In this weeks blog we have put together our top five ways we help print & embrodiery businesses with their websites.
We provide garment decorators the most comprehensive website for their business providing them a proven sales tool for their business. In no particular order here are five ways we help print & embroidery businesses succeed online:
We take the stress out of your hands and actually build your website for you. You need to focus your energy and effort on running your print & embroidery business and do not need to be wasting time building one yourself.
Where our competitors offer a drop and drag website you build yourself we do the hard work and build for you. Save a considerable amount of effort & time and leave it to the web design company to actually build your website for you, we aren't just an off the shelf solution.
If for some reason you ever need to get in touch with us we are simply a phonecall or email away. We love to help customers with any queries they have and ensure we provide them quality, quick and reliable UK based customer support.
You won't find us using a ticketing system or using a North American or Australian call centres!
We have 100s of brands available for customers to sell on their websites. Simply pick & choose what you would like on-site. You don't have to be tied in to any particular wholesaler or supplier, you sell exactly what you want to sell on your website.
Our easy to use online ordering makes winning business easy. Whether its creating a public/private shop for a repeat customer or using the easy to use four step process both your new and existing customers will find ordering quicker and simpler than ever before.
We don't stop once the website is built. Our team help you maximise your websites potential with in-store and online training in a number of areas including but not limited to SEO, PPC, Email Campaigns, In-Store Marketing, Blogging, Social Media and much more...
For more information on how eTrader Websites can help your print & embroidery business you can reach us on
The rise of influencing personalities on Social Media
otherwise known as ‘Influencers’ has led to the rise of Influencer Marketing.
Influencer Marketing has grown rapidly and involves big
brands working alongside prominent Social Media personalities (mainly on
Instagram and Youtube) to help promote their products and/or services with some
huge brands paying millions per post.
You might be asking
yourself, what does this have to do with the garment decoration industry?
Influencer Marketing is slowly filtering down into the high
street and may soon be cluttering up your Social Media feeds, so it may be
something your business needs to consider in the near future.
To help get you started here are a few simple tips to
consider if you are going to undertake Influencer Marketing:
Do your research and checks: Carry out your due diligence when
researching influencers, research their personal brand, persona and personality
and see if its value align alongside yours. Research fees do not bow to paying
over the odds just because someone has a huge number of followers – there’s
always knowingly or unknowingly fake followers inflating their crowd.
It is out of your hands: The second you get involved with an
influencer; things are essentially being taken out of your control. Regardless
of what you pay you have no control over what they think. Credible influencers
want to provide their customers an authentic experience, work alongside them
and deliver a quality product and customer experience.
Be patient: The results from using Influencer Marketing is very
rarely instant. Trust must be built between both yourself and the influencer
but also between that person and its audience. It is more so a brand awareness
building campaign rather than a direct sales campaign.
Build relationships: You are more than likely to achieve success
using this type of Marketing when a lasting relationship is created. Working alongside
someone long term is likely to build a trusting working relationship and help
you tap into an influencers influence. Manage the costs by starting with small
personalities who may be of value and establish a manageable cost-effective
working relationship.
Think outside sponsored: Influencer Marketing is not all about
sponsored posts and plugging your business and its product. It gives you the
chance to collaborate and curate some content and tailor it as they understand
their audience better than anyone. It may be competitions, them designing their
own promotional products or anything but it will help you establish a deeper
more meaningful long-term relationship.
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.
To get started here
are some tips for help with maximising your lists:
- Create separate lists for your target audience –
a list for existing clients, prospects, accounts of interest and so on
- Create a list dedicated to your competition –
keep a track on what your competitors are offering in their Social Media
campaigns and keep a private list to see what is working and what is not
similar businesses
- Grow your followers – as well as creating your
own list it may be likely your account itself will be added to one by someone
else. You can see all lists you are a member of, this will also display all
their followers who may also be a target audience for you
- Find existing lists online – there are tools out
there to find existing lists based on whatever your search might be, use this
and identify existing lists to potentially replicate
If you use Social Media management tools like Hootsuite,
Crowdfire etc you can also integrate your lists and create custom feeds to use
and monitor on an hourly, daily or weekly basis.
