NZS.com Newsletter February 2009

2009 has kicked off to a roaring start for NZS.com! We hit a traffic milestone with over one million page views for January and we're further leading the way within the New Zealand web space with a brand new look to the site.

In this month's newsletter, we talk about offline marketing of your online presence, a useful approach to managing your customer queries, and we remind you of a great way to spend and save your money at the same time using a great online resource.

Contents:

• Top Ten Sites
• Save Yourself Rich with Vouchermate
• NZS.com Hits One Million
• Noticed Something Different?
• Offline Marketing of your Online Presence
• Bring Back the FAQ

February means back to work and back to school for all Kiwis, and luckily it also means back to sport! With the launch of the new website NZSport.co.nz, a database for clubs around New Zealand for info and photo uploading, team Txt alerts and so much more, we've decided to look at the top 10 websites on NZS.com from our sports category:

Rank	Site Name	URL
1.	RugbyHeaven	www.rugbyheaven.co.nz
2.	Radio Sport	www.radiosport.co.nz
3.	Multisport Calendar	www.multisportcalendar.co.nz
4.	Cool Running	www.coolrunning.co.nz
5.	Marching New Zealand	www.marching.co.nz
6.	Total Cheerleading	www.totalcheerleading.com
7.	Athletics New Zealand	www.athletics.org.nz
8.	Kaiwara Klassic	www.kaiwaraklassic.co.nz
9.	Blackcaps	www.blackcaps.co.nz
10.	DotGolf	www.golf.co.nz

Smashing all previous visitor records, NZS.com received over one million page views for the month of January 2009. With the 2008 year holding a steady average of around 850,000 page views per month, the staggering 1,075,401 page views that NZS.com received in the first month of 2009 is a is a strong sign of the New Zealand market moving closer to other countries in terms of research completed online.

A true testament to NZS.com's success and the increasing success of the New Zealand web industry has been the direct enquiries by potential advertisers in 2009. With more and more New Zealand companies venturing online as part of their marketing mix, NZS.com saw a 200% increase in advertiser interest in January 2009 over the same month in 2008. Instead of traditional real-world marketing techniques that target widely but produce limited results, the trend for New Zealand companies this year has seen a dramatic shift towards targeting specific potential customers and clients via online search advertising.

To compliment the success of our million page views milestone, we've launched a brand new look of NZS.com this week. We've updated our look to make NZS.com easier on the eye, and more usable within your screen space.

NZS.com is now in fixed width format, making it viewable without scrolling across on a wider range of computer screens. The NZS.com design team have spent copious hours positioning the content within the directory pages to maximize the use of page space, meaning users get the most information in the clearest format possible upon page entry. This content reformat has also been keyed with a modern new font, increasing text visibility.

The result of this contributes to the overall sleek new look of the NZS.com homepage and all of the other category and feature pages.

Are enough people visiting your beautifully designed, search engine optimised website? Online marketing is frequently evolving and every month there's a great new way to promote your website online, but what about offline?

Advertising your website's URL offline for both current and potential customers is an important additive to your marketing mix. For existing customers, it alerts them to an avenue by which they can keep actively involved in your business. For new customers, it can tell them everything they need to know to introduce them to your product or service.

Customers and clients need regular reminders that you have an online presence, and enforcing this offline is an essential way to keep them involved and loyal to your business.

There are several must-do's to promote your URL offline:

• Print your URL on every external document that might ever leave your company. Business cards, letterheads, invoices and other statements, fax cover sheets, newsletters, greeting and thank you cards.
• Make sure every single member of staff knows how to say your URL, and knows everything you can do on your website. This includes everyone from the general manager to the receptionist, the accounts person to the student intern. You want anyone to be able to give access to your company at any time; on the phone, on the street or at a social gathering.
• Add your URL to the end of your voicemail message for anyone who rings up after hours so they can still have instant access to information about your business.
• Always refer to your URL if ever talking to the press. More importantly, for any press releases or information sent externally which may be published elsewhere, add your URL within the body of the text - instead of just at the end. Many publications will run press releases with little or no changes to them, but will often leave out contact details at the end to avoid looking advertorial.
• Put your URL on every promotional product, especially pens and calendars. You want your customers to look at your URL constantly, and be re-reminded of it while they're at their computer.
• Put your URL on the exterior signage of your offices or place of business. A great way to grab potential customers as they walk by who won't walk in to ask for more information, but would happily go online for it.

If you have an e-commerce website, you'll know how important customer service is. Buyers are taught to be wary online, and are much more likely not to return to your website if they have a bad experience (and tell ten people about it) than if they were shopping in the real world. Whether it be a product delay, lost package or taking too long to answer an e-mail, it takes a lot of time and effort to make sure a customer doesn't feel jaded if something goes wrong with their purchase.

Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, is a widely researched topic. If one thing ever comes out of what makes a good experience great, it is speed. The customer may always be right, but they'll also take the easiest route to find the information they seek - especially online. If a potential customer can't find what they are looking for or how to do something at first glance, they'll shoot an e-mail to you or get on the phone to your customer service team. The time it takes to respond to each email or talk through an issue over the phone can be extensive. If you don't have dedicated call centre staff on hand, this can seriously cut into your margins - just think about the dollars spent in wages per hour of handling simple, repetitive customer queries.

If this sounds all too familiar, consider investing some time in a detailed, preferably searchable FAQ. Furthermore, make it prominent on your site, something you want customers to look at. If they have to search for help, even just more than one page deep through a link at the bottom of your page, they're likely to get in direct contact instead.

If you collate your common answers to customer questions in a simple, searchable FAQ section, and continually update and add to it (this is key), you'll significantly enhance your CRM. This will mean customers will not have to wait several hours or days for a response; in fact they won't even have the need to ask the question.

For large-scale e-commerce businesses, there are amazing new software solutions out there which generate lists of possible answers for searchers, using collected data about the answers others find helpful.

Dynamic databases of answers are the clear future, and while they involve a fair amount of set-up, they'll be an essential tool in coming years for self-serve e-shopping. Taking your e-commerce website to new heights? Consider advancing your FAQ from a outdated, deeply hidden list to a comprehensive, easily-searched (and easy to find) machine.

We're interested in your opinion, if you have anything you'd like to hear about in the newsletter, let us know.

Images from Flickr: Moo Business Cards, FAQ.