Listen to Your Customers and Grow Your Business

I had to learn this valuable lesson the hard way.  We built an amazing website based on competitive research.  We reviewed several competitive sites and built a new site incorporating the best of our competitors’ sites.  When we launched the website, we expected our sales would go through the roof…they didn’t.  Our online sales were flat after launching our new site.  What did we do wrong?  We asked customers what they liked and didn’t like about our site.  The feedback we received was interesting.  We received comments like “You need to make your site more like competitor X.”  We did significant research of our competitor’s websites and thought we took the best of all of them to build a best-in-class website.  We were wrong.

I told our web team to contact every customer who provided input and asked them exactly what they meant by their comments.  Our customers provided incredible insight as to why our new site didn’t set their world on fire.  After reviewing the customer feedback, we only had one option…completely rebuild the website from scratch based on what our customers wanted, not what we thought they wanted.  That was the smartest thing we did.

We rebuilt our website, but this time we made sure that it would be successful.  Every customer who provided feedback became our beta testers of the new site.  They tested our site, provided more feedback and we continued to improve the site.  When we relaunched the site to the general public, our web sales improved immediately.  The customers who tested our site really appreciated that we listened to them to give them what they needed.

I have worked with and for some of the smartest entrepreneurs in the marketplace and I learned early in my career that they grew their businesses by listening to customers and giving them what they asked for.  This sounds obvious, but often companies don’t take the time to listen to what customers want and then take action.

One excellent channel to listen to customers is social media.  Believe me, your customers are talking about your company to other customers and prospects on social media.  They are also talking about your competitors.  I highly recommend that you join in on the conversation.  You will quickly discover what they like and don’t like about your company and your products.

Listening to customers, giving them what they are asking for, and quickly resolving any issues they have are keys to success.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

Photo provided by garageolimpo.

Why does your company need a LinkedIn Profile?

Your company has a nice website, a call center that takes customer orders, a solid sales force that brings in new business and a marketing team that gets your branding message into the marketplace through direct mail, pay-per-click and banner advertising.  Why should you spend any time on social media like LinkedIn?

Good question, but the answer might surprise you.  If you are doing everything that I mentioned above, you are not doing everything you can to increase your sales.  Many people think of LinkedIn as a glorified job board where you can post your resume and look for jobs, but it’s much more than that.  I like to think of LinkedIn as your favorite coffee shop like Starbucks or your favorite watering hole.  I might be dating myself a bit, but think of LinkedIn as a place like the TV show “Cheers”.  It’s a place where friends gather and you can get to know people.  It’s “where everyone knows your name” or that what you want it to be.  It’s a place where friends gather and where you can make new friends.

OK, you are probably thinking that this guy is stuck in the 80’s and can’t get out.  Stay with me on this.  If LinkedIn is where you can connect with old friends, business acquaintances and make new ones, why wouldn’t this be a good place for your company to be?  LinkedIn isn’t Facebook.  You can see Facebook spill over on LinkedIn.  No offense, but I don’t really care if your cat can play the piano or your toddler rode a Big Wheel for the first time.  That’s what Facebook is for.  LinkedIn is the place to go to network.  Find other professionals like yourself, learn new things, find a job, and FIND NEW CUSTOMERS.

Let’s go on a little Google adventure.  Check out some of the largest, most successful companies on the internet.  Do they have these icons on their site?

I chose 5 big, successful companies in the Fortune 25.  Here’s what I found.

1. General Motors – Yep, social media icons on their home page
2. Exxon Mobil – Yep, also social media icons on their home page
3. General Electric – Yep, also social media icons on their home page
4. McKesson – Yep, also social media icons on their home page
5. IBM – Yep, on their home page…you get the idea.

These are just 5 big companies in different industries, but they all have something in common.  They all are using social media including LinkedIn to connect with their customers.  Customers know social media and so do their kids.  It’s a new way to communicate.  You need to be where your Customers are and they’re on LinkedIn.

