Amazon Kindles Emerge, Microsoft Wants Your iPhone and More

Amazon Kindles Emerge, Microsoft Wants Your iPhone and More
$3 Million in Grants Will Go To Twelve Small Businesses
Why it’s Important for Businesses to Respond Quickly to Feedback
Adobe’s Kevin Lindsay: It’s Time to Focus on Conversions and Customer Journeys
“Bouncing” Into a New Startup Office Space

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 04:00 PM PDT

amazon kindles

There are tools that can strengthen your business. And there is important information that can put you one step ahead of the competition. Each week, the Small Business Trends editorial team works to bring you stories that will help your business not only survive but flourish.

If you didn’t get a chance to check in daily this week, we’ve rounded up the top posts that will make a difference for your business’s survival. Take a look.

New Tech and the Latest Upgrades

Amazon Kindle Fires singe the market. They look like hot new entries into the tablet market. The increased functionality may prove attractive to small business owners and entrepreneurs on the go. What do you think?

Turn in your iPhone for a Windows device. The non-Android using world can probably be divided into those who find this offer attractive and those who don’t. In any case, if you’ve gotten tired of your iPad or iPhone and want a change, take a look.

New 10-inch tablet coming from Samsung. Move over iPad. Stand aside Surface. The Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 is almost here. It’s like the Samsung tablet/phone hybrid Galaxy Note 3…but bigger. And it’s coming Oct. 10.

Web Tools to Watch

Wix heads for IPO. The DIY web builder claims it has more than 38 million users. The company says 679,536 of those subscribe to premium accounts, some aimed at entrepreneurs and small businesses. Those aren’t Facebook numbers, but time will tell.

Pinterest looks at sponsored pins. As it has come to so many other social sites, the discussion of monetization is now a topic on Pinterest. But the social site that lets you collect and pin pictures of your favorite things vows to do it right.

Measuring AdWords conversion offline. If you had said you wanted to do this a year ago, many people would have probably looked at you funny. Today, the search engine is touting it as a new feature.

Other Top Trends

Payroll cards offer an alternative. Just make sure you follow the rules when asking your employees to take their paychecks on plastic. Is there another alternative? Can they get to their money without fees?

Are your Yelp reviews for real? Turns out, the reviews for lots of other businesses might not be. There are many people who wonder how supposedly honest small business owners could be involved in all this fakery. But a more important question would be how valuable even genuine online reviews are after all this?

Grants

$3 million in grants are up for grabs. Small business lender Chase will award that money to 12 winners in its annual Mission Main Street Grants Program (#MissionMainSt) competition. Visit the link above and learn more about what it takes to win.

Acquisitions

GoDaddy goes right on buying. This time the web hosting giant says it’s bought online invoicing application Ronin. It seems like a logical choice on GoDaddy’s path to become more attractive to small business users.

Security

Dun & Bradstreet and others were hacked for private data recently. The three major “data brokers” were hacked by a group of cyber criminals seeking personal information. They then sold access to that data to others. If your business also has customer information on its website or database, you could be at risk too.

Policy

SEC rule change doesn’t enable true crowdfunding. So if this is what you were expecting after last year’s Jumpstart our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, prepare to be disappointed. Of course, the new rule change may make it easier to find private investors. We’ll have to see how it works out.

Reading Photo via Shutterstock

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$3 Million in Grants Will Go To Twelve Small Businesses

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 01:30 PM PDT

mission main street grants

Twelve small companies stand to receive $250,000 each in grants as part of an annual competition promoting small business lending, The Main Street Grants Program. They’ll also win a two day trip to Google headquarters for an intensive small business marketing workshop.

Small business lender Chase announced its Mission Main Street Grants Program (#MissionMainSt) this week. Owners of small businesses meeting the criteria should visit the Mission Main Street Grants site and fill in a business profile and grant questionnaire to enter.

Businesses can sign up for the program through October 31, 2013, by completing the profile and questionnaire.

After that, there’s a multi-stage process (see diagram above). Visitors to the site may vote for their favorite business from Oct. 1 through Nov. 15 using Facebook Connect.

Businesses must receive at least 250 votes to be eligible for for the final round evaluation in the grants. So, obviously, mobilizing social followers is a good strategy at least to get your small business into the running.

