Internet Marketing

Week 37.1 Internet Marketing

How do you reach your customer in the quickest possible time?

Here is the order of speed from fastest to slowest.

Phone call, SMS, email, forum, popular website (mudah.my, ebay.com,lelong.com) and lastly  own website.

Once you have your stock arrived, send sms to a list of your potential customer. If the price is attractive, they will respond and the deal is on.

It‘s also depend on your customer set whether it is new customer or repeating customer.

OK you got stock and you want to dispose it depending on your disposal objective. Make the highest profit, make the least effort, make the quick sale and easy job. You won’t get all of them.

The first 3 approaches are mainly for sellers who you already has a customer databases of more than 100 customer.

Description	Suitable	Not Suitable
Phone Call	Only for attractive deal with people you deal with for quite sometimes. Normally after 2-3 SMS, just call that fellow and sort out the deal. Normally, e.g. spot price went down to USD26/oz, you call your good friend whether he want to share your order or not. Within 2 hours, spot may be USd28/oz. So get it done quick.	May be offensive to others. Difficult for them to said no.
SMS	It’s the quickest form of email. Can send to lot more customers. Once you have something to offer, just sms to 10- 20 close/recent customers of yours. After a few sms reply, call them up and get the deal done.
Email	People will read their email everyday, so it will reach them latest 2-3 days because some of them don’t read their email during the week ends.	Too many email, may cause your email id to be listed as a spammer.

If you have some stock for sales but not enough to cover the whole market, then just start off with SMS first with your close and most recent customers. First come first serve. They should get back to you within 2-4 hours. If there is still some left-over stock within 4 hours, then it is time to do some masses emailing. Masses emailing you should expect respond within 1 day.

If there are still some left over stock, it is now open to all new customers. You have fulfilled your responsibility to existing customer. Then now, you can go and make the announcement in online forum and facebook and see whether there is any respond. If there are still got left-over stock then list them in ebay or mudah and wait for the customer respond.

Description	Suitable	Not Suitable
Forum	Depending on which type of forum, some active forum you can get a lot of sales. But the problem is your price must be among the lowest.	Inactive forum is useless. Choose your forum properly. Activation period may be 2-3 days, after that it gone as advertisement is too deep inside the forum. People cannot see.
Facebook	Lot of traffic.	Your advertisement may only valid for 1 hour, after that it is gone for good. All your friends now know U sell something, you may not want them to know at the first place. Your competitor can get hold of your customer as well.
Popular website	For getting new customer. The problem is timing, it can be 1-2 days, it can takes weeks, you really won’t know	Your price must be the lowest in that website
Own Website	Mainly for own customer and some new customer who suddenly bump to your website	Very low traffic

Today, people are also smart enough to search on facebook, forum, ebay, mudah, lelong etc. So if your prices are compatible then you can get some sales lah. In the end it’s all about price as silver is just a product with little variation, if you get from Mr A or Mr B, it is almost guarantee it is the same thing.

Unless you have plenty of stock, you don’t fire all at one shot, sms, email, forum, facebook, popular website, own website. You will end up disappointing lot of people. You also cannot fire too many times otherwise people will immune to it. Different variation of firing will enable you to understand your customer better.

Customer A is in forum XXX, email everyday, which website.

Customer B only see ebay.com. Etc.

Malays customer mainly from mudah.my

It is best to try different thing at different time and after some time you know what is the best way to advertise.

Good Luck.