F.A.Q
Some of the common questions about us from our first time clients.
More information in our Glossary, with explanations of key E-Commerce terms and abbreviations.
General Questions
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Our team is international, we speak native Greek, English, Spanish and German. Although this FAQ is written in English, as we have multinational clients, we can communicate with you in any of the above languages.
We would ask the same! The cost depends on the following factors, a) your goals b) your products or services c) your target country and d) your involvement in the process.
The websites start at 1000€ for smaller websites without online payments. Bigger websites with content or online sales start at 2000€ in the smaller versions. Fully connected websites with the newest markting technologies have individual prices.
Marketing services start at 250€/month.
With our new focus on Social Media, we offer many services, please ask for prices.
We offer online courses on many online subjects for up to 5 people. Please ask for prices.
Generally it is not necessary to start big and expensive, we prefer to start smaller, learn and then grow bigger. We always try to make the whole process as cost effective as possible.
If you cannot be found, then your competition will be taking the biggest share of these opportunities. Even if you only sell in your physical store, people choose online to come to your business. This is true in Greece, but even much more in other European countries.
Ask the people you know, you will surely find examples of somebody who went online, had big promises and hopes, but nothing ever happened from his online project. No visitors, no new contacts and no revenue, a dead website that nobody knows or cares about. The internet is a huge graveyard of such webpages. We don´t overpromise!
Do what you do best, run your business and let someone like us help you grow.
However, if you have a specific goal, certain activities can be quickly activated and start delivering traffic within hours of setup. But in order to enter a new market or country, you must expect weeks until you get relevant results. The most important goal is to archive a stable and sustainable growth, not to do it in the shortest possible time.
The first one is that the websites get built without really thinking about the audience and how they search for the products or services offered. Without understanding your clients first and researching your competition, you will develop a “nice” looking website that nobody likes to use. Don´t get blinded by a beautiful homepage, the real important parts of the website are the pages where you show your offer! These are often hard to use, don´t work right, are not optimized for customers using their mobile phones and don´t provide the information the customers need.
The second reason is that nobody will find the website without continuous work on it and specially without some online marketing to bring attention to it. Different from any “real” store, nobody will just pass by and step in because he saw something intersting in the window. The internet is much bigger than any street! Without the right online marketing no website will ever bring revenue!
There is a third reason, sadly. Some online agencies do a bad job. Not enough research, bad SEO, bad programming and no real advice for the customer on what he needs to do to become successful. Additionally, online marketing only with Adwords, badly set up, too expensive, without results.
It took us years to really understand the online market and we understand that this is not for everybody. Still, the online market is huge, growing daily and very much worth to address. It would be a pitty to let this chance go by. We have 3 possible solutions for you:
- Based on a monthly fee, we take care of everything happening online for you. The only thing you will see are emails with the incomming orders from your customers. The only thing you have to do is to ship your items (or deliver your service) out to them. We will answer all customer inquiries for you, update the website, put your new products (or services) online and take down the old ones. We will take care of all marketing decisions, inform you and decide how to continue. We can offer this service for Greece and all countries we work in, with native knowledge.
- We can setup, instruct and develop an online person or team in your company to take care of your online activities for you. This will also include a reporting system and, if needed, the necessary software installation in your company. That way, you will get a fully functionable team to handle your online growth.
- We can instruct, in person and via Skype, an employee of your company, so he can take care of all the necessary steps and be responsible of your online development. We cannot make an expert of a person in a few weeks, but he will have the basic knowledge to relieve you of the daily decisions. Together with our assistance you will be able to expand in the online market.
Please feel free to contact us on this matter, we will find a solution that suits your needs!
First of all, we believe in personal contact, so we are frequently in Greece visiting our clients and make personal appointments. If we begin a collaboration with a new client, although many contacts start by mail and with Skype talks, we will try to make a personal appointment with you as soon as possible. We want to learn more about you, your business and your ideas.
Throughout our collaboration we will be in regular contact by Skype, with video calls, so we can see each other too. Apart from that, you can expect regular personal contacts too, if you wish so. We have native Greek employees, so the communication will be natural.
Apart from that, as our business continues to expand, we are planning to open an office directly in Greece too.
Website Questions
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Why can´t I just use a free or cheap website service? I know somebody who will do it really cheaply!
Especially in foreign markets, the share of online sales is so big that many companies have understood the importance of websites & online marketing and take it very seriously. To make your website earn an important share of revenue to your current business, the proper planning, design and development is key to success. This is as true for the website as it is for the following marketing campaigns. Get professionals with experience like us to do it correctly right from the start.
