Click-ITNEWS
October 2010
NEW: Voucher Special Offers Wizard Cast Your Vote for the next feature... “Tell us what you want next” PopIT Buy Now Buttons
The Editor Summer has gone again, and if you live in the North West where we are based, summer never arrived at all. We all have our expectations, and I just expect to have sunshine and fine weather in the summer time. It’s not too much to ask. Never mind, maybe next year eh? The general expectation in the market place is to have lots of special offers and bargains. We all want our money to go further these days, so everyone is used to browsing for the best deals. This leads me into the first feature of this month’s newsletter... our latest update with special offer vouchers. Now you can join the rest of the market and compete with your own special deals and incentives to get your customers to spend more to get those lovely discounts. Our next development is being opened for debate, and your vote, so we want all of you, our customers, to tell us what you want us to work on next in our future update. There are so many options for use as we expand our business, but we want to ensure that our customer’s come first in all our decisions. So take advantage of this opportunity and vote. Trevor Hirst (Managing Director)
NEW Voucher Wizard
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veryone has special offer fever these days. We all want to find the best deal, cheapest prices and bargains for everything we buy. Once it was only after Xmas when the shops opened their sales, but now they are any time of year, and in most cases all year long. If you are not providing special offers then you could be losing out on sales. Photographers and artists are no different to any other service or retail market, and they need to be flexible with their pricing and with the rates they charge in order to remain competitive. The most flexible solution is to offer vouchers to your customers, which is the most popular special offer method used by advertisers. You can issue a voucher number in so many ways, either in your advertising, direct mail, by email, over the telephone, on your blog, and on your website.
Vouchers are ideal because you can make as a value discount, and subject to a each voucher a unique offer, and restrict specific minimum order. it to selected customer groups or make it public for everyone to use. The Voucher Wizard makes it simple to create as many vouchers as you like. It They create the incentive for your takes you through the process step-bycustomers to spend more on their order in step, and you can edit your voucher later order to qualify for your discount. at any time. A voucher field auto-appears below your eCommerce galleries to allow You can also make the offer limited to your visitor to enter the voucher selected galleries, so you can promote a number/reference (if they have one) and collection of fine-art photos, or a specific prompts them to login if it is a private wedding gallery for example. voucher. The discount is then applied to their order. Public offer on all galleries... “Spend over £100 on print orders and get 20% off” Public offer limited to a specific gallery... “Get £5 off when you spend over £50 on prints in the Fine-Art Gallery” Private offer on all galleries... “Members of the Acme Sports Club get 25% discount on all orders over £150” Private offer on a specific gallery... “Members of the Smith family get £15 off their order when they spend over £75 on prints from their portrait gallery”
Vouchers can also be limited in the number of times it can be redeemed, so you could make it a one-off special offer, or leave it unlimited.
This new feature is a very important new development for our Pro-Gallery system, and it arrives at a time when it is most needed.
The other advantage of vouchers is that it is easy to monitor and control. You can see at a glance how many vouchers have been redeemed, and therefore how successful your campaign has been. You can also switch the offer on and off as required, so you can create special offers for Valentines and Easter etc.
We are pleased to offer this as another standard feature in our long list of enhancements and upgrades, and we hope you enjoy using it and benefit from extra sales it can generate for you.
Special Offers can be defined in many ways, either as a percentage discount or
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here are so many new features that we want to create, and only so much time to devote to it. So, we are offering you, our clients, the opportunity to VOTE for the next major feature that you would like us to develop. This seemed to be the most diplomatic and fairest solution, so I hope you all cast your vote and make your voice heared.
agents. The only difference is they don’t use or need the photo gallery system, but everything else is the same, so even the general business voice must be heared, which is why some of the features we are proposing are not entirely photography related.
Take a look at the four new features opposite that we are proposing to develop, and let us know which of them would be of most interest to you. As you will appreciate, we get tons of The one that gets the most votes will be requests for ideas and features, but the next feature we create. some are very specialised and have a You can cast vote and/or offer your very limited appeal. We have to focus own suggestions and requests on our on the benefits to the majority of our support website www.catamatic.com clients, rather than pander to a minority group with very specialised needs. Although our primary market is the The result of the vote will be photographer and artist, we also supply announced in the November our website system to general business newsletter. ranging from catering services to travel
1: Shopping Cart
is very easy to use, with all the features required for most retail services, but without the complexity and high maintenance that comes with most other high end solutions. It needs to be simple enough for anyone to add and sell a product without having to refer to manuals or contact support.
The reason why other hosted shopping The Pro-Gallery system is designed carts are so expensive is because of the for selling prints in all formats and high level of support that is required to sizes etc, but it is not designed for or maintain them for their customers. suitable to sell general products. We want to offer the shopping cart as a We do have our PopITShop facility which allows adding Buy Now Buttons on any page to sell any type of product, but it is a manual process that requires adding a line of PopITCode to a page, which is something that not everyone is comfortable with.
standard feature of our website system, at no extra cost. This will make it unbeatable value in the market, just like our Pro-Gallery system, and enable you to expand your services and sell other products as well as prints.
