Zap Bang Done Blog

5 Reasons Why Your Company Needs an iPhone App

You’ve heard the news and you’ve read the reviews… the iPhone is a huge success and iPhone apps are super popular among a very important demographic – early adopters.

Apple has reported that users have downloaded iPhone apps over a half a billion times in the first year iTunes opened the App Store. The market is growing tremendously with smart phones being compared to the laptop computer boom.

So, how does your company reach these influential movers and shakers? Consider making an iPhone app to promote your business. It’s inexpensive and very effective.

Here are five key benefits:

     1. Expand your company’s exposure to influential consumers.
     2. Set your company apart from the competition.
     3. Give your customers added value.
     4. Keep your customers up to date month after month.
     5. Increase sales!

Be an early adopter yourself. Join the growing number of companies that have discovered the power of marketing their company through the development of an iPhone application. Top companies including Amazon, Target, Starbucks, Zippo, REI and many more are doing it. With an iPhone app, your company can be seen as a cutting edge pioneer.

How do you do it?

Talk to people in your company that have iPhones and visit iTunes app store on your computer (even PC’s can get iTunes at iTunes.com). With a little bit of brainstorming you can come up with some great ideas. Now, look at what your company has to offer and make an iPhone app that represents your company.

Here’s the formula…

Create something that is both useful and entertaining based on what your company does best. Hire a company to create the app. Then, give it away for free so you can get thousands of influential people using your app and seeing your company name.

You can have webpages, rss feeds, videos and even an info screen in the app that tells all about your company and you can even offer special promotions from within the app.

How do you get thousands of users?

That’s the easy part. Once an app is submitted to iTunes, Apple does the promotion for you simply by including it in the App Store. Users will see it in the store and get to immediately download it for free.

Now, as you probably know, you shouldn’t stop there. Send out a press release and promote it on your website. Free is easy to buy. If the iPhone users like your “free” app, it will spread like wildfire.

Where can I get the app produced?

Zap Bang Done makes iPhone apps. We can make one for you if you can dream it up. Give us a call at 1-800-713-2891 or check out our website at http://www.zapbangdone.com/iphone-dev.php

Tags: create iphone applications, iphone, iphone app, iphone app development, iphone application, iphone application development, iphone applications, iphone apps, make iphone applications, make iphone apps

Marketing Your Products Using Online Marketplaces

Comparison Shopping Sites and Online Marketplaces offer a tremendous opportunity for retailers of almost any product.

 It started as a novel idea in the late 90s and soon became one of the fastest-growing web technologies. Comparison shopping engines and online marketplaces made the online shopper’s life easier by providing up to the minute information which includes streaming price data that would normally take the internet user long hours of browsing to collect manually. Concurrently, entrepreneurs spotted an opportunity in this new application of E-commerce and it was not long before cyberspace saw a new major player enter every month or so.

Online marketplaces and comparison shopping engines constitute an important part of today’s E-commerce world.  To help you understand this technology, and profit from it, we made this quick tutorial.

What is a Comparison Shopping Engine?

In the most basic form, comparison shopping sites and online marketplaces collect product information including price data from a collection of merchants and then display it to online shoppers. The biggest advantage of this service from the perspective of the web surfer is the variety and the ability to purchase products at the lowest prices available.

From the merchant’s perspective, they gain more exposure and therefore, market share. From the service owners perspective are compensated for the service by charging the merchant a fee every time a user clicks on the listings and/or every time a sale is made.

What is an Online Marketplace?

As the name implies, an online marketplace is a large collection of products from multiple merchants usually arranged in categories. The concept is relatively simple but due to the web’s ability to hold massive amounts of information it gives customers access to many more products than they could find in an offline brick and mortar store.

Merchants generally pay a monthly fee for listings and/or a fee per sale or by the click. Some sites will charge a monthly inclusion fee plus a per product listing fee but most do not generally include additional fees. Of course, each site has their own method.

What are the Advantages?

Listing your products in comparison shopping portals and online marketplaces can expose your products to millions of consumers in a short period of time. A summary of the most important benefit are listed below:

• Create A New Sales Channel.
• Gain Product Exposure and Visibility.
• Strengthen Brand Awareness.
• Drive Targeted Traffic.
• Improve Conversion Ratio.

Whether you have a unique product or one that is a commodity, online marketplaces allow you to test and research how your particular product and your sales efforts compare to others. Many people think that low price is king but you may find that higher prices give customers confidence in the product’s quality and in your company. If your product is going to sell, this is the environment to test it in.

How Marketplaces and Comparison Shopping Engines Work?

It is not difficult to participate in this new sales channel. You may want to choose one and test there before moving on. Of course, this is optional.

Below are the three main ways that you will be charged.

