5 Customer Service Tips For Your Business

A lot goes into customer service. This is where we foster and nurture relationships, and really go the extra mile to ensure a long-lasting relationship with them. To keep your long-term customer service efforts going strong, here are five tips to use!

Communicate – Strong communication skills are vital to a long lasting relationship. You can’t possibly know what is going on with your client if you don’t talk (or email). Make sure you stay in contact with your clients. Let them know you are thinking of them. Send them some resource materials. Mention that article you found online that you thought would be of interest. Whatever you do, stay in touch and let them know that you are available and interested. You want that virtual door to remain open so that your client can feel completely comfortable coming to you.

Show the love – Everyone likes to feel appreciated. How do you show your clients that they are truly appreciated? Do you provide them with special discounts? Do you send them notes or tokens of appreciation from time to time? It’s important to show that you care for your clients and are grateful for the business.

Be faithful – Yes, we are usually the ones who want our clients to be faithful, right? We don’t want them falling for the next best thing that just happens to be a few bucks cheaper, a little shinier…But the same goes for us. We must be faithful. Faithful to our marketing messages, with which we must stay consistent and reliable. And we must be faithful to our clients in providing them top notch service that they can depend on.

Be supportive – If you don’t provide support to your clients, you will see them leave. One by one. Because everyone wants support. No one likes to feel like they are not listened to, or that they have no one to lean on. Once the sale is made, now you must provide the support necessary to show that you really care and that yes, you are there for your clients. 110% there.

Have fun – Don’t forget to have fun with your clients. As you get to know them, understand their likes and dislikes, then make sure to incorporate that into your phone and email contact. Business doesn’t have to be stuffy and impersonal. In fact, it shouldn’t be. Your clients are people too. And they have senses of humor and interests. Use this to further develop your relationship and let them know that your business has personality too!

Developing Relationships with Online-Only Customers

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You may create opportunities for more business by developing relationships with customers that only order online. These relationships might enable your business to help the customer with their other needs.

Here are 5 ways that you may be able to build greater relationships with your online-only customers:

The Order Confirmation E-Mail
When someone places an order from your site, they certainly expect to see key details in the confirmation email. But don’t be afraid to put a personal touch on it. This may include placing your logo in the email, choosing a “friendly” font, and also phrasing the email in a way that makes people think of the humans that will be fulfilling the order.

Also, you should add links that make it easy for people to check on the status of their order, as well as to check out your company’s social media pages.

Send a Thank You Note/Gift
Alright, we know that you may not be able to do this for everyone. But from time-to-time, send a thank you note to people that have done business with you. By doing this separately from the confirmation email, you are reaching the customer multiple times but in slightly different formats. If you can send this “Thank You” in the form of a hand-written note, or accompanied with a small gift, you may make a lasting impression on that person.

And since they are already comfortable with being online, perhaps they’ll talk about your kind gesture on their social media pages.

Cross-Promote on the Web-to-Print Storefront
Certainly, you do not want to overly distract people while they are placing an order on your online storefront. However, you may reap benefits by cross-promoting other products and services in under-utilized

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real estate. This may entail putting a banner advertisement somewhere in your site that highlights something else that you offer.

Connect via Social Media
After someone places an order, take some time to search for their social media profiles. Chances are, you will find a great majority of people on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. You can use these channels to learn more about your customers, and perhaps identify ways that you can offer additional value to them in the future. This may start by simply saying “Thank You”. Or, you could comment on or “Like” content that they have posted. Also, if you add their profiles to your CRM solution, you will provide valuable data to your customer service team and marketing department in the future.

Invite them to Opt-In for Further Communications
Does your company offer a free eNewsletter? Do not hesitate to mention this to people when they are registering to use your online storefront. If they’ve enjoyed your company enough to order products from it, they may also be inclined to receive helpful information from you in the future.

Marketers, Prepare Yourselves!

We all love answers.

If our boss asks us a question, we feel really good if we have one.

If we are doing the question-posing, a satisfaction itch should be scratched at least a little bit, even if the answer wasn’t exactly what we wanted. (For example – Q. Can we just order pizza tonight for dinner?   A.  No. We are having broccoli and salmon.  [JUST KIDDING])

The Questions that Marketers Need Answers To

If you are in the marketing world, you must be prepared to answer a lot of questions.

However, questions involving data may be tougher to answer than others.

Think for a moment about your own situation. If management or the sales staff asked you these questions today, could you answer them? And, how long would it take to actually produce the results?

  • How many people are on the current customer list? Can I see it?
  • Do we have a list of previous or dormant customers?
  • Where are the prospects and new leads from Trade Show [InsertNameHere]?
  • In our pipeline, how many people are from this industry? Or that industry?

