‘Sales and marketing’ category

We’re up for a Webby!

Posted by Dave at 10:34 am

It’s all very exciting - for those that don’t know, a Webby is the online version of an Oscar (but with fewer emotional thank you speeches…well, probably) and is the most prestigious award a website can get.

We’ve been nominated in the Banking / Bill Paying category - where we’re up against such leading examples of web goodness as Bank of America and JP Chase Morgan (& Co.) - so I think we’re in with a shot!

Take a look at the complete list of nominees and if you’re feeling particulary loving towards Zopa, you can help us win our category.

This is because there are actually two awards in each category - the People’s Voice award, and the Judges award. The Judges award is chosen by a panel of highly qualified, skilled, dedicated and experienced Web gurus (allegedly) so we can’t do much about that - BUT, the People’s Voice award is voted for by you, the public.

Although you have to register before you can vote, it’s not too painful a process, and we would be very grateful. On the off chance you’re already registered, you can sign in and get voting without delay - voting closes on the 27th of April.

Thanks for your support - wish us luck!

Posted in Sales and marketing, awards | 4 Comments »

Shop Zopa!

Posted by Dave at 11:45 am

Whenever we’ve had Zopa swag to give away, we’ve always been inundated with requests for some of it. Sadly, generous as we would love to be, Giles stops us from giving every member a t-shirt, so we can’t help everyone who wants to demonstrate their love for us.

Anyway, member penandme suggested over on the board that we have a Zopa shop, where you could buy lovely Zopa branded merchandise.

You ask, we obey (sometimes), and so there is now a rather splendid Zopa shop open for your purchasing pleasure.

We’ve got mouse mats and mugs, t-shirts, and even some tasteful boxer shorts! What more could you ask for?

Alas it’s too late for Christmas 2006, but why not beat the crowds and stock up for next year?

(Also, we’re not making as penny from these….although we might increase the prices soon and give the profits to charity - get in there now!)

Posted in Brand, Sales and marketing | 2 Comments »

Zopa on TV (Properly this time!)

Posted by Dave at 11:28 am

We’ve just had confirmation from the BBC that (subject to no huge breaking news story) we’ll be on the BBC1 6 o’clock news tonight.

Obviously we’re expecting a wave of interest as a result - so this is a great opportunity to get your money on the markets and get it lent out. If you want to top up your money at Zopa today - give us a call on 0207 636 7712 before 6pm - or go online and fill in your details.

Brace! Brace!

Posted in Sales and marketing, Press, Members | No Comments »

Zopa on TV! (Sort of)

Posted by Dave at 12:38 pm

You might have caught the latest Money Supermarket adverts on TV recently.

If you’re particularly eagle eyed you might spotted the odd Zopa logo whizzing past at high speed. If not, nows your chance!

You can download the video (15MB) for a hi res version, or it’s also up on YouTube. (Although it’s a bit harder to spot at the lower resolution)

15 minutes of fame? Maybe 15 milli seconds - but it’s a start!

Posted in Brand, Sales and marketing | No Comments »

Zopa - Now award winning

Posted by Dave at 7:26 pm

You might remember a previous post about Zopa being nominated for the Internet Innovation of the Year award at the CNET Networks UK Technology awards.

Well, we only went and won it!

To quote the judges:

There was little disagreement over the winner for this category. Zopa brings innovation into an area of life that can make the most difference to those who need it most. At first look, the idea of open source banking - eBay for money, it’s been called - seems completely implausible. But a combination of vision, a very strong management team and the right technology has proved that the idea works, and works well. A world first that has almost unlimited potential to change the way money works for people, it’s one to watch.

And here’s the award to prove it. Lovely, isn’t it?

Ops Director Linda and CTO Tim went along to the party last night to pick up the gong. I think they enjoyed themselves.

Now we just need a trophy cabinet!

Posted in Sales and marketing, Press | 6 Comments »

Zopa = Top UK Web 2.0 App

Posted by Dave at 4:35 pm

While the arguements rage about what exactly is meant by Web 2.0, Richard MacManus over at Read / Write Web has kindly listed Zopa as Top UK Web 2.0 App - we are there, but you have to go right to the end to see us (Downside of having a name beginning with ‘Z’ I guess.)

The original source for the article comes from JigsawUK - a web site that tracks UK startups, so thanks to Colin Donald there as well.

It’s interesting that we’re in the category of ‘Second time around entrepreneurs’ - I guess that’s because of Richard’s previous experience at Egg, but James and myself were definitely start up virgins when we left Egg to create Zopa

Posted in Sales and marketing, web 2.0, blogs | 4 Comments »

More funnel flipping

Posted by Dave at 1:11 pm

A little while ago I wrote about flipping the funnel, or encouraging our members to advocate Zopa. One suggestion was to use the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to promote Zopa.

