Insuring against the credit crunch

It seems the credit crunch is certainly here and it’s got more bite than a fresh new apple. So is it time to cut back on spending on your online business? Certainly not. During times of economic uncertainty, selling online can prove to be more cost effective than traditional methods.

There will also be more people shopping around online to see if they can get a deal during this time. So the internet can be a win-win situation for your insurance and finance company. It’s an industry that is ideally suited to marketing and selling online – your products are commodities that are sold mainly on price and features rather than the more tangible aspects of say, clothing or cars.

So what’s best of way of investing your budget wisely when it comes to your online finance or insurance business?

First you need to take care of the essentials. Make sure your website is up to date, works fully in all aspects (that include forms that work properly and don’t produce strange error message), has positive and prominent calls to actions, positive sales messages and both easy and intuitive for your visitors. These are the basics that you need to make sure of in order to ensure the user experience of your visitors is as good as it can be.

Then you need to address other usability features than can make your online business more compelling for users. These can also help cut your costs. Setting up live-chat and call-back forms are an excellent way of interacting with visitors to your website as well as clearly presenting the more traditional forms of contact like telephone and email (yes, this is now ‘traditional’) Such features are often far cheaper to run than call centres and give visitors to your website an added re-assurance that your are friendly, helpful and dedicated to customer service.

And of course our old friend, SEO. If you are relying on paid-search through pay-per-click listing on search engines, you are probably suffering from hyper-inflation. The rapid increase in the cost of clicks for insurance and finance related searches surely eats into the returns you make on a sale derived from this method of advertising. This is where technical and content based SEO comes into play. On a longer-term basis, investing in SEO that will achieve you better results on the non-paid sections of search engines is better value for money, although not the instant hit you get with pay-per-click. However a sensible strategy and a long-term approach often results in better quality traffic for a lower cost per sale than clinging onto the top-positions in paid-search advertising.

At Areoff, we focus on enabling our clients to succeed on the internet in the long-term. We help bring about sustainable and effective results both straight away with good website design but also professional SEO services and consultancy that will enable our clients to see their way through the credit crunch and be poised to exploit the economic upturn which naturally follows.

Being seen locally

It’s always been true that we like to buy products and services locally not only because it is  convenient but also because we like to help independent support traders in and around where we live.

This is also true online and many locally based independent companies are missing out on the potential of being seen by people searching locally on Google. So ask yourself this important question: “Does my website come up one first page of google for my products in the local town and surrounding area?”. If someone searches for ‘farm shops in MyTown’ does your website appear?

Areoff was approach to design an e-commerce website by a local company. Their products are such that a majority of people want to be able to go and buy locally after finding them on the web for a local search. To create a fully fledged e-commerce site to sell their particular product range would be an expensive proposition due to the very high number of product variations and the price fluctuations inherent in their product type.

The cost of an e-commerce website design coupled with the the administration costs involved in constantly updating the product range and prices are one thing to consider. But then they also have to consider that national chains are their main competition and have established e-commerce systems with staff dedicated to running this aspect of their business.

An e-commerce shop unless it has an established reputation as an online trader is not usually being selected based on customer service but purely on price. So all you might achieve with an online shop in this type of environment is lots of visitors who are comparing your price for the exact make and specification against another online compeititor. Once they have found another online shop selling fractionally cheaper, they will leave your site and you have lost your opportunity to make a sale.

My advice to local companies like this is to look at your online business and website from another angle. It can cost less money to have your local website designed and optimised for search engines with potentially better long-term returns, especially if you ask your website developers to target local searches.

SEO handled in this targetted way can and does result in more customers coming through your shop-door after finding you on a search engine – you already have an established means of fulfilling orders so there isn’t the extra investment or learning curve associated with running an online shop.

So if you are considering how to make more money online don’t just think of the obvious route of setting up an e-commerce website. Think about how you and others use the web to find local products and services and that you don’t always buy online because it is more convenient to buy some products by visiting a local supplier that you may have found through a Google search.

I’m not arguing against e-commerce but instead advocating a sensible approach to how  you can best use the internet and exploit the potential of your website to make more money for your business without breaking the bank on expensive web development.