memes, slide shows and the like often make it easier to express data and complex ideas.

According to David Langton and Anita Campbell, authors of Visual Marketing: 99 Ways for Small Businesses to Market with Images and Design (a book the Affinity Express Marketing Team consumed last year!), “Well done infographics allow businesses to communicate powerful brand stories through compelling graphics. The best infographics have an element of entertainment to them and people tend to share infographics, when they might not share the same information presented as text.” This is also true of other forms of visual content.

Here is why businesses large and small are turning to visual marketing:

• Using visuals on your website can increase your monthly unique visitors by 200 to 300 percent.
• By using images on your website, it is possible to improve your conversion rate.
• Blog posts with images can boost traffic more than plain text posts.
• Customers who view product videos are 85% more likely to buy products.

This is an example of what you could create using Memegenerator.net

The best place to begin adding visual marketing elements is your website.

• Make sure that every page of your website and business blog has relevant and interesting images attached to it.
• Create your own images that represent your content and ideas instead of using generic stock photos.
• Create video demonstrations of your products and services rather than text reviews and descriptions.
• Make data and statistics more appealing and “sharable” with infographics.
• Share and link your visuals across your social media networks.

Tips for Using Visual Marketing:

• Choose colors wisely: Be intentional about the colors you choose to represent your business, as this will impact sales.
• Replace words with visuals: Wherever possible use visuals to share your message and tell your story.
• Paint the town: Make sure your logo, colors, and visuals are an integral part of your marketing communication. Your visual assets need to become synonymous with the perception of your organization to improve recognition.

Some examples of how business use visual are MailChimp, which features a mailman monkey and DropBox, which relies on childlike illustrations to differentiate themselves from other storage services.

The best news is that you don’t need a huge budget or team to get started with visual marketing. There are a wide variety of resources for a low or no cost.

Infographics

• Piktochart Infographic Creator. This is a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) infographic creator for free. It has themes and graphics.
• Visual.ly. Develop infographics and connect to social media accounts–free! Access Google Analytics through the site to track the effectiveness of your creations (or even create infographics from your website’s Google Analytics report).

* By the way, Slideshare announced yesterday that users can now easily upload, view, embed and share include optimized infographics.

Customize Social Media Profiles to Win Social Fans

Marketing is all about reaching out and forming a connection. Whatever product you market and whoever you target (e.g., youth, mothers, honeymooners, local businesses, big corporations, etc.), it’s all about people. This is why social media is important. It allows you to have a direct dialogue with those who matter to you. As Kelly has noted, social media might influence different categories of business in different ways but there is no question that they do influence.

With that in mind, how do businesses build and customize their social media profiles to stand out and attract “key decision makers” and “influencers”? Brands need to create images that are transparent, inspire trust and allow open communication. The first step is building customized social media profiles that provide insight to the actual businesses.

Here are some examples how you can keep your social media profile fresh, leverage the latest platform designs and support larger brand objectives.

Spruce up Google Plus profiles:

Use Google+ plugins: Tell your website visitors that you’re on Google+ with the Google+ badge and let them follow you with a single click. You can also help them quickly recommend your brand and content with the help of +1 button. Mashable experienced a jump in followers after rolling out the Google+ badge on its homepage, which increased its Google+ page audience by 38 percent. Mashable also uses the +1 button on articles and across the site to empower sharing on Google+.

Upload high-resolution cover photos: The Google+ design requires an image size of 480×270 pixels. A high-resolution picture enhance the images of brands and a short and smart tagline sets the right mood for the audience.

Post content for maximum visibility: As Google+ is all about visual appeal, post updates, blog posts, promotions and more with images and/or videos. Make sure you select “public” for all posts, so they’ll be visible to everyone. Updating your page regularly with new inputs increases your chances of high ranking in Google searches.

Cadbury directly connects followers around the world with Cadbury products, promotions and personalities via Hangouts On Air.

Add personality to your Twitter profile:

Some features introduced by Twitter last year help you customize your profile and add spice to your company’s presence on Twitter:

Brand your profile header:Twitter allows you to add profile header images to your account, making the main image look much like the Facebook timeline format’s cover image. You can build the background with various color palettes and patterns, as well as design a custom profile background.

Use updated photo streams:Twitter’s mobile apps introduced “photo streams” that aggregate photos uploaded in tweets over time in one location within the Twitter application. It’s a swipable feature which makes sharing by followers much easier.

Get visual across multiple platforms:Twitter can be shared across all platforms including iPad, iPhone and Android with slight differences. A custom background which displays on the web is not seen on mobile platforms. Conversely, the photo stream doesn’t show up on the web.