The questions involving the actual data will certainly lead to additional questions.   If you have the records, the next questions may be:

  • Do we need invest more time and money attracting attention among a certain vertical?
  • Have we reached out to our dormant customers lately?
  • What has been done to follow-up on the leads from the trade show that we spend tens of thousands of dollars on to attend?

Are You Sweating Yet?

If you are involved with marketing, those questions may possibly be causing a few beads of sweat to appear on your forehead. You may even be visualizing (or having a flashback of) your boss demanding answers to those questions recently.

If you are in the position where you cannot produce the answers easily, or the data, then here’s a solution.

The Solution

Build, manage, execute, and measure your marketing initiatives across multiple channels, and make sure to collect data from those channels for your marketing database.  Segment your data across specific fields and demographics, and then view your reports to see how each segment is faring.  This allows you to slide and dice data, view the big picture of the campaign, and then make the next marketing effort even better!

Do You Have an Effective Marketing Strategy?

“Tactics, Tactics, Tactics…. Everywhere I look, all I see is tactics!”

Perhaps you have also felt that same way recently. We hear about tactics across nearly every marketing channel out there. QR Codes. Personalized URLs. Augmented Reality. SMS/Text-Messaging. Mobile Email. Social Media Advertising.

Those are just a few of the terms that we hear and talk about quite frequently in the marketing world. I know that I can often get quite excited about them!

But, while there is nothing wrong with diving in and understanding specific tactics, we run the danger of thinking of those things as bright and shiny objects that can solve all of our problems!

Instead of falling into that trap, we must be willing to increase the amount of effort and focus that we put on having a strategy.

Long-Term Solutions Come From Having a Strategy

Because we provide marketing services to our customers, we certainly need to pay close attention to new tools and technologies that could improve our offerings.

However, we must ensure that the services we do add (for example, a QR Code or PURL on a postcard) are not treated simply as add-ons. Rather, we focus on integrating them into the overall marketing strategy that supports our customer’s goals.

Often, the development of a strategy will consist of us asking critical questions. The answers to those questions will not only help us decide which tools and technologies should be used, but also, how should we best use them.

Yes, some of our customers come to us with a fully thought-out marketing strategy. But in today’s world, we understand that many CMOs are running around at a frantic pace; thus, they could benefit by having a service provider, like us, offer some consultation and suggestions.

If you do you have a campaign coming up, here are 4 steps that could help you develop and/or analyze a marketing strategy for it:

  • Describe your business: This sounds simple, but it’s crucial. It may help you to define key characteristics that affect branding and messaging.
  • Define the goal: The goal will help avoid using a new tool or tactic simply because it’s new. Rather, it will help ensure that the the decisions that are made are done for a reason.
  • Understand who the audience is and where they are: Think about QR Codes for a second. If your client is going to be placing print advertisements inside of a subway station where there is no cell service, do QR Codes really make sense? Or, if you are going to send information that is highly sensitive or private in nature, will a personalized URL actually cause people to not respond?
  • How will you measure success?: As a service provider, we may be constantly looking for ways to demonstrate and prove our value. However, in the rush to incorporate a new tactic, we may overlook what steps are necessary to help us measure the effectiveness of a specific tactic. By answering this question ahead of time, we will increase our chances of being able to present valuable data to our customers during the marketing campaign.

These are just a few of the questions that can help us to develop and deliver solutions that increase our revenue now and in the future. I hope that you find them find helpful! Yes, there will be always be new tactics that catch our attention, create some buzz, and get us excited (me included!). But no matter what the tactics are, having the right strategy will help to put us on the right path.

Enhance User Experience with Landing Pages

When designing and building a landing page, we typically have a specific purpose in mind. For example, let’s say that we have a goal of registering 100 people for an Open House event. We may promote it through direct mail, emails, and a banner ad. All of those medias will point to a landing page.

When people hit it, we certainly want them to be able to easily figure out how they can register for the event. We may take steps to ensure that there are not too many distractions on the response form. We may limit how many fields we require, or how many questions we ask of people. These types of decisions can have a positive effect on the percentage of people that do respond to our offer.

However, once someone clicks the Submit button, we can take a slightly different approach. Many times, we may be tempted to simply put up a “Thank You” message and call it good. If so, there is a chance that we are losing out on an opportunity to capitalize on an interested audience.

If we only say “Thank you”, then we have created a dead end. We may have accomplished our specific goal, but we are pretty much guaranteeing that they are going to close the browser or go visit another website. However, by using that Thank You page as a way to further communicate and engage the responder, we may find greater success.

