When it comes to going online, there are 1000s of tips out there for small businesses in our industry. We have decided to put together our favourite ten tips for online success. Here are our favourites:

1. Put Your Customers at the Heart of the Online Experience: The most important thing to consider, think why is your business going online? The answers simple – to retain current customers and gain new ones staying ahead of the competition. So put your businesses customers at the heart of your online operation, make ordering easier, give customers logins, private/public on-site shops.

2. Substance Over Style: The most common mistake online in our industry. Customers often come to us with visually amazing sites that don’t offer any functionality. Your businesses website needs to be most importantly user-friendly and secure. Create a website that offers the functionality your customer deserves and make the journey from landing on your homepage to transaction as straight-forward as possible.

3. Make the ‘Online Journey’ as Simple as Possible: Businesses often come to us with the same problem we lose our customer when it comes to ordering. When it comes to personalised clothing there are so many variables, ordering isn’t straight forward. The two main pitfalls – the design tool & checkout. Pick tools that suit your business, many clothing businesses go for the flashiest design tool which often drives the customer away. Keep ordering and checking out simple, customers aren’t afraid to go elsewhere if it’s too complicated – it’s important you get it right like we have for our customers!

4. Create an Online Branding Strategy: Displaying your brand online isn’t as easy as you would imagine, there are so many factors to consider – it isn’t a case of simply putting a few logos in the right places. Create an effective strategy to convey your brand and values online, develop your presence online and grow an ‘online persona’, a voice, personality and style befitting of your business.

5. Produce High Quality Content Online: Many call it time-consuming and call in specialists. But creating quality content isn’t difficult; nobody understands your business better than you. Make content interesting, readable and appropriate – give your customers a reason to scroll down!

6. Create a Continuous SEO Plan for Your Business: The biggest challenge an online business faces is the fight for ranking well organically. With many clothing businesses throwing £1000s at SEO, it’s a big deal online. But why pay someone who doesn’t understand fully what you do/or understand your customers? Simply creating quality content mixed in with some keyword research (Just stop and think what are my customers searching for to find me or what would I like to be found for) with a dash of interesting Social Media, the SEO results should follow.

7. Social Media is Your Businesses Best Friend: Creating and sharing content, news, updates and offers gives your online business another voice, don’t just be seen online – be heard! Whatever the platform, Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, Pinterest – Social Media presents the best way to grow your online presence and brand.

8. Blog Away: Sometimes 140 characters or a post isn’t enough to display what you want. Blogging in the personalised clothing industry is a big one – it allows you to extend your businesses personality. Writing interesting content about your business keeps customers coming back for more. Display the latest news, latest stock, your work with current customers and showcase your businesses expertise. Blogging allows customers to see what you are doing is real and quality work.

9. Don’t Be Afraid To Try New Things: The online world is full of the weird and wonderful trends. The garment industry is a traditional one but don’t be afraid to try new things – online experiments aren’t always a success. But there are customers in places you don’t even know exist yet, it’s your job to find them!

10.Continuously Develop Online, Don’t Stand Still: A huge NO-NO from us is becoming stagnant. Many online businesses get to a point where they are content, with a good site and just go through the motions but the key to success is continuous development. The online world isn’t standing still so why should you? Standing still limits online success, move your online business with the latest trends and developments make sure you are one step ahead of the nearest competition and keep taking your online business to the next level.

We understand the importance of going online for businesses in our sector. For more information don't hesitate to get in touch at info@etraderwebsites.co.uk to see how we can help your business today!

It’s Christmas time – there’s no need to be afraid….

Well there may be cause for concern if you are in the garment decoration industry.This time of year is full of festive spirit and cheer but traditionally it is a quiet time for small and medium sized print & embroidery businesses across the country – the schools orders have stopped, the workwear orders are at a minimum and production is just trickling along.

We can approach this in one of two ways to make sure that your business makes the most of the quiet period and gives itself the best chance of success:

Run a Tailored Campaign To Ensure Your Business Ticks Over…

It’s a simple one to do in the personalisation game running festive campaigns or seasonal flash sales. Of course there’s great reward but there’s also great risk, prices have to be just right and the quality ideas have to be there (after all you are competing against high street brands providing festive clothing, so the bar is set pretty high) and then conversely you compete against specialist gift stores both on the high street (or not!) or in-store.

So the value has to be there for customers, but to be successful you need more than great ideas you need a great campaign! This is where you need to be savvy and smart and not rely on an ad-hoc approach. Just ask yourself a few simple questions…

• When do I want my seasonal campaign to run? When will things get quiet?
• What do I want to sell to both my existing customers and potential new customers?
• How much I reach them? And how often?
• What mediums will I use – Email, Blogging, Social Media or Traditional Advertising?

Put together a plan of attack before a seasonal lull and watch your sales increase over the quiet period!

Alternatively, Use The Time To Grow Your Online Business…

If you don’t fancy running and online campaign and just accept seasonality on face value – then so be it, just ensure that in some way or another you add value to your business.

Throughout the year, we deal with a number of print & embroidery businesses often questioning their online efforts. The problem for garment decorators is a simple one – time constraints & prioritising. Whereas throughout the year a traditional print & embroidery company focus on prioritising, winning orders, getting the jobs in and out the ‘online stuff’ is left as a lesser priority and something that will be looked at when we are not busy or when we have the time…. so now is the time!

