How To Make Your Customer Experience Delightful.

It never ceases to amaze me how a business can take a simple process – a purchase or return - so incredibly frustrating and difficult. And yet the business doesn’t seem to recognize (or care) that there is a problem.

80% of CEOs believe they deliver a superior customer experience, but only 8% of their customers agree.  (Bain & Company)

Are you listening to your customers?

Unfortunately for many businesses, providing a positive customer experience is not a part of their mindset. They are simply enabling a customer to make a purchase and if necessary, a return – using an antiquated customer service model. Their model consists of keeping the business efficient and therefore not hiring enough staff to enable a customer to make a purchase quickly and easily. Or if online, not including easy-to-find contact information to allow a customer to contact the business to resolve an issue or make a return.

It is 6-7 times more costly to attract a new customer than it is to retain an existing customer.  (White House Office of Consumer Affairs)

While that may have been sufficient in the past, your business may now be missing out. Missing out on the opportunity to be helpful by providing a positive customer experience. That experience leads to an increase in customer retention and loyalty. Remember, your goal is to help a customer make a purchase.

"Profit in business comes from repeat customers; customers that boast about your product and service, and that bring friends with them." ~ W. Edwards Deming

The attitude of ‘this is the way we’ve always done it’ doesn’t work anymore. With the Internet and social media, customers have access to boundless information and reviews about products, services and businesses. How do you rate?

90% of respondents who recalled reading online reviews claimed that positive online reviews influenced buying decisions, while 86% said buying decisions were influenced by negative online reviews. (Dimensional Research)

Here are a few ideas of what some businesses are doing to improve their customer experience:

OLD MODEL: Each cashier has a separate line for a customer to make a purchase. Somehow I’m always behind an individual who can’t make up their mind, or has a million + one questions to ask prior to making their purchase. While the line may have been the shortest in terms of people, it is now the longest in the time it takes to reach a cashier.

NEW MODEL: Single-line maze. This is a system where everyone gets into one line and winds through a maze with cashiers available at the end. This system enables businesses to help those customers who need the extra time while keeping everyone in line moving forward.

OLD MODEL: When a customer has a problem or issue, they are required to send an email to info@companyname describing the problem within the body of the text and hoping for a response within a reasonable amount of time. They receive an auto response with no assurance that their email will be read.

NEW MODEL: Knowledge database or live chat. A knowledge database is a great way to provide detailed solution to problems for those customers who prefer to attempt to fix the problem themselves. The database can provide images and video to help with the resolution process. And for those that prefer to have a conversation with a ‘real’ person, live chat provides just that. It gives a customer an opportunity to immediately have a conversation through text with a company representative that will work them to understand their problem and provide a solution.

“In the world of Internet Customer Service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.” ~ Doug Warner

A very simple goal for a positive customer experience is to give your customers more than what they expect to get. You’ll have a fan for life. So instead making it difficult for your customers to make a purchase or hiding your business contact information if there is a problem, be available. Help your customers and make the experience delightful.  

“By the year 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.” ~ Serina Aswani,

Time To Reevaluate The Tools, Technologies, And Practices To Market Your Business

One great aspect that comes with the changing of the seasons to spring is there is more daylight – giving one the impression there is more time in the day. While you know that isn’t true, in our busy and chaotic lives, anytime you can feel that you have extra time can be energizing. Perhaps that is why many use spring to clean.

Just as many may use spring as their excuse to clean, it is always a good idea to periodically reevaluate the tools, technologies, and practices to market your business. See what is working and what is not. Doing so enables you to take advantage of newer methodologies and technologies that can prove to be more effective. With the proliferation of new tools available, there are plenty of budget-friendly as well as efficient means to gathering and distributing content, capturing and measuring leads, running email campaigns and measuring ROI.

“Take a risk and keep testing, because what works today won’t work tomorrow, but what worked yesterday may work again.”-- Amrita Sahasrabudhe

With Google changing their algorithm for mobile search, now is the time to ensure your website and content will not only display correctly but that your site is usable via mobile. Make sure your fonts are large enough to view whatever the mobile screen size, your buttons are not too close together and links are easy to click. Your content should load quickly – plan for slower Internet connection speeds like G3, as Google will penalize you for slow load speed.

In addition to reevaluating the tools you are using, it’s also a great time to consider what other media you can integrate into your current marketing plan that would benefit your business. For instance, 57% of marketers are now using video. Video is a great way to demonstrate the use of your product, provide trainings, or tie your product into a historic or pop-culture event. While it is difficult and really not necessary to have a presence on every social site available, if your target audience is now spending time on Twitter and you aren’t active, now may be the time to establish your presence. On the other hand, if your efforts on a social site are not producing results, it may be time to refocus your energy elsewhere.

Take a fresh look at your content. When creating new content, are you taking advantage of the multitude of ways to present that content? A video can be transcribed and turned into a blog. A blog can be broken into a number of tweets and posts. Stills from the video can be posted on Instagram. You can even turn the content into an offer to attract and gain more leads. With the effort it takes to create new content, leverage that content to reach and engage. 

