To be more responsive to customer needs, emphasise customer satisfaction, develop closer relationships with their customers and flatten the management structure some companies have adopted Customer Teams or Customer Focus Teams. These are cross-functional, Customer Focused teams exist to provide customers a ‘one-stop shopping’ service.

Teams have complete ownership of their accounts, with each team empowered to decide how to work with each of their customers and bring together each service function such as accounting, sales and service into a single team structure to serve all the needs of the specific customers assigned to them based on a mindset of continuous improvement in customer experience. Teams are empowered to take corrective actions to resolve day-to-day problems and have direct access to information that allows them to plan, control and improve their operations. The teams manage themselves and work within the team is generally allocated on the basis of skills and strengths, rather than just job title. This enables a team to provide fast turnaround on all a customer's issues and concerns. By self managing, like players on a pitch during a team game, the managers’ role becomes that of coach, developing skills and knowledge rather than simply directing and controlling actions.

Working in Customer Focused teams interdependence and joint responsibility for outputs become the goal and thus instead of organizing work traditionally from the top down, reducing processes to individual steps work becomes structured around whole processes. Traditional approaches reduce the required skill at every level of work leading to boring and repetitive tasks, but team based approaches are more likely to consider the fit of team members with the work to be done with those closest to the jobs agreeing the jobs specifications.

The advantages of ownership and self management include customers being more comfortable knowing who they will deal with, and teams gaining in-depth knowledge of the needs of each customer because of improved internal communications as team members understand the customer’s expectations and share information, realizing there is no advantage in hoarding knowledge – as their pay will be affected by their customers’ results on their own company’s profitability.

Self managing teams do not just happen and they are not ‘an easy answer’. Teams go through several stages on their way to self-management and it can take two or more years to achieve this objective. Comprehensive training in basic management skills such as problem solving and decision making is critical, as is functional cross training so they can manage their own processes.

To fully realize their potential, teams need not only to be cross-functional but also need to be managed by entrepreneurial and experienced managers who understand that they exist to provide greater profitability for their company by providing better customer experience to their company’s clients or customers and to this end support and drive team initiatives, including playing an active role in building an ongoing working relationship with the customer’s management.

Teams also must not become ‘customer silos’ rather than ‘functional silos’ and must work on sharing policies, systems and processes and people so that the results of ‘winning teams - those that provide increased customer satisfaction together with superior profitability and increasing volume – are quickly tested and replicated elsewhere. To achieve this senior management needs need to fine tune structure, roles, processes and systems to meet the ever-changing needs and increasing complexity of both the customer’s business and their own.

Senior management also have to set the tone and reality – teams exist to provide greater profitability for their company by providing better customer experience to their company’s clients or customers.

To achieve these corporate goals teams must:

1. Make customer satisfaction their top priority.

2. Have a common understanding of the organization's vision and mission and their role in that.

3. Understand the roles of individual members within the team as well as its role with the organization.

4. Work together to plan, make decisions and resolve differences and build trust.

5. Understand what is and is not possible and walk before they try to run

6. Set goals for continuous improvement in inputs, processes, outputs and measured results.

Pay per click - PPC - advertising

Pay per click or PPC advertising is possibly the easiest and most effective way to market your business online. Getting your website listed in the search engines is vital due to the fact that the majority of website traffic (statistics say over 80%) comes from the search engines. Effective PPC management begins with devising a strategy to drive qualified traffic to your website.

PPC (PPC) advertising is simply advertising your website through the use of the search engines’ “sponsored listings”. When using PPC you bid on keywords or keyword phrases that your targeted prospects may use to find whatever your website offers. Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly known as Overture) for instance, only considers the bid amount in ranking a site. The most popular PPC Google Adwords uses bid value and your success (click through) rate.

To develop a your PPC strategy and plan, you must conduct market research. This should consist of identifying your target market (preferably a niche market), identifying keywords that your target market uses to search for what you are offering, and analyzing the keywords and alternative keywords that will appeal to your target market.

During your keyword analysis, you will want to find out how popular keywords are and what the average bids are for certain keywords you are considering for budgeting purposes since defining a budget is a necessary part of PPC management.

Budgeting for PPC advertising involves not only determining how much money you can spend on your campaign, but basing that on the monetary value of a click to your website since you are paying per click.

Your conversion rate, the number of unique visitors divided by the number of sales, plays an important role in determining the value of a click to your site for PPC advertising budgeting purposes as does the average net profit per sale. By dividing your net profit per sale by your conversion rate, you can accurately determine the value per click to your website. The price per click that you pay for your PPC advertising should not, of course (!!!) exceed this value.

So if your selling a product that gives you a £10 profit, and a particular keyword takes 50 visitors to create a sale you would bid no more than £0.20 per click to break even.

A few tips about PPC if you DIY.

1. Don’t put more money than you have to into your account – sounds obvious but….!

2. Test, test, test have at least two separate ads for the same product at the same time. Drop the lower performing adverts and add a new one until you are satisfied with the results.

3. Make sure to keep up with your results daily at the very least and adjust your strategy according to results.

4. Continue to look for new keywords and as you find new ones lose the poorer performers.

If you approach PPC advertising logically, follow the direct marketing mantra of test, test, test, monitor results regularly and make adjustments only according to results PPC advertising is a powerful tool for driving profitable traffic to your site.

You can download a PDF version of this article here.

EVALUATING WEB SITE PERFORMANCE

Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet Marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals.

If you don't know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business.

If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven't been doing any unusual offline promotional activities.

However, just because hoards of people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those visitors to actually do something there. It is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your website.

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and work out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 2,000 visitors to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that result by 100.

If your website is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then work out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.

You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low. There are several effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your website, particularly launching a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier.

You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company to do the work for you. In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions.

Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it's too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.

Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.