Here are a few possible ideas for how to “extend” a user’s experience with a landing page:

  • Put a link to your corporate website, and a compelling reason to visit it
  • Embed a YouTube video that is associated with your company
  • Link to your social media sites (add the social badge, or simply promote one of them with a big logo and reason to click: “‘Like’ our Facebook page”)
  • Encourage people to share what they just did on their social media pages (i.e. “Tweet This: I just RSVP’d for ABC Company’s Open House on the 23rd”)
  • Invite them to subscribe to your newsletter
  • Are you selling something? Put a link to it.
  • Deliver a personalized experience — based on how they responded, display a custom message (in the form of text, pictures, or video)

These are just a few possible ideas.

Sure, not everyone will click on the links that we provide on our Thank You pages. But we will never regret putting forth an effort to extend someone’s engagement with our brand.

(If you’ve had success with extending your landing pages, please feel free to leave a comment on this post.)

Improve Your Marketing Campaigns with QR Codes and PURLs

QR codes offer a number of benefits for marketers. One of the most important benefit is the ability to tie together the print, mobile and web channels to increase the response rates on multichannel marketing efforts.

Since QR codes make it easy for people to jump from print to the web, this intelligent tool can add to the success of your personalized URL (PURL) campaigns, too.

QR codes have the ability to lower the barriers often surrounding customer response which, in turn, leads to an increase in overall campaign response rate.

Here are several benefits that can be easily achieved by coupling QR codes with PURLs to boost the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns:

Providing one-to-one communication
PURLs can be embedded right into QR codes, so when a customer or prospect scans the code, they are taken directly to their personalized landing page.

Once a recipient is at that personalized page, you have the opportunity to engage with them and have a one-on-one dialogue.

Making it easy to respond
QR codes make PURLs portable. They allow the recipient to access each individual PURL without the need to sit in front of a computer.

Because people are on the go, and many carry their phones with them at all times, this portability is ideal in increasing the response rate.

Additionally, QR codes eliminate the need for a recipient to type what may be a rather lengthy PURL into their web browser.

By simply pressing one button on their smartphone, your prospect or customer is automatically directed to their own personalized website. This eliminates the chance of typos and

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decreases the amount of effort required by the recipient to access the information.

Tracking and measuring
Every marketer knows there is nothing more important than being able to measure the success of a campaign.

PURLs provide the ability to track which recipients visit their personalized page and, depending on the level of the PURL, gather additional contact information about each individual.

Similarly, various software programs have been developed that will also record the amount of scans per day, what time those scans took place, the location of the scans, and the type of device being used to scan the code.

Together, QR codes and PURLs can provide a more complete picture of which recipients express interest and which leads are the hottest.

QR codes will only enhance the value PURLs already bring to campaigns, becoming a logical extension of the PURLs you may already be implementing. Use them to fill the gap that other cross-marketing tools cannot.

Add Value to Your Marketing Campaigns with Variable Data

Are you using your customer data to the best of your ability?  Are you not satisfied with your return on investment for all of your direct mail marketing efforts?  Utilizing variable data may be your answer to these frustrations.

By using this particular service, it will help you create more customized marketing campaigns for your customers depending on what information you have about them.  By creating and delivering more customized and personal messages to your audience, you can be sure to see an increase in your marketing response rates!

Here are some of the ways variable data can add more value to your marketing campaigns:

  1. Create personalized messages by using your customer’s name and company in your online and offline marketing campaigns.
  2. Add coupon codes for specific services and promotions.
  3. Use it for the numbering sections for invoices, and cross-promote related products if applicable.
  4. Take advantage of their order history to promote related products to them at a later date.
  5. Utilize their address or location for geographical promotions if you have more than one store.
  6. Add a personalized URL to track who went to the correlating landing page.
  7. Graphics can be different depending on what types of clients you are sending your promotion to.
  8. Just like graphics, text can also be adjusted to help your marketing message relate to your audience more.

As you can see from these examples, you can understand why these tactics will help make your marketing efforts stand out more to your targeted audience.  If you have data that can help you make more specific marketing messages to your audience, take full advantage of it!

If you would like to learn more about how you can start incorporating variable data in your marketing campaigns, give us a call!

Benefits of Repurposing Content

There are very few marketers out in the world that will confess to having “enough time”.

Marketing departments are typically full of ideas and excitement – but they face the same clock as the rest of the world.

Their file cabinet may have marketing strategy documents… their whiteboard full of plans and action items…. and their desks may be covered in sketches.

However, the best intentions in the world do not always mean those projects will see the light of the day. Thus, when you do get a project done, you need to capitalize. Take full advantage of the content that you are pushing to the world.

For example, you may want to launch a campaign that promotes your eNewsletter while getting insights from your customers.  One strategy you can use to accomplish this is by using a landing page that features a quiz.

Respondents can be entered to win a prize after they submit their quiz answers and contact information, but can also be asked if they’d like to subscribe to your eNewsletter.

Yes, there are other ideas for campaigns that would specifically drive newsletter subscriptions. But here, you can take advantage of a campaign that did see the light of the day, and use it to help drive eNewsletter subscriptions.

