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10 ways to get your attendees on board with online booking

9 February, 2010 by bluetubedesignni

If you are an organiser who has recently switched your event booking and payment process from offline to online, then you’ll know that sometimes it takes a little getting used to – both for you and for your attendees.

At first organisers can be a little tentative and reluctant to becoming exclusively online. And attendees? Well, they will continue to use the booking and payment methods that they have traditionally associated with the organiser, no matter how imperfect and unsatisfactory that process is – but only until they are otherwise instructed.

Yet for organisers it is vital to grasp the nettle sooner rather than later – the financial payback of online registration and payment demands it. And you’ll be surprised how quickly even your most traditional attendees will adapt to online registration.

Here’s 10 tips for getting your attendees onboard:

1. Go 100% online
Don’t give your attendees a choice. Stop offering alternative booking methods. When you are booking a flight online, airlines don’t also give you the option of booking your ticket via the phone. As a result we all book our flights online without a second thought.

2. Get your marketing focus right
To maximise your online registrations make your marketing emails short and punchy – a paragraph in length. See it as a short trailer for your whole event. Give a concise overview of the event highlights and make your ‘register now’ button very highly prominent. Make the button impossible to miss and ensure that when it is clicked that it links to the event registration website.

Your marketing email is about persuading your attendees to visit your registration website and not for displaying all your event information.

3. Always be linked in
Always include the URL link of your registration website in your emails. Always send several emails to potential attendees for each event and include the link in every one.

Always include your URL link clearly and prominently on your corporate website. Include the link in emails about your event to your social networking groups such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. Talk about your event and include the link on online forums or on Twitter or on your Facebook updates.

Make the link a clear ‘call to action’ for the attendee such as ‘register now’ or ‘register here’ or ‘to register for the event click here’.

4. Create incentives for online bookings
Offering online registration discounts encourages early attendee adoption, so make the ticket price more expensive for offline bookings. Charge a processing fee for manual or paper registrations. Make it clearly financially beneficial to book online. It is, after all, generally accepted that you get better deals via the internet no matter what product you are buying. You need to tap into that mindset.

Similarly, consider offering discounts for early online registration.

5. Refuse phone bookings
If potential attendees phone in to book manually then explain that registration and ticket payment are now exclusively online. Let them know that you will send an immediate email that will include the link for them to go straight to the registration page.

Have the email ready to go and explain the benefits for the attendee of using online registration and payment.

6. Give prior warning
Prepare your potential attendees for the switch. Give then good warning. Send them an email in advance that will explain that your next event will only accept online bookings and payment.

Let them know what to expect and how the process will work.

7. You’ll love it
Let your attendees know how they will benefit from your online registration system, such as ease of use, convenient and quick, more secure, self service, better communication.

Get them on board either with an email or a link to a page on your corporate website.

8. Make it official
Add a message to your voicemail system announcing the newer and more convenient online registration option along with the URL of your registration website for your next events.

Promote your online registration by placing your URL address in all printed materials, e-newsletters, email communications, handouts, signage etc for each event. Or if you run many events devote a page to your events on your corporate website with clear links to the registration website for each event beside each event description.

9. Educate them
Include a short frequently asked questions section or page on your corporate website.

Provide easy to follow numbered steps on how to register for your event. Put it on your corporate website or in your emails to give attendees confidence. Make it along the lines of ‘it’s easy to register and pay – here’s how’.

Offer attendees an online demonstration of how registration works.

10. Get your staff on board
Make sure that your staff are familiar with the online registration process and comfortable explaining it all to potential attendees.

Enrol your staff participants in one of our free, online registration training sessions to answer all their questions and build their confidence.

Alan Anderson, Blue Tube Design

Posted in Advice for your business, Marketing, Sales and Marketing, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Keeping it real – www.inafishbowl.com

8 February, 2010 by businessinafishbowl

We’ve recently launched new interactive business website www.inafishbowl.com to help start-ups learn from the experiences of others. Arguably, there’s no better way to learn.

Through an energy-packed mixture of video, Twitter feeds and blogs that feature on the new Big Brother-style business website, we chart the trials and tribulations of three start-up businesses, as their owners share their experiences – the good, the bad and the ugly – in real time.

The three businesses featured are a record label, a bespoke tailoring company and a Mexican food range. Each are finding their way through the start-up maze and sharing their experiences along the way. From naming their business through to frustrating first meetings with banks, the businesses lay themselves open for others to watch and follow online.