Prepare email campaigns, set up social media accounts, schedule posts, write blogs, create some optimised content, and create customer shops, promotional artwork and so on. Get all the things you would not ordinarily have time for in your day to day schedule done in time for 2016. Implementing just a few of these Online Marketing Techniques will go a long way in determining the future success of your online business, grow your online presence, increase your brand awareness, increase your traffic and most importantly online sales with all the hard yards you put in in the quiet period… Don’t just accept seasonality, make the most of it!

For more information on how to get more from your site & online marketing efforts don’t hesitate to get in touch via email on info@etraderwebsites.co.uk or give us a call on 029 2075 5733 today!

Following on from our recent blog ‘Blogging & Business: A Match Made in Heaven’ where we looked at the art of writing a good blog and how it benefits your online businesses image. We left one stone unturned...(deliberately so we could write this piece!)

We wrote very (very!) briefly on the SEO benefits of Blogging, but this week we have decided to go one further and examine how exactly it works for you & your businesses.

SEO & Blogging: A Surprising Match….

Googles latest SEO guidance is on all things ‘real & quality content’across everything platform you use. The misconception is SEO is just all things backlinks, your landing page and site content but Googles Latest SEO Update focus on providing your businesses customers the whole experience - that’s where Social Media & Blogging come into things.

Google Loves Real Content from Real People….

 Blogging for SEO is all about communicating, collaborating, sharing you & your businesses views, news and opinions – keeping both current and potential new customers in the know.

Just be yourself, write naturally… nobody knows more about your business than you! Creating quality content is ‘two-fold’. It should generate more traffic to your site for potential newer customers but also keep current customers coming back for more (providing you write some interesting/relevant content).

The key is to be transparent, create interesting and relevant blogs. SEO is all about real sites providing real quality content and it couldn’t be easier than with Blogging!

There Will Be Sceptics Out There….

Some organisations hire fake ‘Guest’ bloggers, some key-word cram, but here at eTrader we promote quality content and ethical SEO practice. We encourage customers to actively create quality content across every medium they use. The results are more fruitful in the long term, both on and offsite. We understand that quality content is king as it plays a heavy part in your businesses Online Marketing & SEO performance.

 Here at eTrader we understand how Blogging benefits your online business. That’s why we have started rolling out our fully integrated blog for customers at very affordable prices. Get in touch to find out more!

Twitter lists are one of the biggest hidden secrets in Social Media, an under-utilised tool to help gain followers and interact with potential new customers.

The challenge for businesses is the platform itself has over 330m users and over 500m tweets are sent per day through these accounts. Twitter lists allow you to cut through the cluttered news feeds and interact with accounts based on interests, keywords and topics (They also give you the chance to keep one eye on your competition!)

Simply click the three dots (…) next to an account name and click add or remove from list, this will give you the option to create a new list or add accounts to an existing one.

Ideal for garment decorators you can group up lists of potential customers by sector, existing customers, local schools and many other target customers. Engage with these lists on a regular basis instead of using a slapdash approach and using your general news feed.

Your businesses website is no different to your store appearance is everything. Customers will walk past a tired, messy and cluttered store with minimal or next to no interest. 

The same goes for your website!

Customers will click and shop around looking for the simplest user experience possible. They do not want to be confused, overloaded with information or be faced with a difficult to use website. In Lehman terms they want to go online, order their printed t-shirts for an event, work or whatever the occasion may be and checkout. They are not as excited as most garment decorators by set up costs, stitch counts and number of colours within a print.

Strive for simplicity and provide your customer base an easy to use experience, shopping basket and make sure they do not need to search around when it comes to buying branded clothing.

Following on from our last blog article looking at maximising customer data, in this article we will look at data capture and highlight how to populate your customer database.

Data capture is an important part of a businesses Online Marketing efforts. It forms an integral part of the mix when targeting new customers, its where many new customers journey begins with your business.

Love it or loathe it…

Data capture stokes debate amongst Marketing practitioners, they are either loved or loathed but timing is everything. Make them time sensitive, not obtrusive to your customers online experience and inkeeping with your businesses brand.

Target your customers more than ever before

Capturing data allows your business to target your customers specifically on their interests, behaviours and tailor email campaigns to what product or service of yours they are interested in. It also allows you to build loyalty, reward someone for being a ‘member’ of your list with exclusive deals, discounts plus whatever other offer you may come up with.

Data is all around us, there is no hiding from it. From the basics such as customer information, names, addresses and contact details to the more complex monthly accounts, customer orders and website data, it can all be used to shape your business by identifying the best avenues to explore – ones that you might not previously have considered before analysing your business data.

Measuring the data that your business has access to can also help to streamline your business, its production and how every department operates. In production departments, items such as machine time versus output, machine downtime versus costs etcetera can be monitored, with the resulting data giving you a real understanding as to whether your business is operating efficiently.

Data doesn’t necessarily have to be raw numbers either: it can be qualitative, which can add just as much value to your business. Opinions and attitudes can be analysed not only to develop your business internally, but also to provide great insight into what your customers think of your services and products, which you can then use to help train your staff and review your business’s various operations.

Email Marketing is one of the main components of a business’s online strategy. The average open rate for an email campaign is 20-30% and is five times more likely to be seen by your customers than messages on Social Media platforms.

It gives your business the chance to engage with both new and existing customers promoting your business, its offers and products at a cost effective price.

There are 100s of recognised pieces of software out there offering click & drop templates, easy sending, automation and much more. We have picked our favourite few below...