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| Leslie_Nolen |
Greetings, everyone! Today's chat will start in just a couple of minutes. |
| Leslie_Nolen | Good
morning! It's 10A sharp, so we'll get started. |
| Leslie_Nolen | This is our
first WebSavvy chat, so I welcome you and invite your comments and suggestions
for how we can improve it in the future. |
| Leslie_Nolen | Radial
provides sales, marketing and business strategy expertise to health and wellness
businesses of all kinds. Today, we'll tackle questions on how to use the web to
strengthen your health or wellness business. |
| Leslie_Nolen | Just type in
your questions - I'll respond w/ my thoughts and encourage others to add their
own experiences and advice. |
| Leslie_Nolen | Who wants to
go first? |
| owenb | when i search for
us on the website one of the other fitness centers here shows up. how did they
make that happen? |
| Leslie_Nolen | Hi Owen, are
you in a big city or smaller city/town? |
| owenb | we're in a pretty
small town in the south |
| Leslie_Nolen | owen, you
can do several things to help people find you. make sure yr city, state, zip and
phone # w/ area code are shown in text (not image) on your site. get local
groups like your chamber of comm. to link to your site. the 1st websavvy article
was actually on this topic and it's got quite a few tips also:
http://www.radialgroup.com/documents/websavvy_local_search.htm |
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| Healthynow |
Hi Leslie. i'm the gm of regionone we are a hospital fitness center. we
have a printed newsletter but want to start an email one. can you give us
someideas |
| Leslie_Nolen | HNow, how
big is your printed newsletter & how many people get it right now? |
| Healthynow |
usually 12pages and we send it once every thre months to about 3500 people |
| Leslie_Nolen |
HNow, a couple of thoughts: 1) you'll save a lot of money switching to
email! paper and postage have really gotten $$$! 2) it would be better to
send a lot less content (no more than 3 items say), a lot more frequently
than every 3 months. we usually suggest weekly or at least monthly. |
| Healthynow |
we usually have 20 - 30 different things in every newsletter, liek
contests or staff profiles or new promotions. im wondering which ones would
be the best to include? |
| Leslie_Nolen |
HNow, no offense, but most of your 12 pages is probably not that
interesting to your members. newsletters should offer useful/interesting
info to readers, and marketing should be secondary. plus, your readers
probably don't really want to read about your business as much as they would
like to read about other customers and what's working for them, how they're
overcoming hurdles, etc. |
| owenb |
we send our nl out every week and it usually has a fitness tip and a
promotion of some kind. |
| Leslie_Nolen |
owen, thats a great idea - how long does it take you to do that? |
| owenb |
really not that long. at first it took aobut a day and a half to do each
one but since we do it weekly we're pretty fast now, maybe 2 hours max? |
| Leslie_Nolen |
HN, owenb's experience is what we've seen too. if you do it weekly, you
get good at it fast. Probably part of the reason you have so many articles
is because you want things that will appeal to different kinds of customers,
right? |
| Healthynow |
right, we hav ea lot of seniors but we also have new moms and families and
so forth. |
| Leslie_Nolen |
so one thing that might work is focusing on a different target audience
each week - Wk 1 is families, Wk 2 is seniors, etc. |
| Healthynow |
leslie i've got to go but this was great. will there be another one? |
| Leslie_Nolen |
Hnow, yes, this will be a monthly event - the next one is Thur March 6,
same time, same bat-channel ::up |
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| fitnessgrrrl | i paid a
designer to make my site and its gorgeous but i don't think i'm getting very
many clients. |
| Leslie_Nolen | Fgrrl, how
would future clients know about yr site? |
| fitnessgrrrl | not sure i
know what youmeaan? |
| Leslie_Nolen | Fgrrl, the
Internet is like a library full of books. unless you read about a book in a
newspaper, or on CNN's website, or see someone mention it, you'd never know a
particular book existed. so how would anyone even know your site is out there? |
| fitnessgrrrl | OK, i see
what youre saying. really i just get most of my new clients when someone hears
about me |
| Leslie_Nolen | Fgrrl, you
need to start doing something that will alert people to your existence. can you
tell me a little more about your business & what u do? |
| fitnessgrrrl |
im a wellness coach (im a RD with a pers. training certif.) and i
specialize in women's health issues. |
| Leslie_Nolen |
Fgrrl, with your expertise you've got lots of PR opportunities that would
help make your site (and business) more visible to future clients. start
asking your clients who their docs are - you could give them a short summary
of progress to take to their next appt. you could also reach out to the
local newspaper with any really inspiring human interest stories about your
clients (get their permission 1st). also, free short seminars (lunch and
learn kinda thing) can be very effective - talk to women-focused groups. |
| Leslie_Nolen |
Fitnessgrrl, one last thought one your site - make sure it's got
interesting and useful content that would appeal to your future clients.