The In a Fishbowl project was founded by entrepreneur Toby Reid and is being supported by Midlands-based entrepreneur Andrew Springhall, who says: “So many people go through the process of starting a business – it’s a truly daunting experience. There’s a wealth of information available, but nothing that really provides the chance to learn from the experiences of others in the way www.inafishbowl.com does.

“The aim was to show empathy with the challenges new entrepreneurs face, but also to inspire them and enable them to learn and benefit from an interactive source of support for any budding entrepreneur.”

Taking inspiration from her native land, Marcela Flores Newburn owns and manages Rico Mexican Kitchen. The new business produces a range of authentic, home-cooked Mexican food products that are sold through stores in the UK. Mother-of-two Marcela makes all of the products by hand.

“I’m really excited to be featured on inafishbowl,” she admits. “It’s a great idea and I really hope it will help other new entrepreneurs in the early stages of starting their business.” On the site, Marcela discusses everything from dealing with buyers and distributors at department stores to the reality of running a home-based business.

You can also follow www.inafishbowl.com on Twitter for latest snippets from all three of our entrepreneurs, while Marcela’s posts have been chosen to feature regularly on the Start Up Donut blog, too, so watch this space.
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Posted in Life as an SME | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Work-life balance

5 February, 2010 by wi11iamsworld

What comes to your mind when you hear “work-life balance”?  I think of having a healthy balance between work life and my home life – family, hobbies etc.

People often find themselves thinking that they work too much and don’t have time to spend with their families. I left a full-time job nearly a year ago on the hunt for a better work-life balance. To this day I can honestly say I have never found it. My outlook on it now is that it us up to you as an individual to make things happen. If you want to spend more time at the gym or with your family only you can do that.

Reducing your hours at work to have a better work-life balance won’t necessarily work. You might end up  filling your time with pointless tasks and activites or struggling for money. You still won’t spend more time at the gym or with your family or you won’t be able to  afford to do the things you want to.  We all need to plan our time better and make an effort to achieve what we want to in life.

We all want different things out of our work life and our everyday life but going on the hunt for that work-life balance may be a bit of a long road. Plan well and the world’s your oyster!

Emma Williams, justbooked

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Posted in Advice for your business, Life as an SME | Tagged | Leave a Comment »

Two weeks to start a business? Nonsense…

4 February, 2010 by Mark Williams

Why do people who should know better continue to give credence to the myth that it’s difficult to start a business?

A recent high-profile example of this came a few weeks ago on Sunday morning on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show and it was uttered by no less a figure than would-be Prime Minister David Cameron.

Detailing measures he would take to aid small firms (and so the economy) if the Tories win the General Election, he said: “It takes something like 13 to 14 days to start a new [sic] business in this country. In America, it’s half as long. We have the ambition to make this [the UK] one of the fastest places in the world to start up a new business.” Later, this was reported on the BBC News website and others, but remained totally unchallenged.

It must be the party line. A few days later, shadow business minister Martin Prisk MP, in his ‘New year, new start, new business’ Blue Blog on the Conservative Party website, further fuelled the myth, saying: “We would cut the time it takes to start a new [sic] business in the UK. Currently, it takes twice as long as in the USA, Denmark or Hong Kong. Conservatives want to change that, so we would reduce the number of forms needed to register a new company and move towards a ‘one-click’ registration model.”

What type of business are they talking about? Have I missed something?

Setting up as a sole trader (AKA becoming ‘self-employed’) is likely to take 10 minutes tops. All you need do is call the HMRC Newly Self-employed Helpline on 0845 915 4515 to provide some key details (eg your name, DOB, NI number, address, telephone number, start date and type of business). You could even have been trading for up to three months previously (if you leave registration any later than three months, you’ll be fined £100). Should you prefer, you can register online. Where’s the problem?

And while forming a limited company (“incorporation”) takes slightly more effort (you need to fill out an IN01 form and complete a Memorandum of Association and Articles of Association), it can be done within a day if you pay £50 for the Companies House same-day service. Otherwise you’ll have to pay the standard registration fee of £20, which, granted, could take between eight and 10 days to process. Pay a professional to do it all for you and opt for the same-day service and your new company could become a legal entity in four hours or so.

So why spread the myth? Is it because our politicians are so out of touch with the reality of starting a business? Probably, yes. Few politicians of whatever persuasion have or will ever start or run their own small business. And that’s part of the problem, but one for another day.

And while it’s understandable that any party trying to gain power should seek to appeal to small firms and the wider electorate with the promise of a better new world, using untrue ‘facts’ (if you’ll forgive the deliberate oxymoron) merely increases the risk of putting people off, at a time when the economy needs them to start a business. We should encourage people to go into business – not discourage them.