2 Steps to Successfully Use Targeted Keywords

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Is it more important to post content frequently or to post content about the right topics? Creating content with targeted keywords and phrases is vital for companies. Below are two important steps to ensure that you can do that successfully.

Identifying the Right Keywords

The first step in identifying the right keywords involves answering the question, “What should I create content about?”

Oftentimes, we look internally for those answers. What do I want to write about? What am I passionate about? While those questions are important, we need to always consider the overall goal. Typically,

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that is to build an audience and to drive traffic to our website.

Thus, we must ensure that the topics that we want to create content about also match up to the interests and passions of our target audience.

At that point, we should find a way to build a list of the words and phrases that are associated to those topics. These items do not need to be stored in a fancy, complex system – you could simply keep them in a document or spreadsheet! But the bottom line is, make the list! Do not rely on yourself to try to remember the words and phrases that you should use when creating content.

Promoting and Sharing the Words and Strategy

The list of keywords must certainly have a big presence within the walls of a marketing department (whether those walls are physical or virtual). But they also should be shared among employees from all departments. Why?

Well, more and more, people from all walks of life and backgrounds are creating profiles on social networks. Perhaps they primarily use their accounts to talk about personal topics. But if they occasionally interact with a customer or prospect on those channels, or if they link to your company’s website, or simply list its name in their bio, they are representing your brand.

By sharing the list, you will be creating opportunities for all employees to build awareness of your company’s products and services.

Oftentimes, there may be an employee that wants to contribute to the online conversation about your business, but they are just not sure what to say. Sharing the list can be the spark that ignites more conversations about the topics that are vital to you and your audience.

6 Ways to Revamp Your Marketing Efforts

If you want to re-ignite your marketing efforts, here are 6 tasks that you can do today that will drive results for your business!

  • Review Your Marketing Plan: Does your company have a marketing plan? If so, that’s a good thing. However, if it has simply been filed away since you created it at the end of last year, that’s not such a good thing! A much better approach is to keep your marketing plan in front of youMB7-224 constantly as the days and weeks go by. It can serve as a force that guides you and keeps you inspired! It can help to make sure that your daily tactics support your goals and objectives. If it’s been a little while since you’ve last looked at this year’s marketing plan, it’s time to print it and review it!
  • Spend Time Connecting and Listening on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn: If you have a profile on those social networks, that’s a great start! But if you primarily only use them to log-in, share some company information (perhaps a blog post, a press release, or some other news about your products and services), then you are truly missing out on some of the major value points social networking efforts can bring. Take at least 30 minutes today to simply use those networks as a listening tool. Read what your customers and prospects are posting there. Use each network’s search form to find out what people are saying about industry trends, conferences, and other news-worthy items. Also, spend some time making sure that you are connected with the right people. Look up some of your recent customers and sales leads, and make a connection!
  • Create a Video and Upload it to YouTube: “Video sells.” Have you heard that expression? If you haven’t used video yet in your sales and marketing efforts, you are missing out.
    225-030 Online video can be one of the most effective ways to reach your audience with compelling messaging about your products and services. Best of all, creating and uploading basic videos can be done quickly and inexpensively nowadays. Give it a try! Sit down in front of one of your company’s posters, banners, or other collateral items. Have someone film you with a smartphone or some sort of handheld device. Then talk for about a minute about one of the major benefits your company can offer… or simply talk about an industry trend. Then, upload the video to YouTube! But also make sure to include keywords and a link to your website in the “Video Description” field.
  • Write a Blog Post with Your Customers’ Needs in Mind: One of the best ways to keep your website fresh and up-to-date is through a blog. Of course, having a blog is not enough. You must make sure that you’re posting content to it on a regular basis. Also, in order for the blog to be effective, the content should address the needs and concerns of your customers. Take 10 minutes today and think about an item that might be on your customers’ minds. Then, write two paragraphs that include some commentary, advice, and/or tips that will help them with that item. Then, post it on the blog to offer instant value to your clients!
  • Analyze Your Website Traffic Reports: How often do you access and read your company’s website traffic reports? Chances are that it may not be enough. Take some time today to login to whatever system you may use for Website Analytics, or pull up the latest report that your marketing agency may have sent you. Read through what’s happening — take a close look at traffic trends (good and bad), keyword usage, sources, goal conversions, and other data points. You will most likely uncover important data points that can help you improve your website marketing efforts in the very near future.
  • Create a QR Code and Add it to Your Printed Materials: Print can still be an effective component in your marketing mix today! However, it often delivers the best results when it’s integrated with other channels, including mobile. QR Codes can make your printed items interactive, they can engage the mobile audience, and they can help you better measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts!

I hope you found these tips helpful, and remember that it is never too late to strengthen your marketing efforts!