Should your company be on LinkedIn?  Absolutely.  You should also be on Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Facebook and maybe some more.  There are a lot of social media sites out there.  Determine which ones you should be on and make it happen.  Your competitors are.  You need to make sure you are where every prospect and customer knows your name.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

How to clean a dirty customer database

How many people do you know that enjoy cleaning dishes after a party or family get together?  Not many.  To me, cleaning a customer database is very similar.  It needs to be done, but not many people like doing it.  At one company where I worked, the executive management team didn’t believe in cleaning customer data.  They would just continue to buy lists without de-duping.  They would throw tens of thousands of dollars away every time they mailed a flier, brochure or catalog.  Keeping a database clean isn’t cheap, but well worth the investment.  As I suggested in my article “Clean Customer and Product Data – Your Pot of Gold”, your customer data is one of the most valuable assets that you have and you must protect it.

Here’s a process that has worked well for me that helped keep our customer database clean.  This is by no means the only database cleansing method, but it works well.

1. Create a “Key” using zip code (3 or 5 digits) and primary address (sometimes all, sometimes the first 14 characters or so).
2. The Key record will look something like “505011234MAINSTSW” while the zipcode field still reads “50501-1578” and the primary address record still reads “1234 Main Street S.W.”.  (We could still use the address information when we generated the address labels, since we know that the list will get CASS and NCOA (National Change of Address) processing by the mailer if we wanted to get any sort of postage discount.)
3. If the list hasn’t been CASS certified (Coding Accuracy Support System) yet, we would standardize the Key by doing a global search and replace on things like “Road”, “Street”, and “North”, and change them to standard postal abbreviations like “Rd”, “St”, and “N”. Then we would strip special characters from the Key: dashes, periods, commas, pound signs, and spaces.
4. When you sort by the Key, then by contact name, a formula can be written in Excel to compare addresses, and use segments of the contact name and/or company name to identify duplicates.
5. By doing visual checks of a few hundred records, you can usually tell if the formulas need to be tweaked and if additional processing of the records needs to be done.
6. Concerning demographics and customer value, we use SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) and NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) to help target customers, and tallying sales activity of defined time periods help classify the accounts.  Because we had the luxury of a SQL database, that information was stored within the database and updated as needed. We could identify the SIC or NAICS hot spots in the customer database for target marketing.
7. Phone or e-mail contact with the customer helped keep the contact list up-to-date.  Because the customer service reps would associate an order with a caller by leveraging a SQL database, we could use the data to help identify active contacts, (who placed orders, how often were orders placed, and the date of their last activity).  This activity helped pinpoint when a contact went cold, and helped us identify who to ask for when calling to clean up the list.

After cleaning up the database and before we mailed an expensive piece like a 1,000 page catalog, we would do a smaller mailing to that same list to see what got returned.  We would clean up the list using that information and then we would be ready for our mailing of a more expensive piece.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

Follow these guidelines to build a successful ecommerce website

There are six key things that you can do to ensure that you build a powerful and effective ecommerce website.

Ask your customers to help you design your ecommerce website

This may sound like a crazy idea, but it works.  I wish I had followed this advice before spending months building an ecommerce website that our customers really didn’t like.  We thought we did everything we needed to in order to build the best site. We benchmarked our major competitors who had significantly more web traffic than we had and rebuilt what we thought was a better website than our competitors.    After we launched our new site, our sales were flat.  We solicited customer feedback and the customers kept saying “I wish your site was more like competitor X, Y or Z.”  What exactly does that mean?  I was determined to find that out.  We contacted every customer who sent us feedback to find out exactly what they meant.

Our customers didn’t want a clone of our competitors’ sites.  We quickly discovered that our new website wasn’t what the customer wanted or needed.  They wanted to find products on the website quickly and easily.  They didn’t really care about promotions and specials. Benchmarking told us what our competitors were doing, but it didn’t tell us what our customers wanted in an ecommerce website.  We completely rebuilt the new website we just launched based on what our customers wanted, not what we thought they wanted.  We also made our customers beta testers of our newly rebuilt website.  They had ownership and a vested interest in making our site successful.  Our site became their site.

