Search Results for ‘customer feedback’
Quirks Marketing Research Review recently wrote an article about how to increase survey respondents satisfaction. Surveys can help to give the smart marketer a heads up on what your client and prospect really want and need. Surveys can be used to gather all sorts of market data such as customer demographics, likes and dislikes, customer satisfaction and much more. I highly recommend that if you are not using surveys in some form or another (digital, hand-written or by phone) you are missing out on information that can take your business to a new level fo success.
Here are the 10 tips Quirks shared:
1. Make surveys engaging and convenient
2. Avoid complex questions
3. Limit questions to 50 words or less
4. Avoid long lists of rating questions
5, Avoid open-ended questions
6. Avoid repetitive questions
7. Advertise accurate survey times
8. pay incentives (prizes) promptly
10. Pre-test surveys thoroughly
11. Get feedback on surveys
I would only disagree with number 5. Sometimes a person needs the option to expand on a response and having an open ended question makes that possible. You might have an open ended question but make it an option to reply thereby not annoying those really want to offer feedback but who don’t have or want to spend a long time doing so.
About accurate survey times, the article states that respondents don’t mind taking longer surveys as long as they know how much time they will take. This is good to know when you need more in-depth replies.
You can read this and other articles online at http://www.quirks.com/. While there, you can also request a FREE subscription (if you qualify).
While you’re at it you can grab a FREE copy of eMarketing ~ 300 page textbook aimed at tertiary education students, business owners and marketers who want to get ahead in online marketing. It has everything from the facts to case studies and study questions around each eMarketing tactic. Go to http://www.quirk.biz/emarketingtextbook/download.
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September 17th, 2009
Getting eCommerce Ready…
When it comes to eCommerce, it’s not too early to start thinking about how you are going to prepare for the holiday season. You don’t want to put everything about your whole business and everything you offer on your home page. Have landing pages for separate items. When you give people too many choices, they become paralized and will leave without buying. Showcase your number one items or best sellers or the one, two or three items you want to move on your home page. Here are 13 more tips to prepare for the holiday rush:
1. Make sure you have precautionary measures in place. Where does your business get hit the hardest during the holidays? Is it local deliveries, customer service, shipping? Focus your attention on getting those parts of your system ready for the holidays.
2. Get help. Taxing your regular help during the madness that can occur during the season, can do more damage than good. Consider outside help to get you through the holidays.
3. Automate anything and everything you can. This reduces labor costs and streamlines processes and in most cases helps the customer get quicker service.
4. Reduce time by auto-processing credit cards. That includes auto settle and authorizations.
5. Manage Inventory. With the economic uncertainty of the upcoming holiday season, it is good to keep a low stock inventory as long as you can order and get a quick turnaround on products you need when the time comes.
6. Consider drop shipping orders to cut down on inventory. Use softeware that automatically forwards those orders to your vendors for fulfilment.
7. Rely on someone else’s I.T. Staff by using a software service provider. They have the compliant issues in place and they may be more able to have a quick turnaround if a proble arises.
8. Personalize your marketing offers. Use your cusotmer database to increase revenues by creating a 1, 2, 3 touch approach to remind them you are there to assist their gift-giving needs. That could be a postcard, email and telephone call or any combination of tactics to get them to order from you.
9. Send emails wisely and prudently. Don’t innundate your email database with messages. They will get mad and ask to be removed. Remember everyone is vying for their business right now. Create email templates or edit and reuse those that have worked in the past. Saves time, and creative talent to work on other high-priority projects.
10. Automate your gift certificates. Gift certificates have gained in popularity and every year the % of people who buy them increases. Many people actually prefer receiving them too. If you don’t offer gift certificates online, think about adding this feature to your website. Its a new source of revenue and there is nothing to ship.
11. Make use of multiple stores like ebay and Amazon or Yahoo to test products, to sell overstock items and move last season’s inventory.
12. Consider a “membership” program such as a flower of the month or book of the month club program.
13. TEST, TEST, TEST. Make sure your ecommerce site works properly, is easy to understand and seamless. Do pages load quickly or do they take more than 5 seconds? Do you have lots of flash? Do they inhibit buying with obtrusive popups or automatic sound? Invite current customers to do a ‘beta’ test, and Offer discounts to them for their feedback.
The best time to think about next year’s holiday season is when this one is over. You can plan better when records are within your reach and everything is fresh in your mind.
Happy Selling!
October 25th, 2008
Listing success stories or case studies on your Web site is an excellent way to let prospects know that you have had great results with clients. These stories/studies also tell in greater detail exactly how you work with a client, which can give a prospect a better idea of what they too could expect and how to gain value from working with you.
Label them “Success Stories,” “Project Profiles” or “Customer Successes” on your Web site. You can write these cases yourself, interview the client, hire a writer, or have the client write something up. Use keywords in the stories to boost your search engine rankings. An audio interview is especially impressive. By the way, customer success stories are a supplement to testimonials, not a substitute.
Here are some examples of companies using Success Stories and Case Studies on their sites:
Novell Software company has a section on their site called Success Stories ~ Here’s an excerpt from one: “As a nationally ranked business school, Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business requires a state-of-the-art IT infrastructure. With Novell® Open Enterprise Server running SUSE® Linux Enterprise, the business school consolidated servers by 90 percent and cut implementation time for new applications by 50 percent. “To read the rest of this story visit: http://www.novell.com/success/georgetown_mcdonough.html.
See how Thunderbird School of Global Managment has helped clients address their customers’ challenges, allowing them to unlock and unleash their full global business potential in their Customer Success Stories Section of their Website.
