Emerging Open Source Markets

Whether you are a not for profit or a small business selling services and products and services, you probably invite your customers and potential customers to events regularly.  Typical events can rage from:

• Speaking
• Training
• Webinars
• Book Signing
• New Product release
• Annual company celebration
• Customer Appreciation Days
• Golf Outing

The list can go on and on.  The ideal solution for events, whether you charge for them or not, is a Hosted Web Form from ETP Matketing.

You can post your event on your web site, your blog, twitter, facebook, print adds, company newsletters, and more.  Simply include a link to your Hosted Web Form and you’re all set.  People will sign up and pay (if required) for your event in advance.  You can then be comfortable hosting your event knowing you’ll have at least a certain number of attendees.  You may find you have a few additional people sign up at the event itself.

Coordinating the event will require a minimal amount of effort and expense.  In my view, you’d have to get pretty large from an events perspective before you out grow Hosted Web Forms and have to move to actual event planning software.

This will afford you the time and resources to focus your time on what’s really important!  Hosting a Great Event.

I hate to complain about Microsoft, but considering they’ve been the leader in the Operating System world for over 20 years you’d think that they’d at least get the simple things right.

Truly,  only M$ can start with a good idea and design it in such a way that they’ve actually designed in a defect.  In my most recent experience, my Windows 7 system comes put of the box with a “Power Setting” that shuts the system off after an hour of inactivity.

Now this could be a useful way to save electricity and be a bit more environmentally conscientious.  That would be if the feature actually worked.  Seems pretty basic as systems have been doing this sort of thing for many years.

The way people implement this type thing is to save everything the computer is doing then either power down or go into some other sort of hibernate mode so when the system powers back up it just picks up where it left off.  M$ use to do this, and I believe the Intel Chip set has supported this feature for many years.  Of course, when M$ implemented hibernate on previous systems it was truly a painful experience because it took so long.  It was almost as painful as a complete restart anyway, but I’ll give them this.  At least it worked.

Fast forward to 2010 and Windows 7.… they power down completely and then when you power back up you’re presented with a screen that says something to the effect the system was shut down illegally and is recovering.

Come on guys! Not only is this annoying, it’s pathetic!

Now that we’ve added PayPal support for our Hosted Web Forms, it’s time to add a few examples of how people can use Hosted Web Forms to Increase Revenue. Importantly, their are a number of side benefits that fall out of this process of using Hosted Web Forms.  These benefits include reduced errors, reduction of credit card processing effort and mistakes, reduction of email entering errors, easier emailing, easier ordering and fulfillment, increased cash flow, and increased actual sales.

The Wine of the Month Club Example

Manual Process

Imagine you own a Wine Store and you want to start a Wine of the Month Club to increase sales and customer loyalty. {I’ve belonged to a couple.  They’re fun and inexpensive}.  So what do you do?

You probably begin with a little “space advertising” in the store that says something like “Ask us about out Wine Club“.  Maybe you even have some other signage or fliers describing the Wine Club details.

Now you have to be available to talk to the person and sell the program. Once they’re convinced, you get out your sign-up book where you have the customer enter their contact details including email and/or mailing address along with their selection of the type of program.  Perhaps it’s two per month for $25, either 2 reds, 2 whites, or one of each.  Finally, you get their credit card and enter all of their information for each sale.  You have your first order.

Now it’s time to fulfill your Wine Club Orders.  About mid-month you go through your book and manually calculate how many of each type wine to order.  Next you need to manually enter all of your email addresses in a database for your notification email to be sent at the end of the month {This part is prone to error both on interpreting the clients and writing and typos that you make}.

The Wine arrives and you bag it and tag it.  You send out an email using your home system in which case it’s time consuming and provides little report email data or you pay $15 per month and use an email service.  Next you begin processing all of the credit card payments for the $25 manually.  You probably need to run off receipts for each order and put them in the bag.  Customer comes in, picks up order, and you’re done.  Pretty easy, eh?

The Hosted Web Form Approach

You start by designing a Web Page that describes your Wine Club details.  You Print off a number of these pages so you can use them as sales collateral throughout the store and at the checkout cash register.  On the Wine Club Web Page you have a link or button that takes the client to the Sign-up page on the Hosted Web Form.

