7 Unique Corporate Gift Ideas for Clients

Thankfulness is a part of every religion and culture, and its by-products are happiness, love and sustained relationships. This concept can also be extended to the business world as well. Given the fact that it is the customer who puts the bread on our table, it serves our best interests to say ‘thank you’. One of the best ways to do this, is to present them with a token of our appreciation or a unique gift.

When we think about corporate gift ideas for clients, most of us visualise corporate diaries, branded pens, watches, calendars, planners, USB sticks and the like. However, when it comes to family members, we consider their likes and interests before selecting an appropriate gift. The same holds good for your business clients as well. Thus it is always better to give them what they prefer.

Corporate Gift Ideas for Clients

Having known your clients for long, Im sure you will be aware of their likes and dislikes. Keeping that in mind, here are a few corporate gift ideas for clients.

Tea and Coffee Hamper

Clients, who love hot beverages, can be gifted with a Tea and Coffee Gift Hamper. It contains an assortment of different flavors of coffee and tea meticulously arranged into a gift hamper. Thus, it acts as a visual treat and looks desirable at the outset. You may check out some sites, where they can be ordered online like

Beermats or Drink Coasters

A beermat is an object on which you can rest glasses containing drinks. This is used to avoid the glass from being in direct contact with the table surface, thereby preventing any possible damage or scratches. They can thus be gifted to clients who socialize a lot. These beermats can be personalized, before giving them away.

Marketing and Motivational Books

If your client is an avid reader, then this can be an ideal gift. And who doesn’t need motivation? You can find books on motivation, marketing and various other subjects on Amazon.com.

A Miniature Waterfall

This is again very popular decorative item; it provides a soothing atmosphere and therefore helps to calm one’s mind. It is easy to install and can be used either at home or in the office.

Bonsai Trees:

This is a gift which can enliven the home or workplace and therefore serves as an ideal giveaway.

Chocolate Hamper

Everybody loves chocolates. If your clients also have a sweet tooth, then why not allow them to indulge in some chocolates and remember you in the holidays?

Dry Fruit Hamper

Although a fruit basket makes a good gift, we personally love dry fruits and suggest that you gift the same. This hamper contains an assortment of dry fruits; they obviously have a longer storage life.

Therefore, we find that there are many more corporate gift ideas for clients ; the main idea is to be considerate enough to understand their likes and dislikes and choose the best ‘Thank You Gift’ to make their spirits come alive!

5 Reasons Why you Need a Website Re Design

The internet has come a long way since the past decade. There has been a splurge in popularity of many small business websites, who have demonstrated their capability to take on the bigger players. At the same time, many websites have lost their appeal due to their unwillingness to change according to the latest trends. Your online visitors can easily make out if your website looks outdated. You need to make sure that it stays in tune with the latest trends. The best way to find out whether you should go in for a website re design, is to visit it, using your smartphone.

Website Not Optimised

Many of us are glued to smart phones for most of the time. However, very rarely do we use them to check our own website. If a website loads slowly or appears disproportionate on a smartphone, that means it has not been optimised for the mobile.

Unclear Message

Web visitors will be on your site for a brief while. So make sure that you get the message across, very quickly and in the most effective way. If the message is not clear, they will simply click away to another site. Therefore make sure that the main page contains all the essential points and the message is conveyed in plain and simple terms. If you feel that it is appropriately designed, you may still ask for a second opinion from close friends who will be more honest in their review of your website. Also have it tested on multiple devices as well as browsers.

Difficult to Navigate

The website must be easy to navigate. The visitors must never get ‘stuck’ in some part of the website and find it difficult to go back. The navigation bar is usually towards the top of the website. It must provide the user with the much needed ease in navigation. The users also expect links at the bottom of the web-page, so that they can find their way through your website, even if they get lost.

If your site is easily navigable, people will spend more time on it, and this increases their visit duration and sometimes results in business conversions or product purchases.

Doesn’t look Trendy

Your web design needs to keep up with the current trends and should not look outdated. Although it may not be evident, you still need to view it from your customers’ point of view. It is best to seek the unbiased opinion of your friends. This will give you an idea of what needs to be done to make it look more appealing.

Poor Conversion Rate

When people visit your website, they may choose follow the Call-to-Action (CTA), submit a query form, sign up for a newsletter, buy a product or perform any other recommended action. If you are getting less response and your conversion rate is on the decline, then there is cause for concern. It implies that your website is not providing the customer experience or simply doesn’t have the appeal of your competitors. Once you are sure that something is wrong with your conversion rate, it is time to go in for a website redesign.