Some sites look great, but if the "meat" isn't there, they won't produce
business results. We just did an article on getting statistics about how
visitors experience your site so you knwo what to change -
http://www.radialgroup.com/documents/websavvy_analytics.htm |
| Leslie_Nolen |
Once you have Google Analytics on your site (super-easy to do), start by
looking at the bounce rate. I bet it's really high, which is a sign that
visitors are underwhelmed by the content. |
| Leslie_Nolen |
We've also got some tips on website design for wellness business here:
http://www.radialgroup.com/topic_technology.htm |
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| foodfirst | we want to add
ecommerce and are thinking about having a pdf order form that people can print
out and fax to us. do you think this will work? |
| Leslie_Nolen | Hi, FF. what
are you wanting to sell? |
| foodfirst | right now we
sell nutritino products and we would also like to sell some ebooks and maybe
podcasts or CDs. |
| Leslie_Nolen | Ah, got it.
I wd not recommend this approach. having to open and print and then fax a pdf is
a pain for customers. some will have trouble opening the pdf, more and more
people don't have a fax. this method only works if u have REALLY motivated
customers! we suggest using what's called a "hosted shopping cart". basically,
it's a service that lets you list your products on your website with a unique
link for each one that takes the customer to a secure online area where they
place their order. extremely easy and quick to implement, costs around $300/year
whether you sell a little or a lot. if you already have a merchant account you
can be set up and running within a couple of hours. one we recommend is
www.marketerschoice.com. Their support is good if you have a question and they
have lots of different features. there are other good ones out there, too. |
| Leslie_Nolen | we recommend
against buying the actual shopping cart software yourself. it's much harder to
add/change products, you'll be very dependent on your web developer, and most
people don't keep their software updated which exposes customers to security
problems over time. |
| foodfirst |
do you think we need a web developer to use this shopping cart? |
| Leslie_Nolen |
FF, if you know how to create a hyperlink you can do it yourself. the good
shopping cart services all have online and phone help + free "how-to"
webinars and it's really pretty easy. |
| Leslie_Nolen |
FF, when someone buys something on your site, they'll click on the link to
the shopping cart, they can pay by CC, and then you and they both get an
email notification so you know to ship whatever they ordered, etc. It's
really pretty slick :) |
| owenb |
what is the bounce rate you mentioned? |
| Leslie_Nolen |
owen, the bounce rate shows how many visitors showed up at your site and
immediately - either went to another site or closed their browser. It's a
major red flag if it's high (like 60-70%, for example) becaise it says
people aren't finding anything even remotely interesting to them on your
site! |
| owenb |
ok. |
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|
| marc | hi sorry im' late is
the chat still on? |
| Leslie_Nolen | Hi, Marc!
Sure, we're still going strong! |
| Leslie_Nolen | What's your
question? |
| marc | im the marketing mgr
for a wellness center here in st louis. i really liked the site statistics
article. we are getting lots of visitors to our site but not much happens with
them. what should we lo |
| Leslie_Nolen | Marc, what
do you want them to do when they first come to your site? |
| marc | to sign up for a
membership. |
| Leslie_Nolen | OK, that's
probably the first problem. Do you think most of your site visitors have already
been to yr center in person? |
| marc | i'm not sure but i
don't htink so because we ask our new members if they visited our site and most
poeple dont know abou tit. |
| Leslie_Nolen | Marc,
customers usually go through several steps before they buy . they research and
evaluate different options, for exmaple. so you need to have info on your
website that helps your future customer at every step in their buying process.
just having a membership signup is not going to work without those other steps
in place, plus i think virtually everyone will want to see your people and
facility before they commit anyway. maybe a good goal for your website would be
to encourage visitors to call and schedule a tour, or call to register for a
free workshop on "healthy lifestyles don't have to hurt" or similar. thoughts? |
| Healthynow | no one here
would ever enroll without seeing our center and meeting the people. we have a
lot of healthy lifestyles tips on our site and we promote some free seminars
there. |
| fitnessgrrrl | i know when
i joined my gym i wanted to see the people and see if i would be comfrotable
there. |
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| Leslie_Nolen | That's it
for today's chat - we'll do it again on Fri., 3/7 at 10A. See you then, and
have a great day! |
