Customer Service Steps You’re Overlooking

Customer service is about more than just delivering the product while not being rude to the customer. To truly wow the customer and build brand loyalty, you need to create the image that you’re willing to go the extra mile on every transaction. Here are some simple ways to wow your customers and turn them into champions of your brand.

Make how you deal with customers part of your business’s culture. Many people in customer service positions can turn downright rude when things get busy. You don’t necessarily need to create an overly cheery image — many businesses do just fine with a no nonsense approach that creates an image of efficiency. Whatever you decide the culture of your business should be, drill it into your employees so much that they won’t deviate from it even during the most stressful times.
Create the perception that customers are getting something for nothing. 5 Guys Burgers and Fries famously dumps an extra scoop of fries into the to-go bag after filling their standard fries container. Customers think they’re getting something for nothing, but the extra “free” fries are already in the budget. Find something similar you can do in your business.
Get feedback from your customers. Many people who aren’t completely satisfied won’t complain on their way out, but also won’t come back. Ask them how everything was and address any problems before they walk out the door. If the same complaints keep coming up, be sure to retrain your staff or find other ways to fix the problem.

Content Marketing Tips for Retaining an Online Audience

For most business owners, building relationships is a lifetime learning experience. The skills may vary depending on geography, culture, business area and personal preferences; however, a successful result levels the playing field. A strong reputation for consistently achieving a healthy business-client synergy is usually synonymous with a stable revenue and business stability and growth.

Content marketing is an avenue of relationship building that emphasizes each communication delivered online as a step toward converting a prospect to a customer or retaining a client. Fortunately, most people already understand the business-client principles that govern the interaction, but applying them to content marketing is rarely discussed.

Trust

Building trust with a customer is essential and a product or service should be represented accurately by advertising and marketing. Content marketing can have a journalistic, or objective, style that relates facts, figures and statistics that explain a product or services details and compares the profile to a competitor or industry standard, highlighting a unique selling proposition that gives the buyer an advantage. If a content marketing article, blog post or email marketing campaign gives a prospect or customer a clear indication of the outcome of a purchase with evidence to support the claims, no buyers will be misled or disappointed.

Courteous Communication

Courteous and consistent interaction anticipating the needs of the client is also important because it reflects a strong business acumen and gives the potential buyer an opportunity to understand a business’s approach and product or service to fully explore the evaluation stage of the buying process. Content marketing should be released frequently enough to keep the business in the mind of the prospect, which is approximately weekly for an email marketing campaign and once or twice per week for a blog post or article.

Rewards

Rewarding loyalty and continued patronage is an important step for reputation management and client retention and referrals. An email marketing campaign could deliver a promotional offer, complimentary follow-up consultation or other type of bonus to a loyal customer, which simultaneously promotes retention and closes the circle of trust.

What do Unsubscribes Mean?

In this digital world we live in, it is important to have the option to unsubscribe from different things online. This is why you should know what this means as well as how it will work. It will help you to improve your experience when using the Internet.

What Does Unsubscribe Actually Mean?

Essentially, the meaning of unsubscribing is opting out of information from someone. This could be a person on Facebook or a company that keeps sending you annoying junk mail. This is why if you find that you are seeing things that are frustrating or offensive, save yourself the time and annoyance and simply unsubscribe. You will no longer have to see the information which will make things easier on you.

How to Unsubscribe?

A common misconception people have with emails is that companies will continue to send them junk mail, even if they no longer want it. Companies are actually required to have an opt out feature where people can unsubscribe from future mailings. If you take the time to look at an email, you will see this feature somewhere. Often, you will have to look at the bottom of the email to find it in small print. Just click and follow the instructions.

When using sites, such as Facebook you will need to use their procedures for unsubscribing. Looking at the help feature on the website is a good way to find it. Otherwise, you can always contact support.

It is also important to note with this that the procedures for unsubscribing are different with each company. Some may take you off their list for future mailings immediately and others may take several days to do this. You will want to read the message that comes up after completing the unsubscribe so that you will know when the messages will stop showing up.

Tips to Effectively Track Survey Responses

Tracking of survey responses enables connecting single responses to a particular person or demographic type (in the case of anonymous surveys). It is useful to track the answers to specific questions in order to manage the customer service relationship. Data gathered from surveys helps to maintain customer satisfaction and increase sales through the use of reminder messages, discount programs and customer retention campaigns.

