While 87% of small businesses have a website (Forrester), many of these businesses are being let down by inadequate tools. In response, online software startup BigTurns has a platform, a web-based application that completely replaces traditional web hosting with a fresh, business- oriented approach. BigTurns is the world’s first web hosting platform that automatically tracks and profiles visitors on your website, creating a complete picture of customer behavior. This empowers business owners to know their customers more intimately, make better business decisions and ultimately improve profits.
 

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Last year over 10 million US small businesses were prioritizing eCommerce initiatives (Forrester), yet the eCommerce world remains a nightmare of confusion and complexity. It’s that nightmare that BigTurns puts to rest with it's all-in-one software, a web-based application that makes running an online store easy by bringing together all the tools that business owners need to succeed. In contrast to existing solutions, BigTurns completely replaces the traditional website-ecommerce pair with a holistic “online business” approach that puts the spotlight on understanding your customers and getting better results – whilst saving time and money.



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The BC Government has a $5000 grant available to businesses in British Columbia looking to become more competitive in their market place.

The grant is to be used to increase productivity, support the introduction of new technology, support the introduction of new work processes, enhance international competitiveness, or introduce new innovative strategies to increase the long term competitiveness of the firm.

You can spend the grant on a wide range of services and choose any service provider you like. For your convenience we have listed two eligible services designed to get your sales team more productive and motivated to sell

• Set up and training on BigTurns eCommerce Platform (learn more >>)
• Set up and Training for the Managed Inside Sales Strategy (watch presentation >>)

Both services are custom designed specifically for your sales team. We are tailoring the services to fall within the allotted $5000 grant and should be able to save you a few dollars in the transition to selling more using online technologies.

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BigTurns is an online business platform.  What’s an “online businesss” platform?  If you’ve not come across this concept before you probably talk about a CMS (content management system).  BigTurns platform at its most basic level is a CMS system, but it’s so much more…

What BigTurns does is take all the elements that a traditional online business needs to be successful and merge them into one holistic solution.  The elements that I’m talking about are CMS, e-commerce, email marketing, CRM, analytics and reporting. 

Typically a business will run all these systems separately in different environments.  By doing it all in one place will save you money, but having these fully integrated can make marketing so much more targeted and accountable.  Calculating ROI on email campaigns and affiliate schemes is so much easier and can done “out of the box”. 

The system also helps to build accurate profiles of your customers because every interaction they have with your website, whether it be completing a form or buying a product is recorded against their CRM record as can every email you have with them.  This means any member of staff can pick up that customer and at a glance can see exactly their history with the company.

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Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) is a constant battle online. I call it "Shiny Object Syndrome". It is so easy to lose focus these days and bounce from one great idea to the next before we have fully executed on the first great idea.

That's why we need a plan that follows a the path to success. 

Decades ago, business owners had it easy - they weren't dealing with the rapid and volatile change we deal with today.There was a strategic, focused way of managing a businesses that you may remember - the 4 P's.

The 4 P's, aka the "Marketing Mix", is a combination of four marketing ingredients that you must constantly balance and control when running your business.

The 4 P's are still relevant today, and we have a bit of an update to applying them to the eCommerce Business:

Product

Offering static, cataloged products no longer wins the race. With comparison shopping sites and huge online stores like Amazon, how do you compete on Product alone? Google has changed the way we buy online and your customers now start with the goal in mind (a product), then choose which supplier to buy from.

If you're selling eProducts or online services then you still have the power to innovate and stay ahead of the game, but if you're selling tangible goods you need to be offering a valuable experience AND proving your credibility.  Here are a couple of proven techniques to demand credibility:

1. Allow customers to offer feedback with comment forms on blogs, announcements and products. This builds online credibility for your next round of customers to see, making them feel more comfortable doing business with you.
2. Offer a public forum where customers can discuss what they like/dislike about your product or service. You can always moderate the forum if you are concerned about negative feedback.
3. Give your customers individual, personalized attention through exceptional customer service.
4. Prove that you're an expert by creating content & educating you customers about the products.Give customers detailed photo galleries, videos, specifications and anything else they won't find in a "bricks and mortar" store.  Customers crave information in their quest to become more informed.

Price

Competing on price is a hard battle to win.
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Do you need to generate more sales?  Do you want to fire up our sales team?  Is your Marketing Department producing good quality leads?

One of our clients has a very effective way of using the BigTurns Email Marketing Platform as a calling list for his sales team and I would like to share his methods and successes with you here.

First, you need to know about the Email Marketing Platform.  The BigTurns platform is hooked into the BigTurns Analytics and Reporting engine.  That means that when you send out an Email Blast you will have access to the following Data:

1. Who Opened Your Email
2. Who Clicked on a Hyperlink in your Email
3. What Hyperlinks were clicked on the most
4. What Products were Bought as a direct result of your Email

This is very powerful information.  You will know, in real time, who opened your email and weather or not they clicked on a link or not.  You will know who is interested in your products and who is not. You will know How many times they opened your email and how many links they clicked on.  You will be "BIG BROTHER" watching your contacts interact with your email campaign.

This is a snapshot of the Email Marketing dashboard for each campaign.

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About 4 years ago, we were looking into starting a new business, online. As an accomplished businessman we started thinking about what we were going to need to be successful. A website was the obvious starting point. It had to be easy enough to add and change content - because websites live or die on the basis of fresh, useful content.

Next - we needed a way to manage leads and customers. You need to be able to react quickly to new leads and follow up on old ones. Then, marketing. Email marketing to be precise. A permission based list of people who are receptive to hear your message is priceless. And don't forget - online shopping. Selling online is the most important function we needed to do.  We wanted to process orders 24 hours a day.

That's a basic list. There's more, like community forums, affiliate programs, blogs and so forth. But let's keep it simple, ok?

So, checklist in hand (we are pretty organized kinda guys) we went looking for something to do all this and we found Content Management Systems, and Customer Relationship Management systems, and Shopping carts, and Email Marketing Solutions, and Site Analytics. So we signed up to all these services and downloaded what we needed to download.

OK great, we thought, let's get started!....Or not.

We got frustrated. Because running any business is a little like racing a car. You've got to push hard, stay ahead of the pack and be smart about how you race. But our  problem wasn't that we couldn't race. We were wasting our time trying to build the nice, fast car.

The other problem was we found ourselves spending a lot of time trying to keep all his separate systems in sync. And more than once we forgot one of the five or six log in details we were supposed to remember.

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Why "All-In-One" Matters

Last weekend I moved into a new house.

In the usual flurry of last minute craziness, I managed to pack my stuff and get my furniture to the new house. Now I've got a list of things to do: 

• connect the electricity
• connect the phone
• connect the gas
• connect the internet (most important, of course)
• change address with my bank
• change addresses for magazine subscriptions
• change drivers license address
• change health insurance address

The list goes on for about a page!

What if I could do it all in one step?

If instead of calling 20 different numbers I could just call one? Imagine the time it would save!

Now maybe such a service exists, I'm not sure. But since I don't move every week this isn't a problem I really urgently need solved.

I do, however, need to manage my ecommerce business on a daily basis. And unfortunately managing an online business these days requires logging in to many different tools and interacting with them all on a daily basis. So it's a lot like when you move house - but you have to do it all the time!
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