Launch: Olmsted Medical Center

As our local readers may have already seen, Olmsted Medical Center recently unveiled a new visual identity to the public. We are proud to have been a part of this and excited to introduce OMC's new home on the web!

Our main focus in the redesign process was making the site patient-oriented. This meant that great care and consideration had to be given to the overall user experience and accessibility of information. The oversized navigation along with brief, well-organized menus addresses this need, along with minimal use of graphics and scalable text to allow those with visual impairments to access the site more easily.

The site covers a broad range of information about OMC. Learn how to live a healthier life, find a healthcare provider that can best serve you, learn about OMC's new branding, or read OMC newsletters!

We have enjoyed working with Jeremy and the crew from Olmsted Medical Center, and we look forward to expanding the site in the future to make it even more useful.

Five ways to make your website a place worth staying...

When it comes to making your website a place where people will stay for a while, or even return to, there are a number of great tips and techniques you can use. Too many to go into in one post, in fact. Here are five ways to make your website a place worth staying.

Teach, and they shall return.

You've seen those websites that are basically one big sales letter, they look great, and quite professional in a slick brochure kind of way. But they really don't do anything other than deliver the smoothest of sales patter. And if you've seen one you've seen them all. After your first couple of visits to these sites, like most visitors, you end up clicking away.

You don't have to sell, sell, sell. Provide info about your products and services, an insight or two, and people will have a reason to stick around.

Keep it light and airy.

If your landing page takes more than 30 seconds to load, you will lose 90% of your visitors. This is a fact.

Make it personal

If you have recurring visitors, welcome them by their first name and offer them their own shopping cart/personal shopper. Tweak their experience of the site so that they feel like they are going to their favorite brick and mortar store.

A picture is worth a thousand...

Use product photos of good quality and relevance. Next time you are surfing the net, take a look at a variety of business landing pages. You will be surprised how many contain badly developed photos, or photos that look like they were taken when Elvis was around. End result: your company looks cheap, which doesn't exactly make customers like you.

Get on the telephone.

I know it is the 21st century and the Internet dominates most of the business done in the world, but some customers still like to talk. Don't forget to include a good, working telephone number on the website in a prominent position. And get someone on the end of it who likes talking to the public. This could potentially have an impact on a quarter of your customer base, so do not ignore it.


Remember, your website is your business. Make people stay. You can do it in the real world, so make sure that you do it online.

Upgrades at CWS

New Phone Lines

At 10:30am CST today, we will be upgrading our incoming phone lines to a new system called SIP Trunking. We do not anticipate extensive downtime during this transition. This has many benefits to both you as the customer and to our staff. First, SIP trunking uses our existing Internet connection for outgoing and inbound calls. Unlike PRI lines, we can add additional phones lines in a matter of seconds which will come in handy to accommodate growth. Finally, another cool addition is that you'll now have the ability to direct-dial each of us at a unique phone number. Here's the list for reference:

Direct Line	Name	Extension
507-216-4386	Ryan	x205
507-216-6646	Alan	x204
507-216-6648	Lyle	x202
507-216-6649	Sara	x200
507-216-6652	Andrew	x203
507-216-6654	Jon	x208
507-216-6664	Jim	x206
507-216-6668	Josh	x201

Additional Bandwidth

Later this month, we are also turning up an additional 3Mbps circuit from Sprint. This will give us additional bandwidth capacity for growth into the future. It will also provide additional redundancy for our systems. We're setting up this connection on a separate Cisco 2621 router on our end, and the traffic on this line will be directed through different routers and cities on the Sprint network from our existing lines.

Additional Cooling

Earlier this month, we invested $12,000 in an additional 5 tons of cooling for our server room. With our growth over the past 4 years, we felt it was time to add this additional cooling capacity to our data facility and increase the redundancy of our systems for cooling your servers. The new Carrier unit was installed by Brogan Heating and Cooling of Rochester.