Jeff Zucker, CNN‘s new president describes Twitter as a frenemy. The brand tweets about latest news as well as social/political issues to create a lot of buzz and engagement.

Adopt the “New Look” on Pinterest:

New and updated design features on Pinterest help viewers by offering simplified navigation, larger pins and enhanced social sharing tools.

Increased size of pins: Pins that were 600 pixels wide earlier are 735 pixels wide now, which give you a bigger window to show your creativity, feature pictures of new products and share pictures uploaded by fans.

Offers multiple actions for pins: Pinterest empowers viewers by enabling them to perform different actions beyond the usual Repin or Like. On expanding the pin, visitors see more pins from the same boards as well as from the same websites. They can see the number of pins, repins and the links to the images above the pins. The share button on the top helps viewers to share the pins on other social networks and even gives the option to share pins with their friends via email or through Facebook.

The new and improved look helps brands form new connections and source pins easily from followers, making their profiles more interesting.

Dress up business pages on Facebook:

The constant updates in Facebook profile layouts, keep marketers on their toes thinking of what they want to showcase and share with others.

I found the Kellogg’s page warm and welcoming—what you expect at a family’s breakfast table.

Experiment with cover photos: Cover photos are the large images (851 pixels wide and 315 pixels tall) that display on the Facebook profile pages. As the image will represent your business, use one that captures the essence of your brand. It could be a popular menu item for a restaurant, image of a ride for an amusement park or picture that shows people using your product. A creative image captures attention.

Add a profile picture: This is not the large cover photo of your profile page but a smaller, square image in the bottom-left corner overlaying the cover photo. It is small in size (180 × 180 pixels) so make sure the image does not have much text that might become unreadable. This image accompanies all your posts as a thumbnail.

Share links in the About Us section: While sharing your company’s description, mission and vision, it is a good idea to include links to company’s website as well as other social media profiles. This will help visitors to get a clear understanding about your business and build trust.

Update your company’s LinkedIn profile:

LinkedIn is the leading social networking site for professionals with more than 200 million users from around the world. Business-to-business companies should absolutely create company pages on this site and use them to network with potential customers, get referrals and build their fill the top of their sales funnels.

Dell’s profile page has a cover image that portrays the brand as one which delivers work-life balance. Choose cover images to support diverse campaigns and business priorities.

I explained LinkedIn marketing tactics in detail in a previous post How to Market your Business on LinkedIn. Some key points that add impact to your LinkedIn profile are:

Showcase products and services: Products and Services tab of your LinkedIn profile allows you to share images of your products with descriptions, linking them to your website section where customers can go and make the actual purchases. They work like banners linked to landing pages where you can talk about the benefits of your products and services.

Choose a dynamic cover image: The cover photo appears at the top of the home page of your LinkedIn company page. Choose a cover photo that draws people in to take a closer look at your content. It is a good strategy to include your business vision or a brief message in the cover photo that helps connect to the interests of prospective clients. You can frequently update the cover image to reflect a variety of business priorities, ranges of products, milestones achieved and events celebrated.

How have you customized your social media profiles to reach out to your social followers and fans? What features or updates have you used to maximum advantage?

25 Great Resources for Small Business Marketing

Most small business marketers wear many hats and have limited resources, making it difficult to cover all the bases. The good news is that there are a wide variety of free and low-cost tools, as well as informative resources, that can improve your efficiency so you make the most of your marketing efforts.

In case you want to drill down to what is working for other companies, a recent survey by Constant Contact of small business owners discovered that the top five tools respondents use for attracting new business are as follows:

• Daily deals: 53%
• Internet ads: 51%
• Web listing sites: 38%
• Social media ads: 37%
• Online coupons: 29%

That being said, here are 25 small business marketing resources we either use at Affinity Express or for which we have heard good reviews from our contacts.

Website

1. WordPress. Offers a great solution for small websites and blogging platforms (free version).

2. Google Analytics. Gives you vital traffic and user interaction data for your website, enabling you to make useful business decisions (free).

3. Bravo Video. Offers an easy way to capture customer testimonial videos that can be shared on your website, as well as your blog and social media channels.

4. Pixlr. Enables editing of images (e.g., resizing, cropping, filtering, enhancing, etc.) for your website, marketing materials and more without the need to invest in expensive software.