Truth is, registering a business isn’t difficult and it doesn’t take a long time, the myth needs to be challenged (same as the ‘excessive red tape’ red herring). The real difficulty lies in surviving that all-important first 12-18 months and then moving the business onto the next stage. Any small-business owner would tell you that, Dave.

Mark Williams, Start Up Donut editor

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Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

True net gains?

2 February, 2010 by markthook

“Small firms should increase their website presence,” urges BBC entrepreneur expert Howard Graham in a new piece on the BBC website.

He cites the well-established business wisdom that growing your firm depends on creating a unique selling proposition (USP) and communicating it to your target market. “The web is simply the best way of doing that,” he argues.

In many cases, he’s right. For example, an independent bookshop selling rare first editions could make invaluable use of a website to make its unique publications known to a wider audience, and of course sell them via an online shop.

But I’m surprised that Graham should believe it’s “extraordinary” that fewer than half of all small businesses have a web presence. Is it really that astounding when, as the Federation of Small Businesses says, “the vast majority of small businesses serve their local markets”?

I spoke to my greengrocer this week. I suggested the very thing Graham is advocating, that he should consider investing in a website. I expected a negative reaction based on likely cost, but I was wrong. He simply replied: “I’m based in Bristol, why do I want someone in Leeds to know who I am? He won’t want to buy from me, and even if he does, by the time he gets to me, the carrots will have rotted!”

My local grocer was more concerned with making sure families down the street know he was open for business. Graham’s firm carried out a survey that backs this claim up: “A recent survey we carried out at Made Simple Group clearly showed that… specifically improving visibility to generate new business was a key concern for many.”

But is a website always the best way to achieve this? How vital is a web presence to a plumber, mobile hairdresser or local newsagent? Surely good old fashioned word-of-mouth, attention-grabbing signage and business cards do the job just as well – if not better – than an expensive website?

This is not to say small businesses should ignore other avenues of online marketing – social networks such as Twitter, Ecademy and Facebook, as well as blogging. All can provide excellent, low-cost exposure for your business. The Start Up Donut has some great videos that provide an introduction to online social networking.

But a purely web-based approach to publicising a small business can be ineffective if not suicidal. Small firms should increase their website presence – but only if there is true value in doing so.

Mark Hook, BHP Information Solutions

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Posted in IT | Tagged , , | 10 Comments »

Business owners’ three biggest PR blunders

1 February, 2010 by PR Expert Paul Green

While I was a journalist, I saw many business owners make the same three basic PR mistakes time and time again. When it comes to trying to secure free publicity for your new business, the following mistakes should be avoided…

1 Trying to push dull, irrelevant or non-stories

Sorry, in truth, journalists don’t really care about you or your business. They only care about stories that are of interest to their audience. It can be very dull being a journalist, having to wade through the same old marketing guff being sent to you day in, day out. So when something special comes along, naturally, you jump on it. As a business owner, that’s your opportunity. If you are to engage journalists and their readers, you must have a compelling story to tell.

2 Giving up after one failed press release

If you send out 100 direct mail letters and then stop because “direct mail doesn’t work for you”, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity. It’s not necessarily that direct mail doesn’t work for you, you might not be sending your communications to the right people, you might not be writing about the right product or service or you might simply not be communicating your key messages effectively. Sometimes the timing isn’t right or your success is hampered by external factors.

The same can be said about PR. There is no way that each and every press release you ever send will lead to coverage, no matter how good your story, media release or how well you know the journalist. Effective PR requires a long-term commitment.

3 Having unrealistic expectations

PR is not really meant as a direct lead-generation tool (although it can work that way if you are fortunate). It can certainly be used to raise awareness and enhance the credibility of your business and support the rest of your marketing activity.

Your goal should be to encourage and make it really easy for interested readers, listeners or viewers to find you (or more usually, find out from your website how your products or services can benefit them). Don’t expect overnight success either, raising awareness, securing sales and ensuring customer loyalty usually takes a lot of time, effort and investment.

  • The first 500 Start Up Donut Blog readers can get a free copy of Paul Green’s book – PR Success Made Easy – here.

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Plan for growth in your business

28 January, 2010 by gradwellblogs

If your business is to continue to expand and grow, then plans need to be put in place for that growth potential to occur right from the start.  If you make a smart choice when you set up your business Internet services, then you’ll have faith in its capacity to expand as your business grows.  But if you don’t choose right first time, you may end up paying the price when you need to shell out to cover the expense of expanding your Internet operations each time your business or organisation grows.