Lots of Bling

Make sure that the site doesn’t have too many bells and whistles. Too many graphics and animations slow down your website and drive visitors away. It is much better to have a simple but optimised website. It loads faster and conveys the message to the web visitors without any further hiccups.

These are few of the reasons why you need a website re design. You may thus approach website design professionals to get it re designed.

9 Secrets to Running a Successful Shopping Cart Website

You will need ecommerce website design if you are into retail business. Here are some tips to build and manage a successful shopping cart website.

Simplicity

Your business website design must be simple. It should not contain all the bells and whistles like flash animation, background music, etc. Users are accessing your website while on the go; the last thing they want is slow loading flash or a blaring background music. Also, keep your Affordable Shopping cart design presentable, simple and free from clutter. That way, the users will quickly find what they need without delay. Apple.com is the best example of a clutter free site.

Always Respond Quickly

When customers submit an enquiry, you must respond quickly. A lazy response to customer queries is a surefire way to lose them. If they order your product, make sure that a receipt is sent to them along with delivery details. If you are on a vacation, then delegate the job of checking your official email to your employee. Also have a customer support number which is manned during your work hours with a facility to leave voice messages during non-working hours.

Interact with Customers Online

Social Media like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest can help you build your own community where you can interact with your customers and fans. Fans can also share their experiences about using your product and post it on your social media page. In fact, positive online reviews especially via social media can add credibility to your brand and help in word-of-mouth marketing. You can also have a blog where healthy discussions take place regarding your subject of expertise. A blog can also have sharing buttons so that a wider range of people can benefit from the knowledge.

Have Customers Comeback for More

Your must keep the company website constantly updated with fresh content. Therefore it is good to have a dynamic website with a blog which is constantly updated with interesting articles, so that visitors keep coming back for more. Also make sure that the blog has a comments section with Facebook and Twitter sharing buttons. You can even run offers like “50% off for a day”. This will create interest and the visitors keep coming back for more. Repeat visits to you website by your loyal customers, may even lead to product sales.

Optimize within Limits

Do not try too hard to optimize your website. Let the content feel natural and not be studded with too many keywords. Let it be interesting and readable. If you try to stuff keywords in every nook and corner, your website will be regarded as spam site and demoted by Google. Remember that the key to top SEO ranking is quality content.

Avoid too many Listings

There is a general view that submitting links to various directories, will cause Google to give you a good ranking. The fact of the matter is that Google actually recognises these web directories as ‘bad neighbourhoods’. If your website is listed there, it will be taken as a spam website.

Build your Mailing list

Have visitors to your website to sign up for a free E-Book. They should be able to subscribe to it by submitting their name and email. Thus you can send out newsletters to your subscribers once or twice a month. Take care not to bombard their inbox with more frequent newsletters. Also have an option for your subscribers to opt out. Thus you can build a community of subscribers with whom you can interact and send special offers on your products.

Customer Service

In spite of the advancement in technology; you still cannot replace the element of ‘a human touch’. Having an online shop is not just about getting orders, counting money and asking the shipping guys to handle the rest. You must have customer support executives who are real and not virtual beings; they must be handling customer calls. Customers may encounter a lot of problems. It could be that your website accepted the payment two times, or probably they ordered two times, or perhaps the product with another color or size got delivered. There are many concerns which a customer support person must resolve. This cannot be done by a robot or any virtual telephone assistant. When customer concerns are taken care of, they don’t mind giving you a positive review, whether it be online or by ‘word of mouth’. This generates trust.

Easy Payment

Make your payment method easy. You could opt for an ecommerce solution like Shopify or integrate your site with Paypal. A successful shopping cart website cannot be build overnight. It can definitely evolve into a success over a period of time, by following the right steps. Do you have any favourite tip for promoting an ecommerce website? Do let us know in the comments below.

Tips for Creating Evergreen & Quality Content

When you plan to write evergreen content for your blog, it obviously needs to be subject-specific and stand the test of time. Is this possible in today’s ever-changing world, where technology is changing rapidly? So how will you make sure that it stays relevant time and will continue to get traffic? Here are some tips.

Let content match your product

Let’s say, for example, you own a fashion brand. In this field, there are tonnes of great content ideas you may come up within a short period of time. However, if you are selling a less glamorous product like a mosquito repellent, or house cleaning services, then the content obviously cannot be as glamorous or interesting like the former.

Nevertheless, we found the following pest control blogs very interesting:

http://www.bulwarkpestcontrol.com/community

http://www.thermal-clean.com/blog/

Therefore, it goes without saying that you don’t need a glamorous product to write a great blog. Your blogs can be just as interesting, even if you don’t have a fashion product to sell.

