What Are Your Customers Saying About Your Company?

When your customers call your company or go to your website, what is their experience?  Do they get their questions answered by friendly, helpful customer service representatives?  Do they feel that your customer service representatives are smiling over the phone?  Can they easily find the products they are looking for on your website?  What about their experience when they are disputing an invoice with your accounting department?

In our digital world with instant information and social media that can make or break your company by negative posts about your company, the customer experience is extremely important.  Here are some key things you can look for to give your customers the best experience they can possibly have and more importantly, they will tell other prospects about their stellar interaction with your company.

Positive – Was every customer touchpoint with your company a positive experience?  Whether they called your customer service or accounting department, looked for products on your website, emailed an inquiry to your company or opened their order once they received it, you need to make sure every time you touch the customer, they have a positive experience.

Memorable – What has your company done to make the customer’s experience memorable?  You want them to remember their positive interaction with you over your competitors.  Customers are busy and don’t want to deal with bad customer service.  There are too many competitors that can take your place. Make every time you touch your customers a memorable one.

Friendly and Helpful – Customers need to feel that you want to make their lives easier.  There is nothing better than talking with customer service reps who love what they do and you can feel that they are smiling while they are talking with you.  Everyone to talks to customers need to be professional, friendly and helpful.  Do your customers feel better about their experience with your company after they talk with your customer service reps?

Elevating Customer Experience  – Is everyone in your company committed to making the customer experience the best it can be?  Attitude is a very powerful ally. In several places where I have worked, getting everyone in the company on board with customer service that is “over the top” is mandatory.

How Likely Will Your Customers Recommend Your Company – Do your customers recommend your company to others based on their positive experience?  If you don’t know, ask them.  Customers normally have no problem telling you and anyone else who will listen about a bad experience they had with you.  Find out how satisfied they really are and fix what isn’t working right.  Social media is a great place to listen to your customers.  They are talking about your company, your products and how they were treated.  Listen to the conversation.

Relationships Build Lifetime Customers –  One of the keys to building lifetime customers is to create relationships with your customers.  People buy from people they know.  The more they know you, the more they trust you.  Ensure that your company is committed to having the best customer experience and the relationships will come.

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

Photo credit: ytang3 / Foter / CC BY-SA

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.

Customer Segmentation – Leveraging Your Data For Success

In my post “Clean Customer and Product Data – Your Pot of Gold”, I talked about the importance of customer and product data hygiene and maintenance.  In this post, I would like to take you through the next steps with your clean customer database… customer segmentation. 

The first step in customer segmentation is to analyze your customer data.  Any marketer will tell you that you need to collect as much information about your customers as possible.  The more data you have, the more segmentation you can do.  One of the key things you look for are patterns – similarities and differences in the data that you collect.  Here are some things to look for.

• Geography
• Lead, prospect or customer
• Gender
• Age
• Method of entry to your company (email, print, banner ads, Adwords, social media, call center, fax, walk-in)
• Method that your customers purchase (phone, web, walk-in)
• Products purchased
• Frequency of purchases
• Products viewed but not purchased (You might detect a pricing or product content issue)

 The next step is to group and flag this information into your database.  You can create and name categories that your customers fall into.  For example, if you segment your database by “XYZ widget buyers”, then you can target market to that group only and upsell certain accessories to those customers.

The next step is to segment your customer database.  Be careful here.  You don’t necessarily want to pigeon-hole customers into one group.  You will find customers overlap into multiple categories.  Make sure that you don’t hit the same customers that fall in different groups at the same time.  Verify that the simultaneous marketing campaigns you are launching include different customers.  Over-marketing is easy to do if you aren’t careful.

Once you have flagged your database with the appropriate segments, do some A/B testing of your marketing campaigns.  See what works for those segments and what does not.

Measure everything you do and make adjustments to continuously improve your campaigns.  Implement the programs that work and stop the ones that don’t.

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.