To give you a picture: You would never ask your general doctor to do a complicated surgery, if he had not done it multiple times before and is a specialist, would you?
Avoid frustration, get realistic goals and save time and money.
All websites built by Ola Online Consulting are owned entirely by our customers. Although this has not happened yet, you are entirely free to move the website to someone else. In fact, we will teach you to take over the website, so you can have complete control, if you so wish.
As part of the website development and the following online marketing, we will offer you instructions on how to manage the content yourself, so you can change and edit your products or services. The backoffice we will provide you is designed to be easy to handle without any programming knowledge.
Unless you request otherwise, all Ola Online Consulting websites are built to be responsive. Responsive websites are entirely mobile friendly and are essential in todays online world. We take great care in giving the best mobile experience to our customers.
We will not deliver any website that is not optimized for mobile usage!
Accordingly, we will use every possible step to make your website rank high in Google and Bing. Different from many other agencies, we do much more than filling out the corresponding fields of the website. We will use every onsite and offsite method available and do the necessary research work upfront to ensure that your website is found with the most important and relevant search terms.
This is especially important if you plan to access a country with a different language, as the search patterns might be completely different than in your home language. In short, we take SEO very serious and will provide you the best possible results.
You might have noticed that some very beautiful websites don’t exist anymore and some “ugly” websites still exist. The reason is that a good website is one that is perceived as good by your customers. Young customers like other things than older customers, woman like other things than men. Hi value products get presented different than low value products, and so on. A good website is one that is fast, mobile friendly, functional and easy to use. Not necessarily “beautiful”.
Don´t get “blinded” by a nice homepage with lots of beautiful photos. That is nice, but your customer did not visit you for a nice looking homepage! He has a need and wants to find a solution, fast & easy. A good website is one that makes it easy for your customer to find what he is looking for. Remember that any customer will only spend 20 seconds on that beautiful homepage, but a lot more time on the pages that show him what he is looking for.
We at Ola Online consulting take great care in finding out what your customers will expect and develop a website that suits their taste, not necessarily yours or ours. Our main goal is to make a website that helps you grow your business, not a nice looking one that does not perform.
We will help you use and understand this tool, so you can track your traffic yourself. For customers that need a regular consulting on what their data means or want a regular reports, we offer the needed consulting services.
We always advice to use FB to strengthen your website, your traffic and the involvement of your customers with your brand. Depending on your goals, we will setup or improve your FB page to deliver results. We can do this in Greek and in other languages as well. As part of our service, we will guide you to use FB and other channels to help you succeed.
But theses marketplaces ask substantial fees for selling your products and have their own rules which must be obeyed. Generally, we do not advice to rely only on them, but to use them for a greater reach, additionally to your own website. We at Ola Online Consulting can help you learn the tricks of the trade on these marketplaces and how to use them to drive revenue to your own website.
Online Marketing Questions
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What kind of online marketing can you do for me?
Contrary to what many companies say, online marketing is much more than having Adwords campaigns and a Facebook page. Depending on your target market and target customers, there are basically the following marketing channels that we can use for your business:
(Also look in our Glossary for more information)
You pay to get seen in Google. Usually, you pay every time somebody clicks on your ad. The cost for this click varies greatly depending on your product or service. This can go from a few cents per click up to 100€ per click for certain search terms, especially in the banking business. The catch is: Although you can get visitors with Adwords, it does not mean that they actually buy your product or service. This is why we are very careful at the beginning of the campaigns and learn which keywords give the best revenue before we start spending more money. The same applies for Bing, the other big search engine next to Google.
To drive results, you have to be on the first page, if possible in the first 5 results. But, as everybody knows this, there is a fierce competition to be there. Honestly, nobody can guarantee you that you will appear there, this depends on many factors and the competition. As mentioned before, we at Ola Online Consulting take SEO extremely serious, so we will do whatever is possible to get there and, even more important, stay there. We will do our homework building/adjusting your website and tell you what additional possibilities are available.
Additionally, social media platforms offer paid marketing opportunities with some advantages compared to Adwords. Social media is a central element of all our successful online marketing campaigns and that means much more than FB alone. There is Youtube, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and many more possible channels.
The first version is one of the cheapest and most effective marketing channels, but it requires that you have enough relevant email addresses to send the mailing to. The classical way to get those addresses is by offering special discounts to your visitors if they sign on to your newsletter. Used right, it can be a reliable and relatively cheap way to generate revenue.