And finally, measurement. What aren’t you actively measuring that you should be? Many evaluate the numbers of visitors and new leads from the latest campaign. What about correlation? At what point are visitors converting into leads, how about leads converting into customers? Having a deeper understanding as to the conversion point can help your marketing and sales teams be more successful in reaching out to a prospect at just the right point in the buyer’s journey.

“It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic.” -- Jeff Eisenberg

Just as you plan the development of your content with strategies, tactics, and distribution, it is also important to periodically reevaluate the tools, technologies, and practices to market your business. See what new automation tools are available, learn about the latest algorithm updates from Google, discover new technologies to incorporate into your content marketing plans, evaluation the effectiveness of your content distribution efforts and make sure you are getting the meaningful information from your data. Incorporate an evaluation into your marketing plan and consider this one way to continually improve your marketing operations, which improves your content marketing effectiveness and improves your overall business.  

Learn The Secret To Online Success

Many may wonder how businesses, both large and small can continue to be successful in today’s 24/7 mobile obsessed world. Sure, large businesses can hire employees to be present wherever necessary at all hours of the day, but is that really the path to success?

There are many stages in the buying process and many opportunities to reach and engage a customer. The secret to online success - be accessible and flexible.

Once upon a time, marketing used to consist of reaching out to customers and piquing their interest with a postcard or catalog. However, times have changed and buyers shop differently than they used to. How do you adjust your marketing to fit today’s shopping habits?

While there are a number of actions you can take to increase your success rate, focus your efforts first on being accessible. A buyer needs to be able to find your business through search, and read the information available on your website quickly and easily. If they can’t find you, or read your details, they will leave and not come back. Therefore, the first secret to success is to provide a website that is viewable via mobile.

1. Responsive Design:

80% of buyers searching the Internet are doing so using a mobile phone. As a result, it is imperative that your company website is responsive.

Responsive design is an approach to web page creation that makes use of flexible layouts, flexible images and cascading style sheet media queries.  The goal of responsive design is to build web pages that detect the visitor’s screen size and orientation and change the layout accordingly. – whatis.com.

In order to capture the attention of potential buyers, your company website needs to ensure your information and website is viewable and easy to navigate via mobile. And, 66% of consumers are more likely to purchase from mobile-friendly sites.

Another reason to make your website as easy to view and navigate as possible is to increase your rankings within Google. 48% of mobile users start their research using search engines. With such a large number of mobile users starting their research with a search engine, responsive design becomes an even bigger issue. Beginning in April, Google’s new algorithm will identify and label websites that are mobile-friendly. Those that identified as mobile-friendly will rank higher in the mobile search results. Make sure you are ready for the update before the Google update.

"Change before you have to." - @jack_welch

The second secret to success is establishing and maintaining a social presence. Make your presence online accessible to followers and be flexible, ready to adjust to unexpected posts or updates within your industry.

2. Social presence

Successful companies have a presence wherever their buyers are spending time. This doesn’t mean you need to be active on every social media platform that exists. Simply determine where your buyers are spending their time and put your efforts there. If you are not sure, start with establishing your goals for social media:

• Are you looking to attract prospects?
• Are you interested in becoming an influencer within your industry?
• Is building an online community essential to your company?

Once you have defined your goals, next define your target customer:

• Who are they?
• What do they do?
• What are their pain points?
•  Where do they get information?

Knowing where your target customer gets their information will help to determine where you should spend your time and effort establishing and maintaining a presence. A successful presence is one that is active, provides insightful and educational information and is flexible. Flexible in communications with potential buyers and industry trends.

“We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details….” ― Jeff Bezos

Marketing today is not just about pushing information out into the web and waiting for buyers to bite. Establishing a presence, providing useful and timely information, and having the ability to adjust when necessary is a key to success.

Help Prospects Solve Their Problem With Content

Whether you sell a product or offer services, helping a prospect get through the consideration stage and into the decision making stage is one that requires patience and time.

In the Awareness Stage, prospects are still trying to identify their problem or issue. Taking advantage of information that is readily available, they are able to pinpoint the problem or issue they are experiencing. Information available at this stage tends to be more educational, not promotional as companies are using this as a first step to connect with a potential customer. Having a presence with insightful information where and when the prospect is ready is key.

90% of business buyers say when they are ready to buy, they’ll find you. – DemandGen Report

In the Consideration Stage, prospects are now researching, gathering information regarding available options to solving their problem. You have an opportunity to strengthen your relationship - solve their problem with content. Essentially, provide information regarding the benefits of available solutions. Caution has to be taken – do not focus on features, or present your content in a pushy, BUY NOW manner. That will likely turn them off. Instead, the purpose of content in the consideration stage is to help guide prospects through this process and build trust.

According to Pardot’s State of Demand Generation report, 70% of buyers return to Google at least 2-3 times during the course of their research, diving even deeper into each company’s specific offerings to see how they can address their particular pain points.

One way to guide prospects is to use metrics. Take a look at the information you have available. What emails have they responded to? What offers have they downloaded? Take advantage of this data to help fine tune your reach to help convert this prospect into a customer.