CWS Welcomes Andrew Ferk

Andrew joins us as a full-time Web programmer. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota with a degree in Computer Science. Andrew is a native of Elba, MN and has spent a lot of time swimming and hiking in nearby Whitewater State Park.

He is also an amateur mechanic and enjoys working on vehicles in his spare time. Andrew can be reached by email at andrew [at] cws [dot] net or by phone at extension 203.

Launching your email Campaign

So far, you've identified the top twenty percent of your customer base, and you've done some background work in preparing content for your messages. Now it's time to launch your email campaign.

The best thing you can do is remember that you have a compelling case for selling the merits of your company. So relax and take it easy.

From Little Acorns...

Begin by sending something short and sweet to your targeted customers. A simple note that tells the latest news about your company is non-intrusive and non-sales, and will help to build that feeling of trust that we all know is important. You're not twisting their arms and you're not breaking their door down.

Then take it a step further with an quick educational note in the following month. Make this a newsletter, short again, and totally non-sales-based. This is you offering a service to your customers, which again will help them to remember that they trust you.

Then, remembering that you have spent all that time gathering inofrmation about your company's best projects and collecting testimonials...

Follow Through

Create an email signature line that is exclusively focused on your area of expertise. From now on your emails should focus on awards, speaking engagements, interviews, and blog links. All of the things that position you as an expert should show up in your emails. Keep building and keep telling your story.

And as you keep building and telling, your customers will tell others. They will do this because you haven't spammed them and you've treated them with the respect that you know you should.

Your emails, for example, could be forwarded to a friend of your customer, one who needs a big contract with someone who they can trust. A journalist might need to interview a local firm with your expertise, and your email may be forwarded onto them. New contacts will naturally read your campaign, and your circle of influence will start to grow.

Every time you develop a relationship with a new contact, add them to your list.

You are selling nothing but your company and its expertise, which is what you wanted in the first place. When your customers trust you they do the selling for you.

CWS Welcomes Jenna Collins

Jenna is joining CWS as our second summer intern. She is a graphic design student at The Art Institute in Minneapolis.

Jenna will be assisting us with a variety of print and Web design projects throughout the summer.

Laying the Groundwork for Email Marketing

In a recent post we looked at how you should identify the top 20% of your customer base, and then treat them like VIP customers in your email marketing strategy.

So how do you approach the development of this strategy?

Think Creative

It's time to get creative. Think about how you've served the needs of this top 20%. Think about how you have been creative in solving their problems.

Then write up a case study of each successful project. Pick something you can be proud of, and detail it as a success story. If you can, ask for testimonials from happy clients.

Keep a Record

Keep a log or diary of successful techniques you have used, articles you have read that have improved your delivery, and any client questions or problems you find yourself answering repeatedly.

Meet The Press

Begin to court the press. Journalists often frequent chat rooms and forums. Get in there and start talking about your company and answering questions. Get out to the local press and present your firm as a solver of business problems. If you have contacts or colleagues in the know, ask for details about anyone they know in trade publications, and start to play the game. Write letters to magazines, attend shows and events. Get used to representing your firm in the media.

Be a Winner

If there are any competitions in your field that you can enter because you have the ability, do it. Even if the world at large might not think a win for "best T-shirt design" is Earth-shattering news, let people know about it. Everything that keeps your name in people's minds is helpful. Winners do business.

As you develop these items over time, you are assembling a library of resources that you will be able to draw on in your email marketing efforts -- questions you can answer and stories you can tell that will connect with your audience. Keep a record of what you have developed, ready for use when you need it.

This is basic groundwork to make sure that your email messages contain something of value. Next we'll look at delivering on the strategy.

Top Five E-mail Marketing Mistakes

Before we continue to explore the benefits of a good e-campaign, we need to look at some cardinal rules, or rather the breaking of those rules.