Make it extremely easy to use

There is nothing more frustrating than going to a site that you know has the product that you want, but you can’t find it.  In an ecommerce world where every second or millisecond counts, build a site that is logical, intuitive and very easy to use.  You want your customers to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible.  That means that your product names and descriptions need to be accurate and what the customers call the product.  I have found that many manufacturers call their product “X” but the customer calls it “Y”.  Kentucky Fried Chicken discovered that their customers called their company “KFC” not “Kentucky Fried Chicken” so instead of “re-educating” the customer, they changed their signage and promotional materials to mirror their customer’s perceptions.  That was a very smart move. When customers Google a product that you carry, you want your products to show up in their search results.

Be price competitive

Do your homework.  Make sure your products are the ones that the customers want and that they are competitively priced.  Competition is tough in the ecommerce world.  Your value proposition should include competitive pricing.  Don’t let price be a hindrance for customers to buy from you online.  That doesn’t mean you need to be the cheapest online, but you do need to be competitive.

Optimize your site

Before you launch your site, make sure that it is search engine optimized.  You want Google and the other search engines to index your site because you have great content with keywords that reflect that you are an expert in the products that you carry.   When I was hired at one company, we had 6 optimized pages on Google.  Within the year, we had over 3 million optimized pages and our products showed up many times on page 1, position 1 in Google search results.  SEO works when you do it correctly.

Market your URL everywhere and build credibility

You can have the best ecommerce site in the world, but if your customers don’t know about you and the products that you are selling, you won’t be very successful.  New customers are much more likely to check out your ecommerce site if they know more about you.  With all of the fraud that takes place online, people need to believe their credit card information is safe on your site.  I strongly recommend advertising online (on websites and social media) and in print, as well as sending out email messages about your company and your new website.  The more visible your company and URL become, the more likely your online sales will increase.  People like to do business with people they know and trust.  Building credibility with the marketplace is very important.

Manage your expectations

We would all love to build a successful ecommerce website like Amazon.com, however Amazon hasn’t made a meaningful profit in the nearly 20 years it has been in business.  It takes time to get your ecommerce site to take hold in the marketplace.  Be patient.

If you…

1. Have your customers help you build the ecommerce website that they want,
2. Make it very easy to use,
3. Ensure that your product names are what your customers call your products,
4. Be price competitive,
5. Optimize your site so you are indexed well with major search engines and
6. Get the word out in the marketplace about your products and services on your ecommerce site using effective advertising to build awareness and credibility. If you do all of these things, your site will be successful.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

Ecommerce Image provided by Maria Elena.

How Good Is Your Ecommerce Website?

I have designed, directed and built over 350 websites in my career.  I would like to share with you some of the key elements of ensuring a successful ecommerce website.  You can have the best website in the world, but there are a couple of key elements that need to be in place before you launch your website.

First, evaluate how good your customer service is.  You may be wondering “what does building a great ecommerce website have to do with customer service?”  Everything.  Many of the customers in the B2B industrial space use the web to search for products, but often use the phone to place the orders.  Whether the customer is placing the order online, through email or fax, or just making a phone call, the customer experience needs to be great.  Customers go to your website to learn about you and the products that you are selling.  The customer user interface for your website needs to be easy to use and functional.

Second, your customers need to find you.  With the introduction of the internet, the competitive landscape expanded significantly.  With smart phones, IPads, tablets and other web searching devices, access to the internet, the competitive landscape is even larger.  Your company must  be found through all of the internet noise.  Your ecommerce website needs to be search engine optimized. Customers tend to take the path of least resistance.  They can find whatever they want by going to Google, Bing or other search engines.  When they are searching for companies that sell the products you sell, you need to come up on top of the search results.  Make sure your site has search engine friendly URL strings, alt tags, meta tags and is loaded with keywords that show the search engines that you are a valuable resource for your customers for the products that you sell.  Also, leverage social media, online and print advertising.  The more your customers see you, the more likely they are to visit your site and purchase from you.