You put up a large sign in the middle of the store that says “Sign-up for our Wine of the Month Club”, under which you place a PC that is always on displaying the Wine Club web page you created.

Whether you are in the store or not and whether or not the client is in the store or at home, the client reads the web page and clicks through to the Web Form sign-up page.  At this point the client enters all of their information and makes payment using a recurring payment button on the Hosted Web Form.

Upon completion, the client will receive notification of the transaction completion from you plus separate notification from PayPal for the completion of their financial transaction.  You will receive the same for both as the money would been transferred to your PayPal account at that point.

Behind the scenes, your Hosted Database has been updated with all of the user information in real time.  When it is time to place orders you have all of the “correct” information in a spreadsheet which you use to easily calculate your orders and place them.

The orders arrive, and you bag them.  You use the spreadsheet you have from the Hosted Database to print customized personal tags for the bags.

Now the first of the month comes.  All of your customer Wine Club transactions have been automatically processed by PayPal.  If you have 100 customers, you now have $2500 less PayPal transaction fees in your account with no effort on your part. The money is in your PayPal account and all of your customers have received a receipt from PayPal.

About the same time you put together your Monthly Wine Club notification email letting customers know their Wine is ready for pickup along with any other announcements you’d like to make.  You send that email to ETP Marketing for release.  It goes out in a couple of hours.  A day later, reports are ready for your review if you’d like to see them.

At this point, you’re using the time you saved to think of more processes improvements you can make using Hosted Web Forms.

As for the extra revenue, you’ll find uses for that too!

At my ETP Marketing site, I just added PayPal Support to the existing Hosted Web Forms, Hosted Database, and Email Blast Services.  This is be really nice functionality for the small business or not for profit as it allows them to sell products or take donations without having to put together some sort of Shopping Cart.

The fact that it can easily be tied into the Hosted Database, Hosted Web Forms, and Email Blast Service makes this a money making must have feature.  All this and the client really doesn’t need to know a bit of code.  That works for a lot of folks frustrated with the technology that just want to get on with business.

As I build out these services, I’m trying to listen to my customers and be as inclusive as possible.  I had been providing the PayPal services for some time for a few clients before offering it as part of the package.  It works so well that including it is really a no brainer!

Of course, ETP Marketing offers a spectrum of services beyond the Hosted Web Form Services.  They are Interactive Producer Services that range from basic Interactive Producer Services to more sophisticated Interactive Producer Professional Services.

So the XP machine my wife has been using since 04 had a drive failure.  Given its age and the fact that I’d almost rather eat my own spleen than rebuild another windows system, I decided to purchase a new system.  They’re cheap enough these days and come with Windows 7 which is suppose to be the latest and greatest from our friends at M$.

Well, not to be negative, but Windows 7 functions an awful lot like XP in my view.  Certainly, nothing revolutionary in the last 5 years.  On the evolutionary side, they’ve done a nice job on the graphics and the GUI, but nothing that I’d describe as exciting.

Windows 7 is like putting "Lipstick on a Pig"

Functionally, it’s still a pig even though it may have a bit of lipstick on it.  It still takes a long to to start up and shut down.  Installing programs can take a lifetime, particularly when you compare it to a MAC or Linux system.  It’s frustrating to say the least.

You have to be asking by now, why didn’t this complainer just buy a linux system?  It’s really simple. We have a fairly large amount of time and money invested in documents and applications that run on Windows that we just don’t want to abandon at this point.  That’s home use.

On the business side, I bit the bullet a couple of years ago and bought a MacBook Pro and haven’t looked back.  After a very short learning curve my productivity skyrocketed.  Sure, there were and still are some inconveniences, but on balance I get more done and work more effectively.

On another note, [and I've been waiting for this for a long time], the day will come where the actual desktop OS will not be relevant.  The technology is moving in that direction fast but it’ll still take a decade before it’s a reality.

As for myself and my clients…. more and more applications, documents, and tools are moving to the cloud [SaaS model].  I’m not alone.  Most of the businesses I see are doing the same and consumers have been doing it even longer.  Companies that can’t move and adopt fast enough will be steamrolled by the momentum of all of this and fail.

Given how slow M$ has been to adopt the technology, I don’t think they’ll make the cut long term.