Makoto (Thank you!) has come up with some more suggestions - firstly, a simpler way of listing Zopa and del.icio.us. All you need to do is click here and you’ll be taken to the web site and asked to save the Zopa website. Type in a few tags to describe Zopa (suggestions - lending borrowing p2p finance social money exchange web etc) and hit save.

Makoto also suggested using Feedburner as a way of managing the RSS feed from the blog (What’s RSS? It’s a way of publishing and reading the blog without having to keep coming back to the website. You can read the Wikipedia article here). Advantages to using Feedburner are that you can configure it to add links to del.icio.us on every post, and also understand more about how people are using the RSS service.

Anyway - I’ve done it, and if you click on the the links over on the right, at the bottom of the side panel, or simple click here you can access the RSS feed. If you’ve using Firefox or Safari, it should jusy work, if you’re on Internet Explorer and don’t have a news reader installed, it won’t, but you’ll see a page that explains what to do!

Go on - bookmark us on del.icio.us or subscribe to the feed. It’ll be good for your soul.

UPDATE: If you’ve previously subscribed to the Zopa RSS feed, it would be great if you’d subscribe to the new feed URL as you’ll get the extra links as noted above, and it would really help me keep track of what’s going on Strictly optional of course - the original feed isn’t going away.

Posted in Sales and marketing, Members | No Comments »

2% Bonus - clarification

Posted by Chris at 10:34 am

Hi all

We’ve had a few queries on our board about the 2% lender bonus - here’s some quick clarification…

Your money must be offered by 11.59pm on 31st March 2006 at 4.9% or less on the A36 market or 6.9% or less in the B36 market. Provided that you keep your offers at these rates, you’ll receive the 2% bonus on all money lent out after that date, no matter how long it takes for your lending to be matched and processed.

You’re absolutley right to observe that this offer has been extended previously - and that it costs us money! To clarify, we’d rather invest our marketing spend to the direct benefit of our members - wherever it makes sense to do so. This particular offer benefits both lenders and borrowers.

In all honesty, we haven’t decided whether to extend the promotion for another month… you’ll just have to keep an eye open on the site But any lending offers made before 31st March (before midnight) will be eligible…

Hope this all makes sense. The full details can be found here

Posted in General, Sales and marketing | 1 Comment »

Invest ‘06

Posted by Dave at 12:51 pm

We went along to Invest 06 at the Business Design Centre last week - up in Islington, North London - to spread the Zopa word and get some cash in for our lovely borrowers.

You want proof? We got proof:

From left to right in the first picture, the people in the green are James, Dev, Chris, Rebecca, Des and Natalia - and Pardeep took the photo! The second one is Pardeep and the lovely Rebecca - you can work out who is who!

Posted in Lenders, Sales and marketing | No Comments »

Hocus pocus focus group

Posted by Dave at 4:44 pm

Over the last couple of months we’ve been running a series of focus groups in the UK and US, mainly with people to whom the Zopa concept was new, but also with a few existing members. We’ve been trying to work out why (indeed, if) people like Zopa, and how they’d like to see it develop. We’ve got some great feedback - and we thought we’d show you some short clips of the focus groups so you know we’re not making it all up!

This short video (about 10 mins, just over 9MB - apologies for the video and audio quality!) is an edited version of over 50 hours of focus groups, with some of the most interesting comments from all the people that attended.

What I find most interesting (Apart from the fact that everyone loves Zopa) is the variety of reasons people have for using us or liking us. There are incredibly technical people, who see Zopa as a very pure economic efficiency model, there are those who just like the idea of ’shafting the bank’, those who just want to get the best rates (for lending or borrowing) and then there are those who love the idea of transacting with people, not a faceless, (and fat cat) bank!

Anyway - download it (You’ll need Quicktime to view it) and let us know what you think in the comments. And while you’re there, are we mad to put our research up on the web like this? I think it’s pretty unusual….but is it interesting / useful?

Posted in Sales and marketing, Members | 2 Comments »

Site upgrade!

Posted by Dave at 3:43 pm

More good stuff is on it’s way right now as we upgrade the site.

For lenders - you can look forward to being able to lend the money in your holding account, even if it’s less than £500, by adding it to your most recent offer - this means that you can start earning a higher return on it by lending it to borrowers without having to wait for more repayments to come back in.

This is a start - over the coming weeks we’re going to be adding the ability to lend less than £500 from the very first time you join Zopa, and also to automatically relend the repayments you receive from borrowers - 2 much requested features.