• Cost Per Click (CPC): Whenever a user clicks on your listed product, you will be charged the agreed upon rate per click. This is a good model for most merchants since it guarantees traffic to your site which should produce sales. Even if it does not produce sales, it is sending traffic to your site where you can then gather data and find out why visitors are, or are not, converting to customers.

• Cost Per Action (CPA): Every time a shopper makes a purchase at your e-store, you will be charged a predefined percentage of the order amount. The advantage of this method is obvious. No sales, no cost. You only pay for success.

It’s worth mentioning that there are also sites that offer their services for free. Many employ crawlers like the ones used by search engines to collect the product data. Others require manual products submission or data feeds.

How to Get Started?

To get in to the marketplaces and comparative sites all you have to do is join and put down a nominal deposit. This is usually between $25 and $100. Then you need to add your products. This will be very similar to adding your products to your estore. Each marketplace has an interface to load products one by one and almost all of them will let you upload using a data feed.

A data feed is simply a spreadsheet file. They will have specific extensions like txt, xml, csv…etc. These files contain product information that includes product descriptions, pricing, sizes and other important product attributes. The data feed file takes the burden of manually adding and updating each product off your shoulder as it provides an automatic solution not only for listing many products at once but also for updating and editing products efficiently.

If you do not know how to create a data feed of your products, you can give Zap Bang Done a call (800-713-2891) and we can create a data feed feature for your site that will allow you to download files at any time. We can even set up auto updating of your files with most marketplaces.

How to Choose a Marketplace?

Choosing the right marketplace for your business can be a headache given the large number of choices available. There are two marketplaces that we have used often and know to be good sales channels and a great beginning for any merchant.

Founded in 1996, Shopzilla is the leading comparison shopping service. The company’s mission is to enable shoppers to easily find and compare products sold by virtually anyone, anywhere. Each month, Shopzilla connects millions of consumers with many thousands of stores. Back in June 2006, Shopzilla attracted over 18.9 million unique visitors according to ComScore. Shopzilla also operates BizRate. A consumer feedback network that collects millions of consumer reviews on stores and products.

NexTag - the leading comparison shopping site for products, automobiles, real estate, education and more. At the core of NexTag are proprietary technologies and algorithms that enable shoppers to quickly compare many prices and to find the best deals on millions of products and services. For thousands of merchants, service providers and individuals, NexTag is an extremely efficient sales channel with highly qualified traffic and a performance based pricing. More than 17 million people per month use NexTag.

Niche Market Marketplaces

You will also be able to find certain marketplaces with your niche market in most cases. Etsy is a great example. It is a marketplace for hand-made items only.

• Etsy is an online marketplace for buying & selling all things handmade. Our mission is to enable people to make a living making things, and to reconnect makers with buyers. Our vision is to build a new economy and present a better choice: Buy, Sell, and Live Handmade.

How to Save Money in Your Campaigns?  

Many of the marketplaces are CPC based. These CPC-based campaigns can put a strain on your budget if not handled right. Here are few tips that will help you manage your budget and simultaneously get the best results in terms of conversion rate and exposure.

• Keep an eye on your products: Monitor the performance of your listed products closely and don’t hesitate to de-list poor performing, inactive or out of stock products. Taking this action will safeguard your budget wasted money on clicks that do not convert.

• Pick the categories carefully: Take your time to review the categories available before including your products within. Try to follow the logic of customers when searching for products online.

• Update your data feeds: Keep your data feed files updated on a daily or weekly basis. Following this advice will increase the conversion rate as shoppers will be informed of the latest promotions as soon as they are unveiled.

• Check your listed products: Wear the hat of your customer and go through the marketplaces clicking randomly on your products. This will show you whether your images show or not and the links are working and leading to your website or not. Doing so will help you discover problems and fix them before they drain your budget needlessly.

• Consider the move to dynamic data feeds: it may sound counterintuitive to suggest migrating to dynamic data feed system given the high cost associated with this move. But I am confident that you will appreciate the decision once the results are out. The system reduces the time required to manage your listings and provides you with a much easier way to update your files. A time and money saver solution in the long term.

• Use Google Analytics: This is a must if you intend to make much money online with or without marketplaces. It’s free and can give you a lot of invaluable information. We have a full newsletter about Google Analytics in a future newsletter. http://www.google.com/analytics/

SUMMARY

Marketplaces are one of the few marketing efforts that can show you an immediate response. You can sign up today and see sales tomorrow in many of the marketplaces.

Take your time and test, then test again until you have a good program working. Then duplicate it to as many marketplaces as you can. You will be able to make your products available to millions of consumers this way. We hope you make millions doing it!

For a full and free list of marketplaces, Click Here. You will be able to download a zip file that contains an excel file listing over 50 active marketplaces.

Tags: marketing, marketplaces, Zap Bang Done