Nextwave Media - Creative Internet Solutions

Adds new signups quickly, but can cause problems, too

Cultivating a solid, permission-based email list can take a lot of time. So some businesses understandably get impatient waiting around for their lists to grow.

For these businesses, online contests may be an attractive quick fix. As an example, let’s say a newly launched shoe e-retailer, Shoe-Fanatics.com, wants to grow its email list really fast. So it partners with a well-established fashion news website Fashion-Freaks.com, to run a contest or giveaway. Fashion-Freaks.com has been around for years, and they’ve built up a subscriber list composed of users with the same demographics that Shoe-Fanatics.com is looking for. Fashion-Freaks.com will send an email promotion to its readers, recommending they all visit Shoe-Fanatics.com to enter a contest, or redeem a nice coupon. When readers of Fashion-Freaks enter the contest, they can opt in to Shoe-Fanatics’s email marketing list.

Consider these tips

In a world of high technology, it’s the personal touch that stands out. If you own or run an online store build customer loyalty by adding unexpected little surprises to each order. Examples include free samples, a chocolate or simply a hand-written “thank you” card.

After a few years of building ecommerce websites for various clients we have finally bundled up our experience and developed a simple ecommerce storefront system for future clients.

The price includes everything you need to get a professional online store up and running.

All services are provided in-house here at Nextwave.

1. Planning - we listen to your requirements and work out if we are the right IT company to partner with your business. If we belive we can assist we provide a detailed proposal outlining exactly what we will deliver… If you decide to retain our services we move to the design stage.

2 Design - we work with you to customise our basic store template to fit your business branding, providing visuals of what we envision your store will look like

3. Development - we create the store category structure, and install and test all features, applying the design to the base template

So, you have finally read one too many articles about how 30% plus of your revenues should be arriving via the internet and that a further 30% are influenced by what they discover online about your hotel from your website…and the end of month reports show you are way short of those numbers.

You have taken an objective look at your website and you have decided its time to act…you need a new website for your hotel. You want to get it right this time but where do you start?

For the sake of this article, I’m going to assume, rightly or wrongly, that you have prepared and written an online strategy for your hotel that you will also share with your chosen website designer; you now need to provide them with some design guidelines…a briefing document that is both tactical as well as creative. Our focus here is more on the “look and feel” of your site…I have penned many other articles on hotel website search engine optimisation; Google me for the SEO stuff.

Tips to keep in mind:

1. Put at least the excerpt of your latest blog post on your website home page. It only takes a little code to display. This will help to keep you home page more dynamic, and puts the blog front and center for your customers and search engines to find.

2. Make sure to install the blog database tables into the same database as your ecommerce site tables. This makes it easy to display the blog posts in the ecomm site pages, and store information in the blog pages.

3. Put your product category list in the side menu of your blog. It makes your products stand out, and should result in more clickthroughs into the store portion of the site (we are currently testing this idea, and will update later with our results)