Back-to-School Marketing Trends and Tips

When July rolls around, advertisers both large and small start preparing for the second biggest shopping period of the year. As parents gather their ever-expanding shopping lists and kids look forward to updating their wardrobes for the approaching session, this is a perfect opportunity for marketers to catch the attention of both generations.

The back-to-school shopping season offers a shopping window of about 12 weeks to consumers and businesses have to be ready with their marketing campaigns right about now. Here are 6 tips to stand out.

1. Target the decision makers:

There is no doubt that moms set the budget, are the major influencers and, many times, are the final decision makers in this shopping season. That is why gearing your messages to mothers makes good sense. A survey by Parenting.com/Women & Co. shows that moms’ highest back-to-school priority is their children’s clothing, with nine out of ten moms agreeing they spend more money on their children’s fall wardrobes than on their own. Some of the top criteria for busy mothers are: budget, quality and ease of shopping. This message “More school for your money” by Walmart caters to one of the main concerns of the target audience.

2. Follow buyers online:

As research prior to buying is increasing done online, it is mandatory to have an updated website. The growth in usage of social networking sites and mobile devices has significantly increased consumers buying clout. The internet is the constant companion to consumers and they are accessing it 24/7 to help them with their purchasing decisions. You can reach these customers with formats such as:

• Creating interactive apps that become utilities for buyers’ shopping experiences.
• Offering coupons and discounts for special needs or to encourage particular behavior.
• Sharing and updating digital catalogs as people like to browse to check out latest trends.
• Organizing your website by segregating items for different needs and age groups.

The Office Depot website is a great example as it has items organized by school grade with deals highlighted in each section.

3. Use email marketing for effective reach:

Emails are an excellent way to contact parents with kids of different age groups with custom messages for their distinct needs.

Experian Marketing Services provides some interesting trends and statistics from the 2012 back to school season:

• Offers in subject lines were present on 37% of back to school emails and generated 57% of total email revenue.
• Free shipping offers had the best transaction rates and the highest revenue per email.
• Teen apparel interest continued into the school year, especially over Labor Day weekend. Click rates for apparel emails were highest in September, meaning that consumers still engaged with apparel emails well into the school year.

4. Explore new channels:

If you are targeting teens then you should definitely consider the high smartphone and internet penetration among this age group. According to a report from Pew Research Center:

• 95% of teens use the internet.

• 78% of teens have a cell phone and almost half (47%) of them own smartphones—that translates into 37% of all teens having smartphones, up from just 23% in 2011.

• 23% of teens have a tablet computer, a level comparable to the general adult population.

To connect with youth, it is essential to share products in a way that is creative and innovative. Good photography and fun product descriptions can make their experiences interactive and interesting. Some ideas for teens are:

• Share product pictures, the latest promotions and ads on your Pinterest page.

• Tweet about hottest school supplies and accessories, interesting deals or latest back to school news

Staples has introduced a cool contest in which their viewers have to submit captions for pictures to earn chances to win tablet computers and savings passes.

• Run contests and ask social fans to upload their pictures to earn freebies.

• Upload customer in-store videos and testimonials on your YouTube page and share links across all your social media platforms.

The picture shared by Dark Beauty magazine about their upcoming issue on back-to-school fashion trends will have many young readers eager to buy the publication and the clothing!

5. Optimize your campaigns:

Learn from your previous campaigns before going ahead with plans for this year. Here are three ways to differentiate in a crowded marketplace:

Highlight product features: Campaigns that zones in on the product features which are high on buyers’ priority lists have better chances of getting noticed and will make messages irresistible.

Plan offers to make them feel special: The best kind of deal deals leave customers walking away feeling valued. Develop campaigns that make buyers want to spread their experience around.

In a back to school promotion by Apple, anyone buying a Mac got a free $100 App Store gift card in the U.S. or £70 in the U.K. Students purchasing an iPad or iPhone received a $50 gift card in the States or £30 card in Britain.

Spread the word about your non-profit initiatives: When a company uses its resources whether financial or non-financial, to help those in need, it sends out a strong message that stands out. Talk about your initiatives in all your offline and online interactions.

Last year, in a marketing campaign called Shine On, Gap shared stories about children who make the world a brighter place through their unique talents and community service. The campaign appeared in Gap stores in the United States and Canada, as well as online at Gap.com and on Gap’s social media properties.

6. Support a cause:

Many retailers try to form a connect with families with many cause marketing campaigns projected towards education, child development, bullying and various other related issues. The campaigns that get the best responses are the ones that support a genuine cause, strike a chord among the audience and provide real value to the affected group.