Building an effective synchronized marketing strategy

Synchronized marketing incorporates all of the elements of your marketing strategy including print, online, email, social, PR, trade shows, sales, and customer service and allows them to work together and feed off of each other.  Integrated marketing ties together a few elements, but synchronized marketing ties everything together.  Why does an orchestra make beautiful music?  How can your favorite football team score on an unbelievable play?  The answer to both questions is they work together as a team with perfect synchronization.  Everyone knows what their role is and they know what the goal is of the team.  Let me give you a real-life example of how it can work.

When I started working at a company, prior management didn’t believe in advertising or marketing.  We were dealing with a 60+ year old company that everyone thought was out of business, two black and white catalogs and a web site that had a whopping 15 indexed pages on Google.  The prior management thought that if they dropped a black and white catalog when all of their competitors had color catalogs that the phone would ring off the hook. It didn’t.

After I arrived, the first thing we did was to eliminate black and white catalogs and had one color-coded catalog annually.  We also rebuilt the website using that same color-coding on a platform that Google liked and indexed easily.  All of our marketing and promotional materials used the same color-coding.  Our call center, direct and inside sales reps were also trained to help guide customers on the phone through the catalog based on the color-coding.  The goal is to make it as easy as possible for customers to find and purchase our products.  We even created a custom trade show booth with color-coded back-lit shelves displaying representative products for each section on their respective shelves.  We also leveraged social media through contests that drove traffic back to our new and improved website.  We re-introduced the company to the marketplace through print and online advertising as the best kept secret around. It worked.

Everyone was on the same page.  The catalog, website, social media, online and print advertising, Google Adwords, SEO, promotional materials and the trade show booth all working together to reinforce the brand.  The first trade show I attended before we built the color-coding booth, customers would say things like “I thought you guys went out of business.”  After we launched our synchronized advertising and marketing campaign, the next trade show we attended, we were hearing comments from customers like “I saw your ad in XYZ magazine and had to come see what you are doing.  I have been seeing your ads everywhere.”  Those comments were music to my ears.

How to Make Remarketing Work

 

Before beginning any remarketing campaign, there are a couple of things that need to be in place.  Make sure that your website is optimized and easy to use.  Nothing is worse than having a great remarketing campaign where customers or potential customers click on links to your site and they can’t find what they are looking for.  All of your work to get them to your site just went up in smoke.  If customers and prospects can’t easily find what they are looking for, they will go to a site where they can.  There goes a lost opportunity.

I recently visited a website that has nice flash animation, but the designers sacrificed functionality for glitz.  It was cool, but after clicking around the site for 5 minutes, I still didn’t know what the company did or what products and services they sold.  It was too much work for me to dig on their site for information about them.  A well-designed website makes it very clear what they are selling or offering as soon as you land on the home page.  In the age of split-second decision making, you have to capture their attention immediately. If the site is designed well, it also needs to be optimized so Google searches can bring up your site as a search result.

Rule 1: Make sure your website clearly defines who you are, what you sell and make it as easy as possible for your customers and prospects to use your site.

Now that your site is in good working order and optimized for Google indexing, now you need to drive traffic to your site.  There are a variety of ways to drive traffic to your site.

1. Email marketing with promotions 

2. Banner ads on other high traffic sites

3. Free white paper downloads

4. Social media contests

5. Press releases

6. Print promotions that tie-in to your website

7. Free enewsletters

8. Good SEO with targeted keywords for organic search results

9. Well designed Google Adwords campaigns

And the list goes on.

Rule 2: Make sure your website is optimized for Google search including proper tagging of pages, links going to the correct location (no broken links), solid meta-data, good, rich content, and URL rewrites so the URL matches what’s found on any given page.

Now that you have a functional, easy-to-use site that is optimized and you are driving traffic to it, now you can deploy remarketing programs.  You need to determine what products you want to remarket on your website.  If you sell blue widgets and want to “follow” visitors on your site with your remarketing ad, then you need to design a compelling ad that will get the customer to return to your site. 

Rule 3: Make your remarketing ads are compelling with a clear call to action.

Remember, remarketing is only effective with a clean, well-designed and optimized site that has solid traffic going to it and ads that have a clear call to action.

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.