Stewarts Signs (America’s Premier Sign Co.) has a section called Customer Success Stories and Stewarts Signs in the News. The first Story in this section talk about how a Church was demolished by Hurricane Rita but the sign was still there: “If you want to know the truth, I would have much rather lost the church sign than the roof”, exclaims Jo Ann Richards, property chairman of First Christian Church of hurricane-ravaged Port Arthur, Texas. “Standing inside our church the morning after, all we could see was sky”.
Amazon Herb Co. has testimonial and pictures of it’s clients. Here’s one: I love Pure Camu.™ I drank it one day when I had to rake leaves, but didn’t really feel up to it. I told myself I would do half the yard, and then finish the rest the next day. After drinking Pure Camu™, I raked the entire yard that afternoon. I was amazed how much energy I had!”
House Values is making good use of their customer successes with full-page stories and photos.
Use the testimonials given by your clients and customers and ask them to expand on their comments. Create a customer feedback form on your site or encourage them to email you when they want to share their stories of how your product helped them, changed their lives, made something better and more. Use excerpts of the stories for your testimonial section and the full version in your customer success stories section. Audio and video stories are especially powerful. Adding pictures increased the credibility and interest in the story by at least 50%.
Tell us how you use your customers successes to attract attention, prospects and close more sales.
August 27th, 2008
“Communities can extend the edge of the corporation in truly transformative ways — tapping into new talent, helping design products and services, providing customer support and, most importantly, building the brand with the customer.” Ed Moran
What if your website could be THE place where people connect online? Where they could meet one another, exchange ideas and leads, keep up with current trends, learn about new opportunities and develop relationships?
I’m not talking the traditional Social Networking Sites that are made exclusively for meeting, mingling and networking. Not another Facebook, Myspace or LinkedIn. Although that is not a bad idea ~ and a topic for another post.
I am talking about a website that sells something and offers their visitors a place to share ideas and discuss items of interest to them along the theme of what you are selling. Add a forum to your website to increase your prospects! Forums can generate traffic, provide valuable customer feedback and build loyalty to the brand. Forums can give your customers a voice, a place to express their opinions about the product.
But online forums are not for everyone. It all depends on what you sell and if the product has enough diversity to lend itself to forum topics that would interest enough customers/clients to make the effort worthwhile. Lawn and Garden sites, Network marketing companies, sports fans and sites that sell products for pets are likely highly successful because the visitors have a PASSION for the product or the topic. If you sell detergent or mailboxes or office supplies your site might not be the ideal site to create a community forum. In my opinion a blog might be a more ideal option, a place where you can share your expertise with your customers about how to use the products as well as place to offer advice on ancillary topics that would interest them. Also another topic for discussion.
So why have an online forum for your business site? According to Bobybuilding.com CEO Ryan DeLuca “It’s about becoming the place where people come to talk and learn and meet.”
Consulting companies like the David Allen Company have a growing number of followers and active participants to their forums. According to their site, they have 10,761 Members. And their forum activity looks robust. Why? I am sure it’s because the topics are things their visitors are interested in learning more about or sharing.
I also found GAMING sites with active forums. Sites like GameReplays.org have forums that allow their fans to discuss the Company of Heros game at http://www.gamereplays.org/community/-CoH-Section.html. According to their site they have 90,736 registered members.
And then there’s sites like Bodybuilding.com which espouses more than 1.1 million users!
The drawbacks to forums are many. And you should be aware of them as well. Spam is perhaps the biggest issue. People posting stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand. I was on a forum the other day about how to turn an audio file into a podcast and one of the forum “members” posted the following: “I am searching for a partner to walk around the globe in support of our troups.” Well that may be a worthwhile post but had absolutely nothing to do with the topic. Of course everyone just ignored the poster. But I still find that sort of thing annoying and rude.
Other drawbacks include the cost of implementing a forum, the costs to monitor the forums, lack of participation, inappropriate participation and staying on topic (even for those who know and follow the rules this can sometimes be a challenge), marketing the forums so your target audience knows its available and also really expressing the benefits of participating so people want to be there. And let’s not forget the negative feedback that could occur from a dissatisfied customer. Too many of these can do more harm than good and be the downfall of a company. But then again, what’s wrong with that? If the company sells an inferior product then perhaps it shouldn’t be allowed to sell to unsuspecting buyers!
Building online forums is relatively inexpensive. If you’d like to try a do-it-yourself platform, try the Forum Co where you can set up a free forum at http://www.forumco.com/. vBulletin http://www.vbulletin.com/ is a professional, affordable community forum solution which according to their site has “Thousands of clients, including many industry leading blue chip companies, have chosen vBulletin – It’s the ideal choice for any size of community Or just ask your webmaster or webmistress to design it for you.”
The Wall Street Journal wrote a great article “Why Most Online Communities Fail. According to the article Ed Moran, a Deloitte consultant who just completed a study of more than 100 businesses with online communities said: “Not surprisingly, these sites failed to gain traction with customers. Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members … The article said one of the reasons for failure was that “Businesses are focusing on the value an online community can provide to themselves, not the community.” You can read the rest of the article here: http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/07/16/why-most-online-communities-fail/
Before you do consider adding a forum, think about your goals for the forum. What is the aim or purpose of the forum? What do you want your forum to look like? Who would you like to participate? How will you market the forum? And the big question: WHY? Why do you want a forum in the first place?
Forums are one of the original social networking platforms for building communities online. Once you have done your due dilligent, answered the questons above and studied your target audience for receptivity, you will be able to make a better decision about marketing your online business with a forum. Your forum can help you build word of mouth referrals for your small business, help you develop and perfect your brand, your business operations and your business offerings and more than that you will be able to help your targe market have, do or be better at something.
August 25th, 2008
