We have recently completed a product demonstration multimedia presentation for Labnet International. They wanted to put together an online sales tool for the new Multigene Thermal Cycler.

Labnet's MultiGene Gradient Thermal Cycler is now launched and they have received positive feedback on the presentation from dealers and customers alike.

These sort of multimedia presentations are very affordable and offer a sophistication that compliments a product's quality. We especially find them to be useful for products of a technical nature such as medical equipment, scientific instruments, and products that require programming and setup.

Recently, I was looking at some promotional materials for Outlier Solutions and I stumbled upon some interesting things that I decided to share. Promotional products can be a fun and effective way to establish or enhance customer relations, with new and existing customers. Promotional items keep your company’s name and contact information out in the open, handy for customers to find and helping to introduce your company to potential customers.

According to the Promotional Products Association International (PPAI), promotional products is an 18 billion dollar a year industry. A survey that PPAI conducted with business travelers in the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport revealed some other interesting statistics about promotional products and how customers use them. Here are a few of the statistics from PPAI’s survey:
- 55% of people said that they kept their promotional products for more than 1 year
- 76% said they could recall the advertiser’s name on the promotional item they were given in the last 12 months
- 75% said they kept promotional items that were useful

Promotional items can be used as a thank you to your loyal customers. In my own search I keep coming across the saying “everyone likes freebies”. There is truth to this, giving current loyal customers a nice promotional item will help make them feel appreciated by your company.

Epromos.com's blog “Everybody Loves Free Stuff” has compiled a lot of interesting promotional ideas. Some of these ideas are traditional promotional items like plastic bags and coffee mugs that showcase a creative design, and some of the items are more unique, like the laundry detergent kit that includes a piece of fabric that must be washed to reveal the message. Be sure to look at “Everybody Loves Free Stuff” for a lot of creative promotional and guerilla marketing ideas. Look at the Promo No-No page for a laugh as well.

The lesson I have learned, giving away a coffee mug, as typical as it may sound, can be an extremely effective way to build positive relationships with your customers and hopefully to recruit a few new ones.

Designing an e-commerce store takes much more planning and execution than launching a standard web site. Understanding this at the outset, just as with any large project, helps to ensure at the time of launch everyone in the organization is in sync (to the extent that this is ever possible).

Usability, functionality, and design should all be woven together at the planning stages. The goal is to give your customers an overall positive experience. While we (the web design firm) could create a very intuitive web design, we can’t help the product get shipped on time or know that the internal MRP system needs to have certain data fields complete without good planning and knowledge sharing.

According to a survey conducted by Internet Retailer 60.3% of web retailers have redesigned their e-commerce site with in the past year. This statistic showcases that Internet retailers are realizing how important the design of a site is to how successful an e-commerce store will be. Our advice is to embrace the web standards but trust in the competence of the user. In other words, if people can navigate virtual worlds they can get through a few wrong turns in the product shopping process.

There are different ways to approach the design of an e-commerce store. Some companies believe that rich media content deserves more emphasis, while others think that simplicity is the answer. A store can be successful using either approach, however there are some important things to focus on.

In the survey by Internet Retailer 68.9% of the companies redesigning their e-commerce store said that better product and page organization was the main focus of the redesign. Customers are not likely to spend much time searching on a site so organization is key. It is the company’s responsibility to make it easy for the customer to find their way around the store. ECmmerce101’s blog gives 4 good tips for organizing your website. They are:

1. Make sure the information on each page is balanced. Not too much, not too little.
2. Be sure the information you include on each page is relevant and in the correct order.
a. Tell the customers who you are
b. Tell them what kind of business you run
c. Tell them what you offer
d. Display the total cost
e. Explain the necessary steps to complete the purchase
3. Have good categorization and trust your categorization. Trust your customers to understand your categorization.
4. Don’t punish your customers for navigation mistakes. Make the store easy to move through, making sure the customers do not feel lost in the store.

Another good idea is to make the store easier to navigate is to include a search feature. This allows customers to search through the products offered based on size, color, functionality, product number, etc. This is also a great marketing tool as we mentioned in an earlier post.


Outlier Solutions
At Outlier Solutions we know it’s important to implement good design in all of our projects, but understand that extra planning is needed when designing an e-commerce store. We believe that designing to meet web standards is important. According to the Web Standards Group, designing to web standards helps to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users. Standards also help to ensure long-term visibility of any document you may publish on the web.

We have found that including a simple search function into a web site's design can bring lots of interesting marketing data. Many visitors who come to your site and don't find what there looking for may think they are just missing it and will plug their keyword search phrase in and hit go just for the heck of it.

At this point two good things happen hopefully. The best option is they find what they were looking for. But even if they don't (maybe because you don't offer that service or product) they have left you with a quick note about what they were looking for.

Outlier Solutions can build a search function into your website that serves as a helpful tool to your visitors, and will retain all of the keyword searches people conduct on your site. After a few months you can begin analyzing this information and seeing products that people associate with your company or brand that you may consider offering. You also get to see what visitors refer to your products as and can adjust your marketing copy accordingly for better user experiences as well as better search engine placment.

Did you know you can allow your customers to track packages from YOUR website? Well its true. As a part of the UPS Business Solutions Tools you can allow your customers to put their tracking number and track the package from your web site. It isn't even necessary to have an ecommerce installation. Just a tracking number.

This can drive additional traffic to your site and help customers continue to learn more about you. The way it works is Outlier Solutions can design a web page that conforms to the look of your site and then we embed the tracking application. A customer enters the tracking number and the results are given all directly from your site.

Outlier just recently completed a project where were able to allow customers to search by simply using a 6 digit sales order number as opposed to the 18 digit UPS tracking number. This was a huge convenience for both our client and their customers.

Web design elements can be integrated with databases to help with maintenance, functionality and most importantly better marketing data.

For example, many web sites have email forms that they use to gather all the necessary information required to create a proposal, or to direct a customer to the correct support material. This information is typically sent via email and then once the information is recieved, thats that.

But there is a better use for this information. By using a database driven form (instead of an HTML form) you can capture this customer information automatically.

The web request is still sent via email but then the information given is also stored in a database that can later be exported and reviewed. Our web design clients have found that incorporating this type of database driven feature helps them turn their email requests into useful marketing data.

Outlier Solutions also uses database driven web pages to create corporate blogs (such as this one), product catalogs, sales representative listings, and event calendars.