Here are some tips to effectively track survey responses:

Ask for email – even if the email address is never used for any email campaign, it is extremely valuable to use as a customer identifier
Add a unique id to each responder by having a special webpage for each one to use for the survey
Use custom tags which are part of the URL that the respondent uses to complete the survey – these may include such things as email, ID of customer, ID of company, and ID of department.
Ask demographic questions
Track response rate – low response rates invalidate the survey results
Track response time – the amount of time taken to fill out the survey
Track response date and time of day the survey is taken
Track responses in real-time
Create an Excel database – code all responses, for example: 1 for yes, 2 for no so that the entire results may be tabulated and easily seen as an overview
Filter results based on isolation of key factors to make them more useful for analysis – filters include such things as removal of specific questions, cross-analysis, one question response, date, demographic or other data

You Still Need Direct Mail

When you create a marketing campaign, you will need to make sure you have all the elements in place. As technology grows, many people think they can just stick with technology for marketing and forget about direct mail. While it is important to focus on technology, especially mobile technology, this does not mean that it is acceptable to forget about other forms of marketing. There are a few ways that direct mail can still be beneficial for your company.

Build Brand Recognition

When you use postcards, you are building brand recognition. Even if the person throws away the postcard, they still take the time to look at the advertisement that you have mailed. While this may be something they put out of their mind, it is still there. This is why repeat mailings are the best way to go.

Improve Sales to Your Campaign

The more you advertise, the better your results will be. Direct mail can be a great way to direct customers to where you want them to go. For instance, if you have a landing page where you want to capture their information, send them there with a link or QR code. This can help to improve the return on investment that you see. All your campaigns should work together so that they are cohesive.

The biggest thing to remember when using direct mail though is that you need to have the right format and layout. When you choose a company to handle this for you, they should be able to go over the right layout and format for your needs. This will help you to get just what you are looking for out of the direct mail marketing as well as your entire marketing campaign.

PURLs – How They Work and How to Get Started

Personalized URLs, or PURLs, are exactly what they sound like. Rather than randomly-generated strings of characters, your clients or staff might log in to a page such as “yourcompany.com/JohnSmith” or “JohnSmith.yourcompany.com”. User John Smith will see a personalized message, which makes him feel valued no matter what role he plays to your company or website. This helps your company because people respond when others user their names. It’s why cashiers will look at a credit or store card and thank a customer by name as they’re leaving the checkout. Personalized URLs are also beneficial because they’re easy to remember.

The foundation of a personalized URL is to redirect to an existing website and serve visitors with customized images depicting their name or other personalizations based on the user’s demographic and data that you’ve already collected. With PURLs and personalized content, you’re more likely to snag that customer because you can appeal to their interests.

PURLs work well with print marketing because you can print a customer’s URL on a postcard and flyer and invite them to your website. Depending upon your platform, you can also use PURLs to track a specific user’s path on your website and use this to create the perfect follow-up plan. To retain greater control over that path, implement a call to action on that landing page.

A simple method might use a 301 redirect for the URL, but you’ll need a more complex system if you want to provide PURLs to many users. To save money and time, you might not implement a user-specific landing page. Many companies hire developers to create PURLs and the surrounding pages so that the systems will remain responsive and robust even as the company grows and add more personalized URLs to the system.

4 Reasons Why it Pays to Poll Your Customers

What are your customers saying about you?

If you’ve ever wondered whether your small business is hitting the mark with the people it serves, a survey may be in order. Consumer surveys give you insight into every facet of how well, or how poorly, your business is performing.

Who’s Buying What?

This is probably the most important reason to survey your customers — finding your product’s demographic. How old are the people who are buying what you have to sell? Are they male or female? College-educated or blue-collar all the way?

A well-written survey form collects this type of personal information which then gives you better insight into who your customers really are.

How Are You Doing?

Are your customer service representatives friendly? Do they go the extra mile to assist each customer that walks through your brick-and-mortar store or who logs onto your website? Do they say “Thank you” and “Please come back again”? If they don’t, a survey is one of the most-efficient ways of finding out this important piece of information.