Third, along with SEO, a solid search engine marketing strategy is important.  Using Google Adwords, for example, to make sure your top products are showing up on page 1 of search results is very important.  When your site is optimized, you can show up on page 1 through organic search and PPC.  Now you are giving the customer a couple of views of you on the same page.

Fourth, your search and navigation on your site need to be easy to use and provide optimum results quickly.  Customers are busy and they don’t want to dig for the products they need.  They want to find what they are looking for fast so they can move on to other things.  If they can’t find what they are looking for quickly on your site, they will turn to your competitors.  I like to use the “3 clicks or less” rule.  If the customer takes more than three clicks to get what they are looking for, they will probably go elsewhere.  Put yourself in your customer’s shoes.  How would you find what you are looking for on your site?  Don’t assume that you know.  Ask your customers.  At one place where I worked, we totally rebuilt a brand new website based on customer feedback and the results were fantastic.

Fifth, make sure your product content is rich.  Search engines love rich content.  The more relevant the search is for the customers, the more money the search engine companies make through advertising and repeat customers.

Finally, make sure that your pricing strategy is competitive.  I have visited great websites that were easy to find products, but their prices were out of line.  You may find desperate customers who might pay the unreasonable price, but don’t expect them as repeat customers.  Do some pricing comparisons with your major competitors and negotiate with your suppliers to improve your margins.

Customers want easy to use sites, good user experience, fantastic customer service and competitive pricing.  With those core elements in place, you can drive traffic and increase sales by launching a synchronized marketing strategy using search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and print, online and email marketing.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

What is the best way to market a new catalog?

There are several different ways to reach out and touch prospects and customers.  If you offer a variety of different products, you most likely have a printed catalog.  You many also offer a catalog flipper on your website.  But how do you let your customers and prospects know that your new catalog is available?

You could send postcards that are inexpensive, but unless you have a reliable, accurate database, that could be a waste of money.  An old fashioned letter via snail mail is another option.  Slim catalogs are an inexpensive way to get more information to a customer or prospect versus just a letter, but we’re back to the reliable, accurate database again.

Some marketers would deploy an email marketing campaign.  It’s significantly cheaper than print.  You can leverage your customer database with an email database you can purchase.  It has been my experience that purchasing email databases is unreliable.  How many different email addresses do you have and use?  People change email addresses all of the time.  In addition, not everyone likes or reads marketing or new catalog announcement emails, especially if they are getting bombarded by spam emails on a regular basis.

Pay-per-click, SEM/SEO and banner advertising are still viable options, but you need to be careful.  PPC can be great, but you can blow a ton of cash from your budget faster than you can say “Google Adwords”.  SEO/SEM works very well if your website is optimized.  The key is getting into the heads of your customers and prospects.  How are they searching for and finding your company on the internet?  If you know and understand that, you can build a very effective SEO/SEM strategy.

And what about using social media to get the word out?  Whether your company caters to B2B or B2C, social media is an excellent channel to tell the world about your new catalog.

Which channel is right for your business?

I have done a significant amount of work in the industrial supply market which was primarily B2B although we expanded more into the B2C space when we opened a store on Amazon.  Over the years, we have seen a migration to digital technology, but print isn’t dead by any means.  Email marketing has become an effective, inexpensive option.  Social media which was born in the B2C market is migrating to B2B.

One thing I have learned over my 20+ years of marketing is that you need to use multiple channels to touch the right prospects and customers.   Everyone has different preferences.  Some like to order online through a website, social media or an app, others use printed catalogs and 800-numbers, and others still use fax or email.  I recommend doing analysis on your customer and prospect ordering methods.  Give the customer the option to review and order your products however they want to.  With all of the digital browsing and ordering tools like smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops, and the speed in which new product information is delivered, you need to be ready to receive orders whatever what way your customers want to order.  Do B2B companies, for example, have to have a mobile version of your website?  Ask your customers.  If that’s their preferred method of searching and ordering products, then you had better build it.  If customers prefer that method, your competitors may have already figured that out.