When companies decide that they are going to use email to market their products and services many of them make the classic mistake of thinking it will be a cinch. Without careful thought as to what will actually go in the emails, you will be sending the electronic equivalent of those shiny junk envelopes that customers toss in the garbage.

The top five mistakes companies make when using email to market are...

1. Poor content. You read magazines, right? The average glossy magazine now has about a third of its weight taken up by advertising. But we tolerate that. Why? Well, because the other stuff is both interesting and readable. Great content and advertising work well together. So, take a look at your firm's emails, and get harsh. Is the content likely to keep the customer reading? Is it brief but well-written? Does it offer an insight into your product or offer a solution to their problems? Take the time to look at what your marketing guys have done with the emails and make sure that they're worth reading. Otherwise, scrap them and start again.


2. Bad SPG. Spelling and grammar must be perfect. This cannot be over-exaggerated. Put yourself in your customer's shoes (you know, the guys who pay for your groceries). If someone sent you an email that looked like it was written by an eight year old, would you respect them?


3. Multi-media swamping. Don't overload your emails with graphics. These take time to load on customer's computers, and they're often filtered anyway. They also distract from your message. Don't waste your customer's time, or they won't give you theirs.


4. Be allowed. This is really simple. Make sure that your recipients have agreed for you to send them email. If they haven't, it will be tagged as spam. Once your customers consider your message as spam, it is spam. Period.


5. Try, try again. Too many businesses do too many things without thinking first, and emailing is one of them. Test out your email marketing on a small group of customers first. Don't screen them; make it as blind as possible. Choose twenty customers, and test with them. You'll know who opened what and who responded. This is a great way to test the quality of your strategy.

This raises the point of having a strategy. We'll be covering what an e-campaign actually looks like soon. But just remember one thing: what's bad for your customer is bad for your business.

Marketing For Real in a Virtual World

For many people, starting a business is an exciting experience. As a business matures, however, it is all too easy to lose sight of your goals and instead get caught up in the daily operation of the company. A key aspect of your business life that can fall by the wayside is marketing.

Marketing is the lifeblood of your firm. It is the gasoline that keeps you running. If you don't understand this point, ask yourself why the biggest companies in the world still spend millions on it.

In this post we are going to look at an aspect of marketing that is often overlooked by small and medium sized businesses. This oversight is unforgivable, especially now in the e-commerce age, where marketing potential is limitless.

Believe in your firm, communicate the mindset.

Let's say you are a dry-cleaning company. You take customer's garments and you clean them. On your website you say this is what you do. And you're the best in town.

Okay, so far this is simple, basic marketing. Just singing your own praises. It's selling yourself, but it isn't marketing effectively.

To make your firm different from the next drycleaner down the street get your mindset onto your website. This is the ethos that you and your management team carry around with you all day.

The way to do this is to think back to why you started the business. Yes, it is true that there was a gap in the market, that is why you are still in business. But that isn't really why you started the business, and gaps narrow anyway. You have to think about the solution you are offering to customer's problems, decide what your service does that helps people. Simply put, to make your marketing message more effective you have to be a problem solver.

So while you are a dry-cleaning business, you are also...

A firm that helps people who enjoy fine clothes by cleaning them to a high standard, making your clothes look good for longer.

Your customer wears fine clothing and they want the garments to last. You can solve this problem. Incorporate this idea into your marketing message and you are marketing your mindset effectively. Customers will come to you for solutions.

You have to make your company seem different to the rest of the guys in town. If you don't do this then your sales will suffer. And it doesn't matter how snazzy your offices are or how flashy and colourful your website is, if you don't have a clear marketing message that communicates your mindset and makes you seem innovative and dynamic, you won't last for long.

Look at your mindset, formulate it, and convey it in words. Then use your best marketing tool (your website) to get this mindset across in as many ways as possible. Then you are beginning to use the Web effectively to build business.