Main Street Grants Program Entry Requirements

The program is open to U.S. owned small businesses that have been in operation for two or more years (sorry, no early stage startups). Entrants must employ fewer than 100 full-time people annually. But Chase provides a somewhat more lengthy list of rules you should look over if you’re considering entering, so that you know whether your business meets all eligibility requirements.

A group of 12 expert panelists will choose the final 12 grant recipients from the pool of eligible businesses. Winners will be announced in January, 2014.

What Would You Do with $250,000?

In a recent Google Hangout, four 2012 grant recipients talk about how winning $250,000 helped them grow their businesses.

What would your business do with an extra $250,000?

The money might be enough to build a prototype, put a new product into production, open a new location or just grow the business with added investment.

Chase says winners will also receive a special advertising offer from Google, premium sponsor of the grant competition, and access to a special social media toolkit.

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Why it’s Important for Businesses to Respond Quickly to Feedback

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 11:00 AM PDT

customer feedback

If there was ever a question as to how valuable customer feedback can be, Barclays recent shift in its overdraft policies provides a sufficient answer – it's pretty valuable.

After being hit with £290 million fine for manipulating lending rates, the bank reached out to customers to see how they can make their banking experience better. They found out that customers wanted a better understanding of how overdraft fees were broken down. The overwhelming response led to a review of these fees and a total savings of £1.4 million for over 65,000 customers; a move that likely stopped a good percentage of those customers from doing their banking elsewhere.

Despite stories like this, there is a huge disconnect between customers and businesses when it comes to feedback. An American Express survey (PDF) shows that 60 percent of customers feel like their concerns are not being addressed by businesses.

"Consumers feel their feedback is not being heard, yet businesses are working like crazy to stay abreast of online comments," said Geoff Begg of American Express.

For businesses, this is not encouraging news as 89 percent of people surveyed by the Customer Experience Impact Report (PDF) claimed that they started doing business with a competitor after a poor customer experience.

For a small business one bad experience can do quite a bit of damage.

Relying on Customer Feedback

Getting honest customer feedback can be essential to businesses who are looking to improve their customer's experience. However capturing their customers' feelings isn't always easy when you consider that 91 percent of customers don't complain when they are unhappy because they think that taking the time to provide feedback isn't worth the time because the business simply doesn't care.

But if the customer knew that there would be an immediate response, 81 percent claimed that they would provide the business with feedback.

The Barclays incident shows just how valuable that quick response can be. Faced with a damaged reputation and being accused of overcharging their customers, the bank looked to lose a good portion of their business. However by collecting feedback from their customers, analyzing what they had to say and acting on their customer's needs, that bank was able to avoid a public relations nightmare and salvage their reputation with their customer base.

Businesses could do well by learning from this example as the benefits, especially for a smaller business looking to build up their customer base, can be quite impressive. And getting to that stage is something that businesses of any size can accomplish if they listen to what customers reported in the CEI survey:

Make sure that you are available via phone and email.
Be quick to respond to customer issues.
Listen to what customers are saying, don't be clueless.
Make the effort to be friendly.
Get to know your customers and their history.

Most importantly, have a process in place to collect customer feedback and a way to log not only complaints, but also how you and your company respond to issues as they are reported. Being able to follow trends in actual feedback has shown great promise in a company's ability to solve small problems before they have a negative impact on how customers view them.

Don't Ignore the Positive

Sometimes, too much attention is given to negative feedback and customer complaints and people forget that positive feedback can be just as useful when it comes to the growth of a business.

Not only do positive words and comments tell a company what they are doing right, but they help to encourage others to take notice as well. Claims Dr. Duncan J. Watts of Microsoft Research:

The biggest obstacle to success is just being noticed.

But positive feedback won't come unless you make sure to do things the right way.

Feedback Photo via Shutterstock

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Adobe’s Kevin Lindsay: It’s Time to Focus on Conversions and Customer Journeys

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 08:00 AM PDT

When it comes to marketing and advertising budgets, the vast majority of money is used on lead generation activities, with only a few dollars spent on nurturing and converting those leads into full blown business opportunities. But those companies that focus more of their marketing efforts on lead conversion and understanding the journey a prospect takes from a click to a customer is seeing much more marketing success.

Kevin Lindsay, Director of Product Marketing for Adobe's Target product, part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, shares with us his take on why it is critical for marketers to start focusing more on conversion activities in order to get the most out of their marketing efforts.

