2010 – Help for Small Businesses

South African Tourism CEO, Moeketsi Mosola South Africa was speaking at a business forum hosted by the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein when he announced that for the first time in its history, Fifa will be contracting non-hotel accommodation (eg national parks, B&B’s, lodges, guest houses) during 2010.

However, in order to qualify to be contracted the establishment needs to obtain a grading rating from the Tourism Grading Council of South Africa. Establishments can apply to TEP for assistance to partly cover these costs. TEP (Tourism Enterprise Programme) is a R170-million investment by the Environment Affairs and Tourism department to stimulate small, medium and micro enterprise (SMME) development in the tourism sector.

Mosola pointed out to that accommodation is not the only area where people should be looking as there are many other opportunities for 2010 – for example in the support services like housekeeping, food and beverage supply and laundry services.

In writing this, I took a look at the Tourism Grading Council website. The grading process looks time-consuming and bureaucratic, not to mention expensive. The process is still very much document driven but the instructions are reasonably clear and the criteria documents are available to be downloaded directly from the website. The cost is not inconsiderable – if you have a 3-room establishment the cost is R1,292 (R1,236 + R56) and if you have a 30-room establishment the cost is R3,373 (R3,148 +R225) and if you have anything over 151 rooms, the cost is (R5,279 + R225) R5,504.

But the establishment of standards and having a grading system which serves as a communication tool to customers is great. Of course such a system is only as good as the high (world class) standards that are set, the frequency that those standards are revisited and updated, and the organisation and people who manage and enforce them. Gearing up to 2010 and putting in place these systems could indeed help move South Africa towards one of the world’s top destinations of which Mosola talks!

How Alasoop Uses MailChimp to Help Local Restaurants

MailChimp is an e-mail marketing service provider that makes managing e-mail campaigns very simple. Where services like Constant Contact charge a flat monthly fee that increases with the size of your mailing list, MailChimp charges a very low fee per e-mail sent.

On MailChimp’s site there is a great case study about how Webstellung (a small communications business) in Paris is using MailChimp’s e-mail marketing tools to help local restaurants market themselves.

They created a service whereby they get lunchtime restaurant patrons to sign up to receive via e-mail the daily menus of local restaurants who provide a high-quality but reasonably priced lunch. The service (branded " Alasoop", a tongue-in- cheek phonetic rendition of French for "Dinner's on the table") helps office workers find out about restaurants they may not have tried and let’s them know what’s on special today. It also helps restaurants – none of which have anything like an advertising budget -- find new customers, and to fill their restaurants every lunchtime.

Apparently the restaurants currently piloting the service are receiving increased business and increased repeat business. There is a coupon program built in to the e-mails to provide a little incentive, and it seems there is very little unsubscribing in the mailing lists.

You can read the full case study here on
MailChimp’s site.

Online Businesses Beat Offline Businesses in Customer Satisfaction

One of the prerequisites of successful online business is a commitment to customer satisfaction. The online customer simply doesn’t take the kind of abuse, disregard, or obfuscation that the offline customer is often resigned to. Online customers can go elsewhere at the click of a button; off-line businesses often perceive their customers to be captive because of the difficulty of going elsewhere, which can lead to habitually poor service by offline businesses.

The University of Michigan and ForeSee Results have just released the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which shows that customer satisfaction with e-commerce now surpasses that of offline business by 11.6 percent.

The Customer Satisfaction Index is a 100-point scale, and on that scale e-commerce scored an average of 80 against off-line businesses average of 68.4. Online retail scored 83 as opposed to offline retail’s score of 74.

Advertising Boosts Municipal Wi-Fi Ubiquity

There's nothing new about municipal WiFi. It has been around in the US for at least five years (that's 28 internet years), and longer in Japan and South Korea. Now it's available, or in process, in more than 300 cities across the US, and it is becoming almost the norm in major European cities.

The basic idea is that a municipality decides that broadband internet access is a utility, much like electricity or schooling, and that making it available to everyone within the city limits for free can only be good for the city's economy and education levels. The democratisation of information is a strong political driver, and a pretty powerful economic imperative. So the municipalities put up wide area WiFi networks that anyone in town can access with a WiFi enabled computer, phone, or PDA.

Typically these services are free, or at least they are paid for out of taxes, or they are advertising supported. And they are not that expensive to set up: Philadelphia budgeted only $10 million to WiFi enable the whole city, with ongoing costs of about $1 million a year. That's a small price to pay compared with the potential benefit to small businesses, learners, and government.

In South Africa, Knysna has muni WiFi, and there is talk that Gauteng may WiFi-enable the greater Johannesburg area in conjunction with iBurst. There are, of course, political considerations and pressure from internet providers who see their lucrative markets under threat. But inexpensive muni WiFi is inevitable even in South Africa.

Often muni WiFi is paid for by advertising: when you log on to the service, you see an ad. Often these ads are very local, for businesses within range of the nearest signal source. That produces great opportunities for advertising services for small businesses that otherwise would never consider marketing online: local restaurants, dry cleaners, finacial advisors, or car dealers can communicate with potential customers who are right there in the neighbourhood. Try that with TV or local radio.