Creating a shopping cart module would allow anyone to sell any product with 2: Contact Relation Manager any combination of attributes (eg: sizes, colours), and include multiple product photos and testimonials, reviews, suggested products, special offers etc. We have reviewed all of the current eCommerce solutions and found them all to be much too complicated to use. Most of them were developed many years ago when only web designers understood how to use them (you should see the size of the manuals that come with them!).
Often referred to as a CRM, this facility is used to manage all your business, customer and sales contacts, and includes a calendar of events and tasks, to-do lists and diary manager. It allows We recognise that there is a need for a you to see at a glance your schedule of simple eCommerce shopping cart that events, meetings, sales leads, contact
lists, support requests, sales enquiries If your contact list is growing and your diary is getting full, then a CRM may etc etc. be just what you need. Many of us will use Outlook to keep track of all our contacts and view our calendar of events, but unless you go to the extent of using Microsoft 3: eCards & Lightbox Exchange and shared calendars etc, you will find it difficult to access your contacts when you are away from the office. The CRM is designed to provide full remote access to your contacts and diary via any web browser or smart phone. It can also be set to send you text message reminders of scheduled events. You can create calendars and diaries for different colleagues, so you can each manage and view your own events. Most of the CRM packages we have reviewed are far too expensive and much too complicated to use. They are full of features that most people will never use, and you can’t switch them off, so the screen appears complex and very busy. Another example of software bloat (ie: software that tries to be everything to everyone).
If you produce fine art or creative photography then you may be interested in offering your visitors the option to send one or more of your photos to a friend as an eCard with a message. This is a feature that has largely been captured by specialist on-line greeting card suppliers, where you can select from hundreds of designs and messages and send them as an eCard to anyone via email free of charge.
Some photo-galleries also provide this facility, and it can be used as a means of attracting visitors to your website who otherwise may never have found Our proposal is to design a hosted you, resulting in a possible new CRM that is easy to use and customer. expandable, so you can add just the extra features that you need, and switch The eCard is not viewed directly in the off the ones you don’t need. It will be recipient’s email, but it requires them a separate utility hosted on a domain to click a link in the eCard email to (or sub-domain), so it can be offered to view the photos on a special page on anyone, even if they don’t use our your website on which you can add your own welcome text (and even website system. display a voucher for them).
Our proposal is to add a new button to the basket page which allows the visitor the option to send any or all of the photos in the basket to up to ten email addresses with a message. The email is sent to the recipients with the message and a link to view the selected photo/s on your website (also with the message).
directly from MS Word (which can cause a whole heap of trouble), or entered text directly into the page editor and added spaces, or inserted images that are too large to fit in the table cell.
All of these factors can be controlled via the editor, but it still defeats most people who are not familiar with basic page Due to strict legal rules regarding layout techniques for websites. collecting emails, the system will not save the email addresses that the visitor Our proposal is to create a special page enters, but it will record which images layout wizard that presents the user with a range of classic page layouts for were sent and on what date. them to choose. The wizard then displays simple text boxes for each text area of the selected layout, and an image 4: Page Layout Wizard selection facility to select the images for each image in the layout. Our website system uses Once the user has entered the most popular and the text and selected the easiest of page editors images the wizard will available, the FCK Editor. generate the page layout and resize the images to fit. However, it still requires a learning curve to The wizard will even allow understand the concepts of the user to insert a slide adding a simple table to the show or random image into page using the table icon, any image space in the and then inserting text and layout. It can be used to images into the table cells. add a layout to an existing This allows you to create page or create a new page. an almost unlimited variety Once created, it can be of page layouts (the edited as normal from the positioning of text and images on a page). main page editor to allow adding In practice the results are far from internal/external page links etc. guaranteed, and it depends on many variables such as the width of the table and cells, font and image sizes, and even image alignments. It also depends on wether you have copied and pasted
It is hoped that this new feature will make the whole process of creating a professional page layout as simple as a few clicks of the mouse.
PopIT Buy Now Buttons
MasterClass
The PopITLinX facility allows you to display a Buy Now Button anywhere on any page using the following PopIT code... [[B100.00:item=Booking Deposit]]
B = Button The number after B is the price of the item. item = the name of the item or service You can also display a photo above the button by adding the image ID like this... photo=564
If your item comes in different colours then add them like this...
PopIT Tip 3:
option1=Colour,Green,Brown,Red,Blue
If you enter a PopIT code incorrectly then hover your mouse over the error code that appears on the page and it will tell you what is wrong.
...where the first name is the name of the attribute (Colour)
[Invalid PopIT Code]
For full details and instructions visit our support site www.catamatic.com
You can add a free text field to the button like this (for the customer to enter a reference)... text=Photo Ref
~IF~ If you think you are beaten, you are If you think you dare not, you don’t If you’d like to win, but think you can’t It’s almost certain you won’t. If you think you’ll lose, you’ve lost For out of this world we find Success begins with a fellow’s will It’s all in the state of mind. If you think you’re outclassed, you are You’ve got to think high to rise You’ve got to be sure of yourself before You can ever win a prize. Life’s battles don’t always go To the stronger or faster man But sooner or later the man who wins Is the one who Thinks he can. Anonymous
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