* * * * *

customer journeys Small Business Trends: The whole idea of conversion across different types of devices. How are companies looking at those different conversion types across the different tablets and device types?

Kevin Lindsay: Well, let's start with the first part of the question, which is really a good one. Because when we talk about conversion, it does mean a variety of different things when you're looking at different industries. When you take Adobe, just as one example, there are multiple things we want to happen on that site.

One type of conversion is someone actually saying, 'OK, I found Photoshop, I found the version of Photoshop that I want, I'm going to add it to my cart and I'm going to buy it,' or a subscription to Creative Cloud or whatever it might be. It's an eCommerce conversion the way we all classically think about conversion.

Another type of conversion is when we use our digital marketing efforts to ultimately generate a sales accepted lead for our enterprise sales folks. Now along the path to that conversion would be something like downloading a whitepaper. We would call that a micro-conversion. What are the different conversion events that actually need to lead up to that ultimate conversion if you will.

Small Business Trends: The sale?

Kevin Lindsay: Right. In our case, from an enterprise software sales perspective, we're not even looking at the sale as the conversion. From a digital marketing impact perspective, if we get the lead, then that is the conversion. We've done our job on the digital marketing website. We've passed it over.

Now obviously a lot of people are tracking the eventual sale, and that is a conversion. From a digital marketing perspective in the way that most of our B2B clients look at it when they are using digital marketing for lead gen, they're looking at things like whitepaper downloads and videos and product tours and all those kinds of things. What is the value of those kinds of offers? What's most appropriate at the top of the funnel versus mid-funnel versus at that point where someone is ready to take a meeting? What are the things that are most impactful?

The same kind of reasoning can be applied to the scenario in financial services, where today, particularly in the U.S. banks are feeling a crunch due to legislation around service fees, and the fact that they have to make up that money somewhere. They're actually engaging in merchandising optimization, cross-selling and that sort of thing.

If you have a mortgage with a bank, they will try to sell you a home equity line of credit. Debit card, maybe on the first purchase you get a $50 whatever toward your purchase, credit. Whatever it might be, as you look across industries, there are different definitions of conversion. Then within that, as you alluded to, there are these gates that you need to get through. Something we'll call micro-conversions.

From an analytics perspective we were looking very, very closely at the make-up of our customers' journeys. What's happening along the path here? Where is fallout occurring, and where can we be making improvements along the way to improve or fatten the funnel up at the top?

Theoretically, you do that, you take more people through and you improve ultimately, your conversion rate. That's where optimization fits in, and that's where Adobe Target fits into the picture. How do we take that data, how do we make it actionable, how do we actually turn what we know into insights that improve conversion? Or in the case of media, it might be engagement for example.

Small Business Trends: What are folks focusing most on? Getting the conversion rate up or making it more efficient, or both?

Kevin Lindsay: I'd say it's both, but let me first say four years ago we put out a stat. We corroborated this with analysts out there in our community as well as looked at our own data.

We reported that for every $92 that companies were spending to acquire new customers, they're spending $1 to convert those visitors. I don't think things have changed dramatically in the last four years since we put that stat out. That tells us that there's still a very, very big focus on acquisition spend, on display advertising, search engine marketing obviously.

Companies are pouring a lot of money at the top of the funnel to fill the funnel, but not a lot to actually take people through and optimize that journey for the conversion.

It's been kind of slow. Adoption has not been as aggressive as you think. Now, there are truly some best use case examples, where companies are doing it, where there's a healthy overall, I'd say culture, around optimization. They know that it's technology but it's also best practices and it's people. It's all of those things. Then they're seeing better results from those efforts.

Then you've brought up the point around devices, and again, when you're looking at conversion and you have all these different micro-conversions, and then you add to that complexity of all these different touch points. Where does one person start? Where does a person start on one device, maybe, and then pick up with another?

What do we need to look at in terms of length of something called cart persistence, where somebody actually adds something to the cart? They don't buy it today, but that doesn't mean they're not going to buy it. What is the length of time it takes for someone to convert in financial services, and across how many different touch points?

Our financial services expert, a guy named Jason Ward, says basically people go to financial services sites and they lurk. They hang around and they leave, and they come back and they do more research.