As a firm believer in synchronized marketing, if you have a new catalog that you want to present to the marketplace, you need to use every marketing channel you can afford and more importantly, the ones which your customers and prospects prefer, and get the word out in one concise, synchronized branding message.

Does business intelligence on the web increase sales?

When Amazon launched, everyone seemed to be amazed with their business intelligence system that offered other products they might want to purchase.  This isn’t rocket science and anyone can build a database that offers related products.  If you purchase a hammer, the upsell could be nails. What the business intelligence system and the company of the same name that they originally implemented was called Net Perceptions or Net P.  This system did not offer related product, although it could. The system would analyze purchasing data of customers and provide recommendations of products that are purchased when certain other products are purchased.  I’m not certain if Amazon is still using the Net P engine or something else today, but they still use upsells, bundles and product referrals.

Using the same example as above, customers that purchase hammers might also purchase men’s dress slacks.  They have nothing to do with each other, but they are often purchased together.  If you think about it, it makes sense.  When you go to the grocery store to buy milk, you don’t always buy cereal, although they go together.  You might buy tomato sauce, apples and hot dogs.  The Net P engine would offer those products.  This technology is called “collaborative filtering”. There were some other whistles and bells included in the software like monitoring purchases of customers and when they were due to reorder, the engine would alert the sales rep so they could ask the customer if they wanted to reorder product.

At one place where I was employed, we integrated Net P into our web site, call center and direct sales smartphones.  We increased sales by $4.5 million dollars that year due to upsells.  It wasn’t quite as easy as it sounds.  We also had a unified effort to get more customers purchasing online, offered incentives for the customer service and sales personnel and our executive management “encouraged” everyone to be on board.

I moved on in my career and had another opportunity to integrate the same technology at another place of business several years later.  The businesses were similar, but not the same. Interestingly enough, the business intelligence engine failed miserably the second time.  Why? One reason was the economy.  When we implemented the BI engine the first time, the economy was doing very well.  Spending money on upsells wasn’t a problem.  Also, upselling on  the web was a relatively new thing.  Not many companies were doing it well, so we took advantage of the new technology.  The second implementation had not as favorable economic conditions, customers were getting upsold every place they went and customer fatigue became a factor.

Does business intelligence work on the web?  Absolutely.  Just ask Amazon.  Does it work all the time?  No.  You need to keep all of the factors in play including the economy, customer buying sentiment, and upsell fatigue when deciding to invest and implement online business intelligence. There are newer, more sophisticated toys in the business intelligence toy box today.  If you look at all of the economic implications and customer buying behavior, you can increase your sales using business intelligence.

B2B vs B2C – So What’s the Difference?

B2B refers to Business to Business or when businesses sell products to each other.  B2C is Business to Consumer or when consumers like you and I purchase products from a brick and mortar or online store.  When you go to a grocery store and purchase a pint of raspberries that is a B2C transaction.  If you are a convenience store owner and you go to Sam’s Club or Costco to purchase 20 pints of raspberries to resell at your store that’s a B2B transaction.  When the convenience store resells the raspberries directly to the end user or consumer that is an example of a B2C transaction.  

One could then assume that consumers buying from businesses should behave the same as businesses buying from other businesses — that is a very poor assumption.  Although the transactions may seem similar, the behavior of businesses versus consumers can be very different.  

I worked at an industrial distribution company that focused on selling products directly to businesses.  We classified our products in different categories based on how often those products sold and needed to be reordered. When we decided to sell 50,000 of our products on Amazon.com, we assumed that the business to consumer customers would behave the same way.  Much to our surprise, they didn’t.  Products that didn’t move very quickly for our company in the B2B space moved very quickly on Amazon.