Developing an e-campaign

Email has not died yet. It is still an effective form of communication, even in the age of Facebook and instant messaging. What many businesses don't realize, however, is that email is a marketing tool that can be used to generate business. And I'm not talking about spam, which is rightly vilified, and will eventually be wiped out or at least severely limited.

What I am talking about is using email to target your customers in an intelligent, research-led way. Many businesses still think that email is just a quicker version of snail mail. They are missing out on a highly effective addition to their e marketing arsenal.

Before you can use email as a proper, effective marketing tool, as part of an e-campaign rather than just a shotgun approach, you need to consider a basic concept in marketing...

The cream of the crop

First of all, don't even bother to use email as a marketing tool until you have identified the top 20 percent of your customer base. These are your best customers. The old 80/20 principle, whereby twenty percent of your customers provide you with eighty percent of your profits, means that you should identify your top 20%, and focus your email campaign on them alone. So identify these people.

And then:

• Consider how they became your customers. Was it via referrals, through a trade show, or through networking?
• Decide just what it is that makes those customers profitable. Why are they your top 20% and what lessons can you learn to help you attract more like them?
• What do you need to tell those customers, or what do they need to know to buy your services? What information do they require?
• What is the best way to reach those customers?

When you know who your top 20% are, make a solemn promise to yourself and your business that you are going to treat them like VIPs, and that your e-campaign will recognize them as the bedrock for future growth.

Future articles will focus on what action you must take to cultivate your 20% list effectively, and develop an e-campaign that will drive sales and build your firm's reputation.

Do Your Customers Trust You?

Believe it or not, there is a group of people out there who don't trust the Internet when it comes to purchasing products and services. Even now it is quite common to hear customers saying they would rather go to a good old-fashioned book or music store and buy in the "real world." There is, of course, nothing wrong with this. In fact, this basic human need to hold a potential purchase in your hands is exactly why Amazon and other book sites allow visitors to read pages onscreen.

But there is a deeper issue here, one that affects many different industries. Take consumer electronics, for example. This is a famously crowded market. There are hundreds of thousands of products sold by hundreds of thousands of firms. You can buy the latest widescreen television from a thousand different places online. And because the market is so saturated, and any independent seller can have a website within weeks, prices are competitive. In fact, a lot of online sources are significantly cheaper than brick-and-mortar stores.

Try it yourself. Search for a widescreen television on the Internet and pretty soon you'll hit a site that promises to find you one at a low price. And that television could well be $100 cheaper online than it is downtown.

But even though online is cheaper, many people still buy from the brick-and-mortar stores. And that's because deep down, they feel that they can't trust a store unless they are standing in it. It's a classic problem for online businesses, and it turns off millions of customers.

So how do you build trust? How do you assure customers that you are a worthy online store, and that they are safe to buy from you? How do you assure them that you are selling something real, and that you aren't going to take their money and run?
Here are some things you can do with your online presence that will assure customers and clients that you are to be trusted with their money. Bear in mind that this is a real problem. You might not see the problem, because the customers aren't actually contacting you. Instead, they are looking at your site, and then walking away because they would rather touch and feel what they want to buy.

So, let's start with what you are all about.

Company information.

Get this part right. Anything that is important about your company, make sure that it is on your site. Use your "About" page to link to FAQs and use photos of your offices, etc. to give that "real world" feel. Clearly place your phone number on the homepage and answer when it rings.

Get in touch.

Basic stuff. If any customer emails you, get back to them within the hour if possible. We all know what dead email feels like. Do you really want to do that to the people who put food on your table?

Feedback.

If you can get feedback, make the forms professional, and let them know you appreciate the feedback. Refer to it in your website or on your blog. Show your customers you value their input. Everyone likes to see this.

Money.

Make it 100% clear that you have secure transaction capability. Use logos, links to privacy assurances; shout your financial trustworthiness from the rooftops. Your customer's money is safe with you. Period.

Advertising hell.

Don't clutter up your site with ads, even if they bring you money. It isn't worth it. When it comes to ads, anything more than five per cent of your page is bad news. It feels like going to a dollar store.