Office Depot is uniting with the boy band One Direction for a back-to-school campaign that will include an anti-bullying initiative carrying the theme “Live. Love. Move” that elaborates to say: “Live kind. Love everyone. Move together against bullying.” The brand has introduced an exclusive offering of back-to-school products in this campaign. The limited-edition collection is available at all Office Depot retail locations as well as their website. A percentage of the products’ sales will be donated to support anti-bullying education.

Every business is unique in its strengths and weaknesses. Each brand associates with its customers in a different way. So, it is good to know these tactics and use them to develop your own personal strategy to engage your existing and new back to school consumers.

Which trends have you discovered for this back-to-school season? How do you plan to draw crowds with offers this season?

5 Tips to Planning a New Website

Your website represents you 24/7 and needs to convince visitors (and search engines) that: 1) you are an authority in the industry and 2) your business is a worthwhile provider to meet their needs. You build trust by looking professional and sharing accurate and compelling content.

But developing or improving a website for your business can be daunting and overwhelming for even the most digitally-savvy marketers; resulting in delays, increased costs, panic and even (gasp!) paralysis!

Because Affinity Express helps hundreds of small- to medium-sized businesses establish or redesign their websites every year, I decided to get some advice from Patrick Mullen, our vice president of interactive operations and product development.* He has been integral in building our website offering, which our publishing and other clients market to small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

Here are five tips Patrick shared to help you formulate your website plan and understand the project scope. As he notes, a solid plan defined early makes for a simpler process that will achieve the desired outcomes.

Designing Your Mobile Website to Draw Visitors

In my last blog post, we established the need to have a mobile optimized website for businesses to increase their reach and improve chances of interacting with target audiences in their comfort zones. But the idea is not to merely offer a “good enough” mobile experience, but to make your services available in a smartphone context. Let’s dig in further and understand what works in this format.

You can reach your mobile audience with three different approaches. The best option for your business will depend on your primary web interactions, your users’ habits and your budget.

Responsive or adaptive design: This involves having one URL to serve the same HTML to both mobile and desktop devices but using CSS to alter the page rendering according to the device. A responsive design will show more stuff or less, optimized for a mobile layout. For example, if you rotate the phone between landscape and portrait, it will change the spacing, but not the content but is likely to still provide access to the full desktop-view’s content. An adaptive design, by contrast, might show very different content and also present a different user interface, reflecting the tap/swipe/scroll of touchscreens versus desktops keyboard/mouse interactions.

Separate mobile URLs: Every desktop URL would have an equivalent mobile-optimized URL. Separate mobile URLs, also known as mobilized websites, may share some content with the desktop-oriented websites, but will have a lot of their own code with slightly different URLs, like “m.affinityexpress.com” or “mobi.affinityexpress.com”. For companies with both desktop and mobilized websites, the code may detect the users’ devices and either automatically switch to the appropriate sites or offer choices.

Mobile apps: A mobile app is downloaded on the mobile device and doesn’t require Internet access to run (although it may require Internet access to perform most tasks).

Before going ahead and choosing one of these three options, it is important to understand your audience and their requirements and hence customize your mobile format:

1. Check mobile usage patterns:

You need to find out if your potential customers have mobile interactions in a rush while on the go or in a more relaxed fashion as this will impact your content, design, amount of text and calls to action. Most people now use their phones for the same tasks we do on desktops but knowing the specifics of your target audience will help in providing the content that they are looking for in the exact fashion they like.

2. Build for future:

Plan ahead and invest in mobile technology that can be evolved a year or two from now rather than going for complete redesigns. It is good to define your expectations from mobile websites in the current scenario as well as in the long run. This will help you weigh pros and cons of having apps versus investing in sites that work across devices.

3. Make functional mobile website:

Users expect mobile websites to fulfill their needs, primarily entertainment, productivity or communication. So more than great designs and artistic presentations, your prospects are interested in the functional aspects of your websites. Therefore, it is important that your mobile designs facilitate easy and quick website transactions. Confusing user interfaces or poor performance will result in bad brand images and render even the most beautiful designs ineffective.