If you wish to save time and money, then it’s best to choose an Internet services company with the flexibility for expansion built in:

Multi User VoIP:

Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, is growing in popularity with businesses due to its flexibility, cost-effectiveness and quality of service. VoIP to VoIP calls are free and the system is easy to set up with no expensive capital outlay at the beginning. With Multi User VoIP, you can add internal extensions to your existing VoIP phone services quickly and without any additional cost, allowing your rapidly expanding call teams to respond to increasing demand.

Email:

Exchange allows you to share all your important information with others and access your mail on your computer or mobile device. Share calendars, files, and address books and ensure that everyone is using the same up to date details. As your needs change and your business grows, increasing your email services will simply be a matter of adjustments, not having to look for a brand new product.

Broadband:

The standard broadband should give you the fastest possible speeds that your telephone exchange will allow.  Broadband should also give you a very generous bandwidth limit and direct access to a VoIP network, like the Gradwell. However, as your organisation grows and your needs change, you may need faster connection speeds, more bandwidth and line prioritisation with a separate line for data, to free up your VoIP phone line as the number of calls increases.

Web Hosting:

Getting reliable hosting for your web activities is vital from the start.  Poor hosting leads to down time that damages reputation, productivity, confidence and sales. It’s important that your web hosting is reliable and robust enough to ensure your site can handle all the demands that could be made on it – particularly when an influx of new visitors occurs, if there’s a sudden surge of interest in your business. Many companies fail to plan for these surges and end up with their sites going down when visitor numbers spike.

Your web host should provide plenty of web space, quick speeds and reliable, expandable services, and if they don’t – maybe it’s time to look elsewhere.

Peter Gradwell, Gradwell

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Posted in Advice for your business, Technology | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Lessons learned at Small Business 2.0

28 January, 2010 by Emma Jones

Small Business 2.0 was held on Saturday 23 January. Now in its second year, it’s an event dedicated to helping small businesses profit from the web. Emma Jones went along and picked up some useful nuggets.

Business at the weekend

One of the reasons I like the Small Business 2.0 event is that it’s held on Saturday. Not only does this mean it’s accessible to 5 to 9ers (those holding down a day job and building the business at nights and weekends) it also means there’s a relaxed feeling about the place as attendees listen, learn, and meet new people in an informal setting.

These ingredients came together well on Saturday and were the recipe for an interesting and enjoyable day. Here are a few things I picked up:

  • A bit of trivia – the first item ever sold on eBay UK was a Scorpions CD at the price of £2.89. 
  • eBay has more than 17 million monthly unique visitors and offers more than 15 million items for sale. There are 123,000 full time eBay businesses, generating more than £1.7 billion per year in turnover. To date, $600million worth of business has been driven through the eBay iPhone application. The company expect this to become an even more popular way to shop. 
  • E-commerce continues to climb: the numbers of people shopping online – and the amounts they are spending – is increasing at a rapid rate. So it’s still a very good time to be starting an online trading business.
  • Customers are becoming more demanding: the majority of customers expect their online shopping experience to be as good as, if not better, than an offline shopping experience, placing the onus on the store owner to make it as simple and enjoyable as possible. 
  • The secrets to success in creating a successful online venture can be summed up as having:

- Great products
- Competitive prices
- Outstanding service
- Giving something back (eBay report that even though sellers participating in eBay for charity give 10 per cent of the sales price to charity, their products are 20 per cent more likely to sell, at a better price. This resulted in $50 million being raised for charity in 2009).

  • Enterprise is alive and well: I met a number of people in the early stages of starting a business, from Domino Duhan who is soon to launch Flog.com as a place to create a free online store, to Steven and Zoe who travelled from Worcestershire to pick up tips for their new venture selling cottage gifts.

Altogether, there was a great vibe and positive signs that 2010 will be another exciting year for anyone starting and growing an online business.

Emma Jones is the founder of Enterprise Nation and author of ‘Spare Room Start Up – how to start a business from home’. Her next book ‘Working 5 to 9 – how to start a business in your spare time’ will be published in May 2010.

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Posted in Advice for your business, Life as an SME, Sales and Marketing, Successful entrepreneurs, Technology, You and your idea | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Gym’ll fix it?

26 January, 2010 by ironmongoose

Every business has its sales peaks and troughs. A gym in January is supposedly one of the classic peaks. “I’ve eaten too much turkey, I must go to the gym and punish myself”.