Lists require a bit more effort than conventional Social
Media techniques, but the results can lead to an increase in your Social Media
following, increased coverage and engagement which can only be a good thing for
driving traffic to your businesses website.
In March Instagram
introduced a brand-new checkout to their app. Consumers can now buy their
favourite products without ever leaving the app, but what does this mean for
the Social Media platform? And how could it possibly affect garment decorators?
But there is a catch, for now anyway…
Instragram checkout is only available for several leading
global brands such as H&M, Mac, Nike and a few others. But this is seen as
the next step in the Instagram strategy, turning influencers and social
engagement into sales.
It works by simply attaching a checkout button to posts
where customers click and simply fill in their details once and they will be
saved for future purchases. This will likely be a popular tool with customers
as its an all in one checkout, where your customer information remains secure
and purchases can be completed without going to an external site.
Of course, there are limitations. This feature requires
heavy investment and is only currently available to some of the worlds leading
brands at a substantial cost.
The biggest drawback however is the customers effectively
become Instagram’s as consumers are using their checkout and not the brands
checkout. Problematic for businesses looking to manage their sales funnel and
manage their conversions the brands currently using the checkout will not be
able to identify users, their behaviours or any complex information, they will
only receive the basic order details.
While this is only at very early development stages working
with big brands, who is to say it won’t be introduced to businesses using
Instagram for their Marketing & Advertising?
The garment decoration industry is a highly visual one,
companies using Social Media to sell their print and embroidery rely on imagery
of previous work and case studies to push their business and their quality. The
checkout itself if introduced for small businesses would be an ideal fit for
the industry.
With UK businesses already spending millions of pounds on
engaging with influencers and Sponsored Online Advertising on Instagram there
will be some that will see this as a step in the right direction where you can
measure Return On Investment (ROI) can be measured in a more quantifiable way.
In the last few years
the UK has begun adopting a few online trends from the US, namely Cyber Monday
and Black Friday.
Love it or loathe it
they are the biggest online shopping days of the year and offers online
consumers the chance to make huge savings in the build up to the festive
period.
With more and more small businesses jumping on board and
offering flash sales, bargains and discounts as part of their Marketing for
these events ensure your business has the tool to run a flash sale smoothly.
To get the most from
these promotions here are a few simple pointers to get you started:
Start planning now: Plan
your promotions in advance, build up suspense with your customer base and let
them know of any upcoming offers and savings in advance whether its in-store,
on Social Media or via an Email Campaign.
Create specific page
copy: Plan the products or services you are going to offer savings on.
Ensure your website is optimised with product pages for these specific items.
Point customers in the right direction and ensure your user experience is
customer focused, they are not afraid to shop around when it comes to huge
savings!
Create eye catching
content: Whether it is for your businesses website, Social Media or to be
distributed to your list of customer contacts creating eye catching content
significantly increases click through rates.
Plan for an upsurge: Ensure
your website can deal with increased volumes of traffic, too many page requests
can slow the site down or crash the site itself. Test your website using tools
like Loadimpact.com to ensure the server that your hosts your businesses
website can take the strain.
Test, test, test: Before
any of your promotions, artwork and copy goes live test your processes and
ensure your site is fully prepared, functioning and operating as you would
expect with the new pages, copy etc. Get another set of eyes from a team member
and gain feedback.
Some businesses go as far as offering loyal customers a first
glance ‘Exclusive’ access to a flash sale. This is used to gain customer
feedback, fine tune and tweak their offering to make sure everything runs as
smoothly as possible in time for the main event.
Whether you love it or hate it, Black Friday and Cyber
Monday are here to stay for the foreseeable future. The chances are if you are
not taking part, your competitors are. If you think it would be something that
would add value to your business dip your toes in, start planning and prepare a
campaign using these few simple pointers.