4. Decide between mobile website and app:

Mobile apps are great for more focused and personal user experiences but they require complex management and involve many outside participants like carriers, handset manufacturers, operating system developers, store administration and others. Mobile sites avoid all of these things and allow for a much faster path to execution. If your goal is to offer mobile-friendly content to the widest possible audience, then a mobile website is the right choice as it offers broader accessibility, compatibility and cost-effectiveness. On the other hand, you can look at developing a mobile app if you plan to provide specific advantages to your customers such as:

• Interactivity/gaming: To let your customers play interactive branded games like Angry Birds.
• Regular usage/personalization: To personalize your services like the Net-A-Porter app that reflects the website’s lifestyle network. In addition to snapping up a Proenza Schouler handbag and Alexander Wang sandals, users can read up on the latest fashion trends and watch exclusive videos on everything from designer interviews to full-blown runway shows.
• Complex calculations or reporting: To allow complex data calculations and reporting that could be used by financial and investment related domains.
• No internet required: If the content is not updated on a daily basis and you just need to provide offline access or perform functions without a network/wireless connection.

5. Check analytics for better focus:

Before focusing on the operating system, version and screen size, it is good to see which device is getting the bulk of your mobile traffic. For example, in Google Analytics you can see a breakdown of the devices that are being used, the divide between different operating systems, as well as what versions of each operating system are being used. You can see the devices bringing the traffic on Audience> Mobile > Devices.

To check out the mobile operating software being used by your website visitors, you could look at another variation of the report:

6. Identify and address core audiences:

Mobile devices are very under-powered compared to traditional computers. Mobile is inherently more selective than the general public web and the mobile ecosystem is far more fractured. Since mobile users visit mobile websites away from their regular internet connections, out in the real world, most interactions are driven by the content and ease of maneuvering. In other words, a shopping assistance site is more likely to be used in an actual retail environment than an exotic recipes site, which is why it’s vital that mobile sites be specifically developed to address distinct needs and user profiles. Some tips to keep in mind while developing sites are:

• Design the pages to fit the most-used mobile screens
• Limit images and text so pages load quickly even at slow connections speed
• Create links and other navigation options that are easy to click on with a (fat) finger, stylus, or other limited input options.
• Find out and address most urgent needs on the first page.

7. Avoid separate mobile websites:

Avoid building separate mobile websites, as each of these take up time, energy and money. It also makes maintaining and updating content difficult on all of them, not to mention the effort required to check and report on each one’s performance. The best option is to build mobile platforms that are optimized for as many devices as possible. This is the optimal setup for focusing your resources and budget on developing engaging content rather than maintenance.

8. Aim for an easy mobile experience:

Successful and often-visited mobile sites are easy and clean. Consider having a survey to ask your clients what’s really important to them and what they expect to see on your mobile website. Give out information that they seek like light image galleries on a wedding photographer site, requests for demos on a coffee vending machine site and menus with location maps on a restaurant website. Some more tips for a user-friendly site are:

• Use minimum layers to navigate in the compact screen
• Avoid artistic fonts and instead keep the text easy to read with crisp fonts
• Do not ask for too much information as typing on a mobile or iPad is not exactly pleasant
• Use technologies that are easily grasped by your target audience

Are you using a mobile platform for a broader reach? How does your mobile website/app help you better connect with your audience?

Happy Independence Day

All the best for a happy Independence Day from Affinity Express to all our clients and colleagues!

Why Small Businesses Need to Get Active with Mobile Commerce

This year, 15% of online retail sales will take place via mobile devices, according to eMarketer, up from 11% in 2012. By 2017, the percentage will rise to 25%. Overall, eMarketer estimates, US retail Mcommerce sales will reach nearly $39 billion in 2013, up 56.5% over 2012 and almost triple the amount spent in 2011. This includes products and services ordered online via any mobile device, whether payment or fulfillment happened on mobile itself or in person. The estimates exclude sales of travel services or event tickets.

Many businesses have optimized their online presence to cater to the mobile audience by either creating mobile versions of their websites or tweaking the existing sites for better viewing on mobile web browsers. But according to the SMB Group’s 2010 Small and Medium Business Mobile Solutions Study, only about 12 percent of small businesses (1-99 employees) and 21 percent of medium businesses (100-499 employees) have mobile web sites (versus 44 percent for companies with more than 500 employees).

The fact that many small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have yet to take advantage of the mobile commerce trend suggests you should get started to stay ahead of your competition. Here are seven tips that could help you make the leap into the mobile retail.

Reach out to big spenders:

According to a recent Essential Research survey on mobile internet adoption, 42 percent of mobile internet users have a household income of over £40,000 a year and spend more on their mobile bills. If you cater to the affluent segment of consumers, then the likelihood of their owning smartphones or tablets is much higher. Consumers using iPads spend significantly more time and money on e-commerce sites. While the iPad dominates mobile traffic, the iPhone and other mobile devices are not far behind. Therefore, a mobile website increases your chances of being seen by this crowd and communicating your messages.