In the US, a hotspot and advertising company called JiWire now plans to offer ad-supported Wi-Fi through a relationship with Ultramercial. The ads will appear prior to gaining free Internet access at hotspots. To avoid the initial ads you can simply pay a small fee to get online. Once WiFi providers and income generators like JiWire start investing in muni WiFi infrastructures instead of waiting for municipalities to take the initiative, things start to develop at a very rapid pace.

There's an article on JiWire here

Nine Questions To Ask About Your E-mail Marketing Campaigns

The more e-mail marketing you do, the easier it is to slip into bad habits or to assume that what you know worked last year will work again this year. Here are nine questions you should ask yourself about your e-marketing campaigns, to try to keep them focused and effective.

1) Is your address list full of black holes?

Your opening rate may be low because you are sending to people who no longer respond. They are not bad addresses, just people who ignore you. Use your metrics to isolate the “black hole” addresses, those who have not opened your mail in more than six months. Then send them a targeted message with a compelling subject line, inviting them to update their mailing preferences, complete a survey, or even get some incentive. Then delete anyone who stays unresponsive.

2) Do you know how your messages look to all of your readers?

What impact will Microsoft’s decision to use Word to render HTML e-mail in Outlook 2007 have on the appearance of your work? How do your e-mails look on a mobile phone, web-based mail, Blackberry, or PDA? How do they come across in different browsers and mail clients? You should test in as many combinations of browser and mail client as you can. There are services that will do this for you. Try SiteVista's email service ($49 per month): you send an HTML email to the address they provide, and immediately view the rendered message as it would appear in various email clients. (To see how your message, or your site, looks on different browsers, use BrowserCam. A one-day pass gives you unlimited screen captures of your web pages using hundreds of combinations of browsers, platforms, resolutions and plug-ins – all for under $20.)

3) Do your opt-in processes actually work, and how porous are they?

The fewer steps a user has to take to get to the final opt-in click, the less likely you are to have people abandon the process mid-way. Test the links and every step that a reader will have to take. If there are five or more clicks from start to finish, you might have a problem. If you can reduce the steps that it takes, do so. Don’t try to get lots of information at the opt-in stage, merely an e-mail address will do – and you can get that automatically with a simple “click-here-to-subscribe”. If you need to know more about your subscriber, fill in the blanks progressively as your relationship matures.


4) Do all the links in your e-mail messages actually work, especially your unsubscribe links?

There are different types of links: internal links to content that allow readers to jump around the e-mail; links to content on websites; links to images not embedded in the e-mail; and service links such as subscribe, forward to a friend, and the all-important unsubscribe. Have someone test all of them before the e-mail goes out, and make sure the actual e-mail as received is tested on a computer other than the one used to create the e-mail.

5) Who is watching the incoming mail, especially in the unexpected mailboxes?

Just because you give people the right links to click dos not mean they will use them. Just because you tell people not to reply to auto-emailed messages does not mean they will obey your instructions. There should never be such a thing as an un-manned e-mail address.

6) How likely is your e-mail to trigger spam filters?

Different spam filters get alarmed by different things. Your images, links, hidden code, and even use of words or capitalisation can get your message bounced before it gets to its destination. Most e-mail marketing services provide an automated spam check of your mailing – use it. Services such as Constant Contact or Mail Chimp will alert you to things you ought to change to increase the likelihood of your e-mail getting through.

7) How does your e-mail display in mail clients using image-blocking and/or preview panes?

Most mail clients (even web-based mail) now provide preview panes that allow users to see the top part of a message without actually opening the whole thing. That’s good because you are not solely dependent on your subject line to get the recipient to open the message rather than delete it; it’s bad because the top part of your e-mail may be a turn-off. At the same time, most mail clients’ default security settings block images in e-mail (whether embedded or linked). So it’s a good idea to use a combination of compelling content and non-image layouts, colours, and fonts to make the first five-ten centimetres of your message as irresistible as possible. Once the reader wants to see your message, they will do the simple click-to-enable the images. To help them decide to do this, make sure you use compelling alt tags with each graphic which will display in place of the image.

8) Are you immediately engaging new subscribers to your list, and trying to ensure those who have recently unsubscribed leave with the best impression of you?

Don’t leave a new subscriber hanging for months after they have made the commitment to join your list. OK, some people fall through the cracks (we all do it), but work on making your cracks a lot smaller. When someone unsubscribes, confirm this in an e-mail or on the unsub landing page, and provide a link to a brief exit questionnaire. You can learn a lot from this feedback that can help you recapture those who you have lost, or prevent more people from leaving for similar reasons. Remember, markets are conversations and everything we do should be geared to facilitating relationships.

9) Are you sending messages too often, or not often enough? Are you sending them at the right time of day, on the right days?

Depending on what it is you are communicating, you might be mailing daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or even seasonally. If your mailing goes out every few months, you risk people not remembering you and unsubscribing. Too frequently, and they will unsubscribe because they feel spammed. The key is to match content to frequency, and frequency to recipient expectations. If you have a large enough list, test different frequencies to see what the success rate is and what the unsubscribe rate is.