Leverage branding.

If you offer recognized brands, put them front and center on your online store. If you don't offer branded products, make what you sell a brand. Give it a logo, a tagline. We'll cover branding in a later post, but for now, don't underestimate the power of clear and memorable product presentation.

Returns.

Make your return policy clear and jargon free. If you offer a service, make the problems and complaints policy as open as you can. Just remember that the best firms have nothing to hide.

Put yourself in your client's shoes.

You owe everything to your customers and clients. If you're savvy enough to have a company, you know that sales drive it and you just operate it. So stop them from going to the brick-and-mortar stores by assuring your customer base that you are a firm to be trusted. Imagine the experience of going to any big department store and getting a bad deal on delivery, or a broken product that the store says you can't return.

Would you go back?

Attention All CEOs - SEO has changed

In fact, Search Engine Optimization has changed beyond belief. Not so long ago, it was all about stuffing content with keywords, and then hoping those web crawlers straight out of The Matrix would be looking for them. Now, of course, it isn't so simple.

And what is infuriating for a lot of people who have a presence on the Internet in a legitimate sense - in other words, your real, honest business concerns who want to market themselves online in a real, honest way - is that the unscrupulous spammers and black hats out there have pushed SEO to new, highly complex levels.

If you are unfortunate enough to own or run a business whose online presence is slipping, chances are you won't even know how to stop the decline. You just don't have the knowledge. And if you don't know how to use good SEO to stand out from the crowd, you my as well not be online.

Some websites use good SEO, some use bad. For years now firms have been enjoying the feeling of having their pages at the top end of Google, apparently with minimum effort. It seems that they know exactly what to do. They know the secret.

The secret to Good SEO

So what is the secret to Good SEO? Easy, don't do it.

Remember that great idea you had at the kitchen table? That is your company. That is what you are in charge of. The vision. Remember that? Savor it once again. Your vision. The thing that gets you up in the morning.

Then, once you have remembered why you started the whole thing (and you're all fired up about helping people again) you'll be eager to think up some new keywords. Don't.

Take a step back, think about the goals and objectives for your website, and give your firm's marketing to the experts.

Give it up because an SEO expert has two things going in their favor, two reasons why you should hire them to make your site noticeable. Reason number one is easy. SEO experts are perfect because they can look at your firm from the outside; they have the commercial perspective, the detached view, whatever you want to call it. In other words, when it comes to your firm and its online marketing, while they weren't present at the birth, they can smooth it over, smarten it up, and get it a date for the prom.

Reason number two is even simpler. An SEO expert knows exactly what to do to make your firm's website shoot up high in the rankings, and then make it stay there. They know about image searches and logos, about linking (the Holy Grail of SEO, and an aspect that will have a whole post dedicated to it soon), about content management, and so on. All things that, while you may well know something about them, you can't honestly say they're your business. They're not what you do.

The Bottom Line

SEO experts need not be expensive. And the job they can do for you and your firm will bring results. There are a lot of cowboys out there, and we'll deal with that in a later post, but get your hands on a company who know online marketing inside out (as well as you know your firm), and you will see business growth. Guaranteed.

We will spend the next few posts exploring the bottom line, looking at aspects of SEO that companies need to be on top of. By the time we're done, you'll know how a good SEO expert can make those web crawlers straight out of The Matrix cling onto your sticky site for dear life.

July 4th Holiday

Our office will be officially closed on Friday, July 4th in observance of the Independence Day holiday. If interested, one can read the official document online. Can anyone tell me everyone who signed it in 1776?

The crew at CWS will be spending the day with our friends and family in observance of this national holiday. Our support team will respond to an emergency if needed. If there is one, please call (888) 426-7793. If you have a non-emergency issue, let us know by sending us an email.

May your travel be safe, and your good times plentiful.

Best Wishes,
The CWS Team