What’s the Next Step?

When it comes time to expand your operations, which direction should you take? Try asking your customers. A survey that asks clients what new features, products or services they would love to find inside your place of business gives you an idea of where you should begin and what products you should focus on next.

What Are Your Opportunities for Improvement?

Is your parking lot too small? Do you keep your store cool enough in the summer? Are your credit card readers and cash registers fast and efficient enough to keep people coming back for more? If you’re not sure, get a survey into the hands of every customer and find out which areas need improvement.

The future of your business is in the hands of those you serve. Make sure your consumer surveys are there as well.

Common Marketing Mistakes

Common marketing mistakes fall into general categories; failure to understand your customer, resistance to change, and ignorance of current strategies. These categories can overlap but we will use them for our discussion.

Failure to understand your customer is the basis of all marketing mistakes, because marketing is about understanding people. Do you collect data from your current customers so you know who your base is, how they heard about you, why they come and why they come back? Do you know who else might need what you offer? General marketing research is a tool, but it has limits. The more you connect with your actual customers and understand them, the more focused your marketing will be. People buy with their right brain (connections) more than they do with the left (logic) and they rarely buy the first time they hear a message. Do you know which message connected and how long it took to get a response?

Resistance to change plagues all of us because it takes effort and money to adapt to what is happening. It’s easier to do things the way they always have been done. Identifying your unique selling proposition (USP) means analyzing your business honestly and stepping out in new territory might involve taking decisions out of committee. When was the last time your committee agreed on which donut was best? If they can’t agree on donuts, how will they agree on marketing?

Ignorance of current strategies is easy to fix: invest in professional marketing advice. All the social media techniques, website and SEO strategies, and understanding how to mix the traditional with the cutting edge is what a professional marketing firm does every day. They already know what it will take you valuable time to find out on your own.

Tools for the Print Industry

The print industry is still very much alive. Throughout the industry, there is more technology than ever before and this has led to a better quality image that can be produced. As a result, when you work with a printer, you can enjoy such things as a clear image of the photos you wish to print, a full bleed on your flyers, and colors printed in the exact hue that you need them to be.

One of the primary tools that everyone in the print industry should be using is a digital printer. Digital printers ensure that there is no pixelation on larger prints and that the images are as clear as they can possibly come out in a printed format.

Large printers are also a must to ensure that you can get the banners and posters that you need. If you need a 24×36 poster, then it should be made available to you without having to work with a company clear across the country, which also involves shipping, handling and a longer wait time.

Various die cut tools should also be available so that you can get the shapes that are important to you. Whether you want club cards to hand out that are round or you want business cards with rounded corners, you should have the options available to you.

Not everyone in the print industry uses the same tools – or uses them in the same manner. It’s important to ask questions of a print company before you submit your order to ensure you are getting the quality that you need.

A significant amount of technology is available and anyone in the print industry should be tapping into this technology to provide you with a superior product to enhance your business.

Design: Dos and Dont’s

When it comes to designing anything that is going to be used for marketing, be it a logo, business cards or flyers, there are some things that you don’t want to do. Marketing dollars need to be stretched and used effectively. If you make some basic design mistakes, you could be doing more harm than good for advertising your brand.

Choose the Right Logo

You don’t want to choose a logo that is so intricate that it is hard to read or duplicate. There have been countless businesses that have created a logo that looks great when it’s blown up on a banner. However, as soon as they try to print it on a business card or a T-shirt, it looks too blurry and is impossible to read.

A logo should be clear and crisp. Don’t overcomplicate it because it is the logo that will be used on everything pertaining to your business. It should be easy to read and only contain a few colors so that it can be produced easily.

Brand Yourself

Branding needs to occur with your designs, which means they should look similar. Whether you are printing banners, posters, flyers, business cards, company t-shirts, or anything else for the purpose of marketing, you need to have a similar look. This means using the same logo, colors, and font so that people recognize you.

Don’t Confuse

You cannot afford to confuse your consumers. If you continuously re-design your logo or change the feel of your marketing materials, you are going to have brand confusion. People won’t know who you are and what you stand for.

All marketing materials have to be clean, crisp, and well branded in order to effectively penetrate the market and ensure that your marketing dollars are stretched properly.