The other one is to buy/rent email addresses from specialized companies for a campaign. This way you can access new customers that normally are hard to reach. Depending on your target audience, you can select specific groups that match your goal. This way of marketing can be very effective but is also expensive and should only be done when the website is performing well.
Basically, you give a share of your revenue (usually between 3%-10%) to other websites or blogs that find customers for you. There are two big advantages of this kind of marketing. 1) They have access to customers that you cannot reach otherwise 2) You only pay when you make revenue. This marketing channel is a bit complicated to use, but very rewarding. We at Ola Online Consulting have a lot of experience with this marketing channel and will use it to your advantage.
As in real life, people trust the opinion of people they look up to and if they write something positive about you, this can have a huge marketing effect for you. We will identify and contact the right people for your offer and your target customers. We have a large database of bloggers that we can contact on your behalf.
This marketing channel, often overlooked, can be highly effective and cost efficient.
We at Ola Online Consulting believe that cooperation is the heart of online business and have many successful examples that proof this.
It basically means that every customer that came to your website and left without buying anything is stored in an external database. As he contiues to be online and visit other websites, he will see your advertisment with an offer of exactly the products that he was looking for in your shop. He is “retargeted” with what he was looking for.
This method is the reason why, after you were looking for something online, you suddendly start seeing everywhere ads of the shop and products you just visited. This marketing channel needs some software installed in your webshop and comes with a setup fee. Also, you need some traffic on your website before it can be effective. Accordingly, this is no tool to start with, but can be very rewarding to fuel your further growth.
On the other side, successfull companies spend thousands of Euros monthly for online marketing. We have worked with companies spending over 100.000€ each month for marketing! They don´t do it because they want to waste money, they do it because they EARN money from it!
The cost for you depends on your target market and your products or services, as well as your goals. As a rule of thumb, you can expect to spend around 10% of your revenue for marketing, although this can vary greatly if you want to grow fast and big. The good thing is that you will get total transparency over the spending and the results, we will lay out all the relevant figures for you and explain to you what they mean for your business.
Generally, we will only spend money for online marketing if it brings new revenue to your business. If it does not, we will stop it imediately, analyze why this is so and take the necessary consequences. We will never spend money for marketing “just because”!
We hate wasting money!
Some marketing channels, like affiliate marketing, although very effective, require a bigger investment to set them up and are not suited for every product or service. After understanding your targets, we will give you a detailed plan of what possibilities we can offer you. Your success is our success, accordingly, we will give you the best possible options that fit your budget and your goals.
Foreign Market Question
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The Greek market is special in many ways, as many of the biggest online companies have chosen not to enter the Greek market. Amazon and Ebay for example do not have a Greek website. In some ways, the Greek online market is not as developed as in most of the other countries in Europe or USA. This is good on the one side, as the competition is not as tough. On the other hand the online market is relatively small and the amount of online purchases compared to offline purchases is lower than in almost any other country in Europe.
The reason is that the customers in other countries expect to find a website tailored to their taste, and their behavior is different than in Greece. Also, there are some legal aspects that have to be taken into account, that are not as important in Greece. In other countries, where the competition is strong, you cannot make mistakes, as your competitors will sue you fast and easy and this can have serious effects for your business.
We have professional translators that can deliver and translate in any of the following languages: Greek, Spanish, English and German. Additionally, we do not only translate, but more important adapt = localize your content (text+photos+videos) to your target market. This is extremely important and will make a big difference in your success!
The reason is, that the customers in each country are different and expect different content. In addition, we will optimize your content in a way that your customers and Google find what they expect. This will have massive positive SEO consequences.
And the most important question.
Why should I choose you?
Successfully, we should add! From the very beginning, you will notice that we know what we are doing. With 20 years of experience we understand the do´s and the dont´s in the Online world.
We are natives in foreign markets!
Understanding your target customers is essential for success, especially in foreign countries. But it is the best to talk to a native in your own language. We are both: Native in your language (German, English, Greek, Spanish), and native in your foreign target country.
We love data!
Our decisions are based on facts. We will tell you what your customers are doing. Where they come from. What they like and dislike. And most imporant, where & WHY they leave. We “listen to your customer” and take our decisions based on that. Don´t take our word for it, see it for yourself.
We love E-Commerce!
Honestly, we love our job! For us, there is no other field that offers so many opportunities and moves so fast. We learn new things every day. For us, online is fun! That is our motivatation to deliver a great jobs.