The small club I run in Bristol was founded on the concept of “ethical exercise”, because we are not dealing with inanimate objects, but real people. In practice, we pride ourselves in telling people what they need to do, which usually differs from what they wanted to hear. This concept is not unique to the fitness industry.

The big question for us is this: Should we take advantage of the public’s desire to abuse themselves with a gym machine on the assumption that if we don’t take their money someone else will? We could put the fund to good use. Or should we “maintain our professional integrity” and tell them the truth, that it’s better (for the body’s physical and psychological health) to bang your head against a brick wall for 30 minutes than attempt to purge excesses with exercise?

The question is further complicated by both our hot water and central heating boilers breaking down in December, requiring an outlay of just over £1,500. It would, of course, be tempting to try to recoup that from some January lemmings.

In one of my favourite training handbooks, Superslow by Ken Hutchins, there is a chapter about the “Real vs assumed objective”.

The Real objective is to deliberately stress the body to illicit a response for the better (faster, stronger, etc). The assumed objective is to set yourself a target (eg 12 reps/5km) and cheat just to get there.

As I often do, this was applied to the above “big question”, which leads to the following answer. My business is based upon ethical exercise and it must succeed or fail on this principle, otherwise the Real objective is compromised.

Please don’t think I’m preaching. I still haven’t got the heating fixed, but I’m sleeping well at night.

Ross Campbell, The Exercise Club

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How to make a profit in a week

25 January, 2010 by Emma Jones

A journalist calls to ask how long it takes to make a profit when starting out in business. ‘It depends on the business’ replies Emma Jones ‘but I’d say it’s perfectly possible to turn a profit within the week.’ Here’s the feature to discover if Emma got her facts right.

Let’s take a business
This feature will not apply to all businesses but let’s take the example of someone providing goods and services to consumers (a craft business) and someone offering professional services (a book-keeper.) This is how they each become profitable by week end.

Example 1: The craft business

Monday
Make item with cost of raw materials being £5.50.
Photograph item with family camera, ensuring professional/high quality presentation.

Tuesday
Upload profile and photo to 3 craft sites which levy a small charge (or free) for listing and exercise a sales commission. Sites such as:

  • Etsy.com – listing fee of 20 cents per item and 3.5% sales commission
  • MISI.co.uk – listing fee of 20p per item and 3% sales commission
  • Coriandr.com – listing fee of 20p per item and 2.5% sales commission

Wednesday
Promote product via Twitter and Facebook. Include a link to the shop so people can click and buy.
Send an email to friends and family (personal, as opposed to group email) to announce the product and, again, with a link.

Thursday
Upload pictures of your product to Flickr so the large audience there can see it too.
If you have a webcam, make a short recording of you making products and upload to YouTube.
Call local stores and boutiques to ask if they would consider selling your stock.

Friday
You’ve attracted interest and made a sale! Sales price is £25.99.

Cost of making sale:
Raw materials: £5.50
Listing fee: 20p
Sales commission: 78p
Marketing & promotion: zero cost but your time
Profit for the week: £19.51

Example 2: The book keeper

Monday
Start a blog using free blogging platforms such as blogger.com or wordpress.com – with helpful posts on book-keeping technique, this will help you be seen as an expert in your field.
Promote blog via Twitter.
Produce business cards. A pack of 50 cards can be bought for £12.99 from Moo.com.

Tuesday
Attend local networking event.
Post in online business forums with helpful book-keeping advice.

Wednesday
Approach small business sites with an article for them to upload that will interest & assist readers (include a link back to your blog so people can make contact).

Thursday
Call local accountancy practice to ask if they require outsourced book-keeping.

Friday
Secure first client! Contract to carry out book-keeping for local home business at rate of £50 per month.

Cost of making sale:
Business cards: £12.99
Promotion and networking: zero cost but your time
Profit in first month: £37.01

Doing the sums
The beauty of both of these examples is that all this promotion and sales generating activity can be done by ‘Working 5 to 9’ ie it’s possible to keep hold of the day job and build your business (and profit) by working nights and weekends.

The secret is in keeping costs low (by being home based and making the mot of free social media tools) and focusing on making that first sale. In which case, it’s perfectly possible to realise profit in just five days. What’s stopping you? Get that business started!

NB. This feature assumes access to a home PC/laptop therefore costs of IT equipment not included.

Emma Jones is Founder of Emma Jones is Founder of Enterprise Nation and author of ‘Spare Room Start Up – how to start a business from home’ Her next book ‘Working 5 to 9 – how to start a business in your spare time’ will be published in May 2010

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