“Instead of one-way interruption, Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment that a buyer needs it.” – David Meerman Scott

Content is your way to connect with prospects and build trust. Make sure your content is addresses what they are most interested in. Create content that addresses the problem and provides a correlation with benefits. This provides your prospect with the justification they may need to help make the purchase.

Content that is helpful at this stage of the process includes:

1. Comparison White Paper
2. Testimonials
3. Product or Service Webinar
4. Case Studies
5. eBook (5 Steps to solving this problem)

“To be successful and grow your business and revenues, you must match the way you market your products with the way your prospects learn about and shop for your products.” – Brian Halligan

Create a variety of offers and make them available where your prospects are spending their time. Many will not respond to your emails, and unless you have a crystal ball, it is difficult to predict when they are ready to respond. By promoting your offers through other social channels, you will increase the likelihood a prospect will see it at the time it is most relevant to them, when they are ready.

One last piece of content that is also a good to have available provides pricing and ROI details about your product or service. This piece will be useful as prospects may start to narrow their alternatives and will need details to help move them along the purchasing process.

It isn’t easy to attract visitors, convert them into a lead and eventually into a customer. Rather than bombard potential buyers with features and BUY ME promotions, provide insightful and benefits-oriented information WHERE they are shopping for WHEN they are ready for the details. Make them aware that you are there ready to help them every step along the way. Make a connection, and build trust.

The 5 Steps To Getting Started In Social Media

Social Media may seem like a black hole of time, money, and energy for many companies. And yet the number of dynamic social sites and the number of participants keeps growing. To keep up with how and where customers are actively looking for information, having an online and active presence is key. For many businesses, they may not be sure how to get started, or where to spend their time.

5 Steps to Getting Started in Social Media:

1. Define the customer.

The purpose of spending time on this step is to understand who you are trying to reach which will then help you to create the right type of content, then determine where this content will be distributed.  A buyer persona, also known as your ideal customer, is defined as a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about customer demographics, behavior pattern, motivations, and goals. Get started by using information you currently have – research your current customers through interviews or surveys. Use this to help build your buyer persona and identify their pain points.

2. Where are buyers getting their information?

Which social sites are helping buyer’s get the information they need to solve their problem? Are you present where your buyer’s are? 65% of B2B companies have acquired a customer through LinkedIn. And 80% of consumers connect with brands on Facebook. With over 60% of the buying process complete prior to contacting a sales rep, having a strong presence online, where your buyers are doing their research is important. The benefits of engaging with buyers through social media:

• Drives people to your website
• Generates leads
• Great for search engine optimization
• Grows social presence online
• Having a presence on social, helps to establish your brand. Another benefit of publishing on social is that it gives you the chance to show your personality through engagement with buyers. Make sure you publish on a regular basis and always include links back to the original source of content.

3. What type of online presence does your company have?

Starting with your website, does your company URL make your website easy to find? 98% of website visitors will never come back to your website. Therefore, it is essential that your website load quickly (no large images) is responsive (viewable via mobile), and is easy to understand the purpose of the business. Easy navigation helps your visitor to quickly and easily locate information leading to a positive experience that will encourage them to come back. Set a goal for what you’d like to accomplish with your website. To help make your website pages effective, provide clear headers, use short sentences that provide the benefits (not features) of what you have to offer, and include social sharing icons to help others promote your business.

4. How do you rank in SEO?

The purpose of search engine optimization is to make it easy for buyers to find you.

Is your website optimized for SEO? 70% of the links search users click on, are organic, not paid. Make it easy for search engines to find your website with a clean design (no large images, simple navigation, clean color scheme), your content and topics utilize keywords, and the formatting of your content is easy to read:

• Headers/subheads should be different size fonts
• Include relevant images
• Use bullets, bold, italics and hyperlinked content where applicable
• Here are a few on-page SEO tips with regard to using keywords. Use only ONE keyword or phrase per page and include:
• Page Titles
• Page URL
• Page Header
• Content
• Meta Description

5. What content do you already have that you can leverage?

Now that you have identified your buyer persona, take a look at the content that you already have available. Look for content that is relevant – see what will work for blogs and posts, then determine what will need to be created. Map your content to the buyer’s journey with more focusing on the top of the funnel, the rest for the middle. 80% of your content should provide information about what buyer’s want to hear – content that answers their questions and solves their problems, with 20% sales related (talk benefits not features). Keep it educational first, and promotional last. Your goal is to provide helpful, relevant content. BE what the customer wants. Blogs are easy ways to provide helpful, educational and valuable content that target your audience. 57% of companies have acquired a customer through their blog. Use blogs to familiarize buyers with your business. To help manage content use an Editorial Calendar. The purpose of an Editorial Calendar is to organize your content and plan when to publish that content. An Editorial Calendar includes your goals, topics and titles, keywords, focus within the buyer’s journey, task assignments and distribution channels. 

All it takes is a few steps to get you started with social media, reaching buyers where they are present. The benefit of being socially active is that it increases the likelihood that you are a part of the consideration process in their quest to obtain information. Engage with your buyers, and make a connection. Be helpful, insightful and educational.