Also released today is an improved member get member scheme - now it’s behind the sign in security, so we can pre-populate the email we send out to your friends and help you to spread the word about Zopa. This fits in really well with my previous post on ‘flipping the funnel’ - now go and use it! (And get paid for the privilege)

Posted in New stuff, Lenders, Sales and marketing, Members | 2 Comments »

Flipping the funnel

Posted by Dave at 1:18 pm

You what?

Seth Godin is an interesting guy - he describes himself as bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change. He’s written some fascinating books about marketing, change and work in general.

One of his latest idea is ‘flipping the funnel.’ The funnel is the classic marketing description of how you get customers - you pour lots of ‘prospects’ in the top, and some drip out of the bottom as customers. He’s written a very short ebook that you can download here (in PDF format) that says that companies should flip the funnel to become a megaphone.

In English that means using your customers to become your saleforce - on the basis that your customers hopefully out number your sales team, and that they are some of your most passionate advocates. So help them tell the world about you!

Two of his suggestions are blogs (Well, you’re reading it!) and encouraging your members to use del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service. Don’t worry too much about what that means - essentially people (like you and me) use it to ‘tag’ websites that we find and think are useful, and other people (like him and her) then search to find those useful websites. So, you might stumble across Zopa, and tag it with the words lending, borrowing, people, money, finance, blog etc.

Simple huh? Here’s an example - search for ‘lending’ and up comes Zopa! (With Prosper in second place.) It also tells us that 220 people have tagged Zopa with the word ‘lending’ - and you can see who they are - cool isn’t it?

Here’s the pitch - if you think Zopa is a good thing, go to del.icio.us, sign up, and start tagging Zopa. Lets see if we can stay ahead of Prosper!

And ‘Thank you’!

What else can do to help flip the funnel, and make Zopa members into advocates?

Posted in Non Zopa, Sales and marketing | 4 Comments »

Zopa stories

Posted by Tom at 4:01 pm

Hello,

We’re looking for some good stories about Zopa members.

You know, stuff like I borrowed £5000 at Zopa to pay for my wedding reception and it was the best day of my life. Or Zopa helped me get the funds to finish my conservatory. Or I’m using the interest from the money I’ve lent at Zopa to save up for a motorbike to ride across America.

Or even stuff like I went to a dinner party and ended up sitting next to someone I’m dealing with on Zopa. Or I recognised an old mate’s username on the Zopa exchange prompting me to get in contact with him for the first time in 5 years. That sort of stuff.

Anything really, as long as it’s Zopa-related.

You can either email me at tom@zopa.com or post responses to this blog.

Oh, and while I remember, let me know if you’d like to recommend a fellow Zopa member for the prestigious Username of the Month award.

Posted in Funny, General, Lenders, Borrowers, Brand, Sales and marketing, Members | No Comments »

T-Shirts and goats

Posted by Dave at 12:46 pm

Not normally 2 things you’d put together I realise. Well, not before about 3 in the morning, a bottle of wine and several large whiskies, (or maybe that’s just me?) but anyway - together they are.

You may know that every borrower that takes a loan from Zopa before the end of January gets a goat, and a T-shirt - well, this is to let you know that both items will be dispatched shortly. T-shirts to borrowers, and goats to Africa.

Send us a photo of you wearing your funky Zopa T-shirt, and I’ll post it up on the blog for all to see!

Posted in Borrowers, Sales and marketing | 2 Comments »

Free Goats!

Posted by Richard Ireland at 6:47 pm

Here’s news of the the latest offer from Zopa which we hope might encourage people to join and borrow on the exchange. It’s a slightly more unusal one, but we think it just might fly, so to speak.

We didn’t want to trot out a “me-too” offer that you might expect from a traditional bank, and of course as Zopa is not a bank but an exchange, we can’t just slash our rates in the short-term or offer introductory discount rates to woo potential members.

So instead we’ve been racking our brains for something we thought would be more fitting and something we don’t think you’d expect to see from a bank. And most importantly an offer that, in keeping with the Zopa concept, is about people helping people.

Between now and the end of January 2006, everyone that takes a loan at Zopa will also receive a free goat. Now, when I say “receive” that’s not strictly true. What will actually happen is that we will fund the provision of a goat, along with a number of other services, such as training, and breeding support to programmes based in Africa. And all on your behalf.

And no, we’re not setting up an African office just yet to manage this. Besides the fact we wouldn’t know where to start when it came to breeding goats, everything has been taken care of, and provided by some great and frankly far more qualified people at FARM-Africa (registered in the UK as a charity no. 326901). Check out their website for more information on the fantastic work they do.

And there’s more. As well as providing goats with each loan that is taken, every borrower will also receive a fabulous printed T-shirt with the Zopa logo, and their own Zopa username on the back. See our offer page if you want more details and an artists impression of the T-shirt people will receive.

Posted in New stuff, General, Borrowers, Sales and marketing | 2 Comments »