Now they're going to do it across all these different touch points. They're going to be on the train, going home, they'll use their iPhone to understand rates or different products and service fees, whatever it might be. Then they go away, and then maybe later on that evening when they're sitting at home with their tablet they complete the process.

It's adding a new level of complexity, and so we need to look at how do we close the loop on this? How do we track from one touch point to the next to the next? How do we optimize that conversion process as you add this new level of complexity as well?

Small Business Trends: What about mobile app versus mobile website conversions? It's funny, because I'm not a big Dunkin' Donut kind of guy, but somehow I got their app. They have the locations, nearest locations, deals. Next thing you know I'm using this to do more than I ever did with them.

Kevin Lindsay: Yeah. I love this topic. We're seeing some very, very interesting things, and we have this discussion a lot. A colleague of mine covers this area very extensively from more of a business and use case perspective around app versus site.

First of all, his advice always is that if you have limited budget and you need to start with one or the other, he tells clients to start with mobile-optimized site. Particularly if SEO is important to you the site is just that much more valuable in terms of acquiring traffic.

We're seeing huge uptake and great results from apps. The retailers that have invested in apps are seeing very nice conversion rates from apps. The shopping apps are pretty powerful. I don't know if you have the Target iPad app. It's beautiful. It's so useful, and has so much utility built into it, that you really can't do with a normal site.

Small Business Trends: Do you see moving forward with more conversion types taking place on a social network? Maybe a certain kind of a conversion type, or a purchase directly from a website, fanpage?

Kevin Lindsay: Last year and the year before, there was a lot of talk about social commerce. A lot of our customers were beginning to play around with it. They were using their various offerings that you could use to actually integrate commerce onto your pages. Some of the commerce platforms had plugins and so on.

I talked to a couple customers who said 'nothing, nada.' Most of them have abandoned that, but they do recognize the value of social features on their site; also the value of brand engagement and the role that social referrals play.

That brings to mind 'OK, on a product details page maybe I should be really optimizing that share button because the value of the share is really high.' I had a customer speak with me at an event last year who said, 'I do that. I really, really encourage the share, because when this person shares out to a social network, those people with whom he shares that come back to the commerce site, they're converting at an 11% conversion rate compared to my 3% site average conversion.'

The value of the share is really, really high. In something like apparel retailing, it's huge. Then you get into some interesting things like within Adobe Social, maybe you have an ensembling app on Facebook and you get people sharing an outfit that they've put together.

Small Business Trends: The thing that still gets my attention is this $92 spent on customer acquisition for every $1 spent on conversions.

Kevin Lindsay: Yeah. It may have improved marginally, but it's not great.

Small Business Trends: Do you see, as companies get more and more involved in these exercises, more time and effort and resources spent on that aspect of it?

Kevin Lindsay: I think clearly acquisition spend is always going to lead the way. It's definitely going in the right direction, and when you look at the results of this optimization survey and you look at the correlation between companies that are engaging in optimization and testing, targeting, all that kind of stuff – they see higher conversion rates. They answer all the right questions in the affirmative, those folks that are engaging in this kind of stuff. It does pay off.

The woman from Brooks' Brother who we were on the phone with earlier today, she got up at an event a couple weeks ago and said, 'This one campaign that we ran, this one experiment essentially, more than paid for the investment in this technology and the people it takes to run the thing for a year.'

These kinds of efforts pay off. Where companies maybe get a little bit disillusioned, but this is typical human behavior. We all start out gung-ho with things. We keep up the momentum and say, 'What's next? What is our optimization plan? What's our testing road map here?'

Small Business Trends: Yeah, have a plan to get the most out of using this.

Kevin Lindsay: Exactly. I think that's what we, through our technology, we have big products, they're big solutions. They require an investment of some time to actually say OK, we're going to take this thing on. It's going to be a program, it's not just an individual project or series of tests. I think that's really important that people get that.

This interview on conversion is part of the One on One interview series with thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This transcript has been edited for publication.

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“Bouncing” Into a New Startup Office Space

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 05:00 AM PDT

business startup cartoon

I was reading something recently about open office layouts and was trying to think of a cartoon to play with that idea, but it’s not something I have any experience with.

The last time I had a ‘normal job’ we were all in cubicles. Which got me thinking about enclosed spaces, which got me thinking, of course, about bouncy houses.

And then this cartoon popped out.

I don’t pretend to fully understand how my head works sometimes, I’m just glad it continues to.

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