Identify Customer Problems and Solve Them

Customers will flock to your site when they know what they will get from you. If you own a restaurant, then they may be interested in your popular recipes, if you are fashion designer, they may ask you for grooming tips and so on.

Here are some DIY and problem-solving sites that we found helpful.

http://www.doityourself.com/

http://www.ana-white.com/

http://www.curbly.com/

These sites basically fulfil the needs of their respected visitors by providing solutions to most of their problems in a DIY (do-it-yourself) format. Most of the DIY solutions given in these sites will remain ever-green at least for a long time.

Search the Analytics

Check out the site stats to see which search keyword is most commonly used to get to your website. Once you analyse the valuable site data, you will know for sure what works and what doesn’t. You can check the traffic stats to know which kind of posting is attracting huge traffic and which isn’t.

Check out Keywords Rankings– Update Content, Keep it Fresh

Check out the keywords you want to rank for and how those are actually ranking. Find out which keywords are doing better and which are not ranking well. You may plan your content likewise (by incorporating the required keywords in the right proportion. It is possible that the keywords which ranked well, came down due to old content; if so you need to tweak the related content a little bit and make your keyword rank well again.

An old blog need not necessarily be discarded. It just needs to be prepped up with the latest information & added graphics and updated once again.

Be Specific and Technical

Your blog pertains to your niche, so don’t shy away from being technical. Your aim is not to please all audiences, but to deliver the right traffic to your site. So it helps you in the long run to be more subject specific in your blog; avoid the urge to be generic and understandable by one and all.

Curated Content

People have an obsession with the top 10 of everything. Create a curated post containing the top 10 of your respective field. I’m sure people will love it. You may further include links inside those postings for further information. People also love listings and the will definitely come back to your site, to see more of it.

The above tips will help you carve out evergreen content for your blog. The term ‘Go Green’ doesn’t just refer to your environment. It applies to your blog too (pun intended)!

Fabulous Blog-post Ideas that will make your Blog “HOT”

We have always spoken about blogs and their importance in online marketing. However, coming up with blog post ideas all the time is not possible at all. Even if you have the knowledge on the subject, coming up with new titles every time can be very demanding. So here are a few tips, which may come in handy when you are starved for blog post ideas.

Play the part of a journalist

Attend an event related to your field of work. Take pictures, interview people. Write back a blog on the event. This is basically reporting and nothing else. However, when it goes together with blogging, the result can simply be a ‘fresh and relevant blog post’. The bottom line is that you are providing useful content, and better still you are reporting LIVE.

Take a Popular Post and Comment

It is one of the best ways to build your authority as an expert in your field. Comment on a blog or article written by experts and give your take on it (after providing a link to their original posting). Commenting on the blog articles by experts also gets you possible back links, or better still, a re-tweet. This will definitely generate extra traffic on your blog.

Insider’s Secrets

Give your fans, some insight into your field, and how things work. No, I’m not asking you to spill the beans and tell them all your business secrets. However, let them into your world and give them a glimpse of what your average day looks like.

For e.g., if you are a martial arts expert, post a video of martial arts and self-defence. The audience will be grateful that they learnt some new self-defence secrets. In reality, you are not giving anything away. They will still need to enrol for your classes to learn it anyway. Nevertheless, you have created a rapport, and they will definitely come back to your page for more tips.

Expert Opinions

You will need to establish connections with experts in your particular field. Then, you can ask for their take on a particular issue. Ask them a set of questions, and record their replies for future postings. Each question you ask them can similarly be posed to other experts. In fact your questions, have the potential to become separate blog ideas, where your field experts talk on different issues.

Once you do this with the permission of the concerned speakers, publish them as a new blog, and tag them in your post. If you are good, chances are that you will earn a re-tweet and the eyeballs of their followers, who usually come in hundreds of thousands.

Generate Infographics

Many a time, when bloggers are starved for blog post ideas, they can turn to graphics. Infographics are very much in demand, especially those relevant to social media and online marketing. You may choose any other area depending on your expertise and make relevant statistics available, after adequate research.

Behind the Scenes Post

When you are short of blog topics, you can try this behind-the-scenes post. You basically let your audience into your production, retail or service facility through posting pictures of your employees, office, staff recreation and other significant office events. The idea is to let people know that there are human faces at work, behind the brand logo. That way, people associate themselves with the company, as they see for sure that humans with emotions run the company and not robots (no pun intended).

Are there any blog ideas that we have left out? Do let us know in the comments below.