There were other behavioral differences between our B2B and B2C customers.  After doing some competitive analysis, we built one version of our website that had promotional banners all over the site.  We assumed that our customers wanted the cheapest price all the time.  We launched the site but our sales did not go up as dramatically as we had assumed it would.  We received feedback from our customers who told us to be more like Competitor X who didn’t do any promotions.  Their feedback was too brief to be actionable.  We then contacted every customer who provided feedback to get more details regarding exactly what they meant by their feedback comments.  We learned that although the B2B customer wants a fair price, they aren’t as price sensitive as we originally thought. There are exceptions of course, but in general, we learned that they were more interested in being able to find and purchase products easily and quickly on the website.  Their time is more valuable than saving a few dollars here or there. They thought the promotional banner ads were too distracting.  They suggested that we focus our attention on improving the navigation and search versus bombarding them with discounts and promotions. We immediately rebuilt our website based on customer feedback and our sales instantly improved.

The key to knowing the difference between B2B and B2C is understanding the customer’s behaviors and buying habits.  Analyzing the competitive landscape is also key.  If you know what triggers your customer’s purchasing behavior and ensure that you offer a fair price with very good product quality and exceptional customer service, you will be successful.  

Clean Customer and Product Data – Your Pot of Gold

You can have the best marketing plan with powerful social media, outstanding print and online advertising, great press releases, a speedy ecommerce website, but if your customer and product data isn’t clean, you’re wasting your time. If you don’t know who is visiting your site or placing orders, it’s difficult to market to them. Think of customer data as your pot of gold…your treasure. Without your customers, you have nothing.

I have worked at several organizations and even our own customer data was outdated in large corporate databases like D&B. We were doing some data hygiene and I asked my colleagues to look up our own company information on D&B. The President listed hadn’t been President in several years. Every one of the executives listed weren’t even employed there anymore. Unless you keep customer data up-to-date, contact information and addresses might be wrong. I have worked at organizations that have undergone corporate acquisitions, moved physical locations, had subsidiaries bought and sold. I have yet to find any organization that is totally accurate on their company databases.

As marketers, it is our responsibility to keep our customer databases clean. It is extremely important to have the correct company name, address, city, state, zip, contact information, phone numbers, fax numbers and if possible email addresses. I worked for a company that had very poor data cleansing practices. When asked to de-dupe a 600K record database for a mailing, over half of the addresses were either duplicates or undeliverable. Keeping customer data clean is a ton of work, but it’s a necessary evil.

The same holds true for product data. If a Customer goes to your website, but can’t find what he or she is looking for because the keywords and product descriptions are weak, they won’t waste their time and they will leave…often never returning.  The cleaner your product data is on your website and in your catalogs the better. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Try to find a specific product on your website using a keyword that a customer would use. This is a trap that many marketers fall into. Just because a marketer or a manufacturer calls a product a certain keyword, that doesn’t mean that’s what the customer calls it. Kentucky Fried Chicken had tried to market themselves as that for years, but their customers kept calling them “KFC”. I was working with KFC during this transition time. Instead of trying to change customers’ behavior, KFC smartly changed their advertising approach. Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC. Packaging, signage and advertising all adjusted to what the customer wanted. Learning how the customer finds your products and what they call them is critical. If you can’t find your products easily, neither can your customers or Google for that matter.

It has been my experience that having a team dedicated to keeping your customer and product data clean and accurate is critical to future success. It’s an investment well worth the money and time.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile and my website.

 

 

Meet Gregory Palmer

I help companies grow by connecting their brand with their customers through synchronized marketing. With over 20 years of branding, marketing, ecommerce, product management and sales experience, I have learned how to build effective branding programs utilizing a combination of online, print, email, social media, PR, and events to increase awareness, build loyalty and grow sales.

I am actively looking for a marketing or ecommerce leadership position where I can help companies brand their company and products using synchronized marketing and ecommerce.

Check out who I am and what I do:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregorypalmer

http://www.gregoryapalmer.com

https://www.facebook.com/greg.palmer.7503

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I’m looking forward to helping you create and market your brand.

GP