Jon Smith / On...

writing & digital marketing

May 5th 2012

On… RSS Feeds and your small business website

Really Simple Syndication is a service you can add to your website to engage with users. Your customer or visitor elects to receive your RSS feeds and by doing so is opting in to receive information from you, be it your latest blog post, site update notifications or specific messages you write for your RSS audience.

RSS, is by name and nature, simple. Your chance to provide a text-based summary or teaser to an article, page or item of interest. If they’re interested, they click through to read more. RSS works on so many levels because it is simple, the customer opts to receive it and you avoid having to create and pay for an email marketing campaign.

It’s possible to create a buzz and encourage sign-ups by releasing exclusive content or offers to RSS subscribers only.

Posted at 9:31pm and tagged with: RSS, start a new business, marketing, online business, online reputation,.

April 26th 2012

On… Adding your contact details to your website

Contact details

Both a legal requirement and a courtesy – you must include a contact phone number on your website, to allow customers to contact you. Although the primary objective of your website may be to sell products or services online – this is not necessarily why somebody has come to your website. It is imperative that you offer users the chance to find out the information they want. This is usually achieved through a help page, a search box or a FAQ page but you simply can’t second-guess every user about what they might be looking to find on your site; a phone number gives them another option, and, even if they don’t use, seeing it there instils confidence in your brand and service – you’re clearly not hiding. Crucially, if you’re selling products online, add the phone number to the pages of the order pipeline. A percentage of customers abandon the order process having successfully placed an item in their basket – by offering a phone number, if they’re experiencing difficulties, or become confused, that phone number offers the chance for you to catch the sale (and possibly up sell!). Don’t expect users to navigate to your Contact Us page to find the information – add it to the page!

Posted at 9:20pm and tagged with: start-up, start a new business, online, online reputation,.

April 24th 2012

On… Good Customer Service from your online business

Customer Services does not just mean offering a phone number or an email address on the site and hoping for the best.

To manage your expectations, if you’re operating an e-commerce operation, you’ll be very lucky indeed if your customer contact rate is less than 5-10%. This means for every 100 orders you ship, at least 5-10 people will contact you before, during or after their order. Of those same contacts about 50% will contact you again with a follow up inquiry. You must allow for this in your daily operations and have suitable staff allocation in place.

At first you will be able to handle the calls and the emails yourself, but for all the time you are answering a customer, or finding out what happened with their order, either internally or with the carrier, you’re not doing the other twenty tasks that need to be done.

For service providers, customer services also covers sales inquiries and client care, both pre- and post-sale. These inquiries won’t be so numerous, but without doubt each inquiry will be unique and will require a detailed and well researched response. Again, you will be able to handle this yourself initially, but eventually it will require its own resource.

Posted at 7:56pm and tagged with: Customer Service, start a business, online business, online reputation,.

April 23rd 2012

On… Pleasing your customers, everytime…

Your tone with customers (or potential customers) must at all times be professional and courteous – it could be that one initial email that leads to a huge order or turns out to be from a journalist writing a piece on your particular market. It could be that this same customer becomes one of your most loyal and constant clients recommending you far and wide. Your customers are your lifeblood and customer service is therefore a very necessary arm of your business, not something you can try and ‘deal with’ whilst eating your lunch.

·      Clearly display a phone number on your website, especially during the order pipeline pages

·      Provide email addresses or contact forms for customers to contact you

·      Consider livechat functionality for customers who require an immediate response

·      Give customers a guide to when they can expect a reply – if it’s 24 hours, make sure you reply within this timeframe

·      Fix the customer’s problem as quickly and efficiently as you can

·      Take any criticism seriously and investigate what you can do to stop the same thing happening to other customers

Without doubt many of your customer’s inquiries will have similarities and therefore it’s well worth creating templates or blurbs which can be utilised for the most common types of contact. Don’t send the template out un-edited, as no single email can cover so many bases.

·      Personalise the email with the customers name, order number/reference, delivery address

·      If the contact is related to a credit or debit card number, be sure that neither you nor the customer quotes the card number via email – this must be done via an http webpage or via telephone/fax

·      Quote the expected or revised delivery date if applicable

·      Sign off with a real name, so that the customer can follow up with the customer service representative in the future

·      Thank the customer for their query/order/comment

Posted at 8:13pm and tagged with: Customer Service, start-up, start a new business, online business, online reputation, two column,.

April 2nd 2012

On… Going above and beyond to attract customers

Going above and beyond

You’re a new business and you have to impress potential and returning customers – giving away something for free may seem counter-productive but it can be super effective at ensuring future custom and causing a word-of-mouth stir. This is true for both product and service providers.

For product providers:

* give away something novel i.e. a free packet of sweets/candy bar with every order

* upgrade random customer’s delivery options – under promise over deliver

* include a voucher or code for a discount of future purchases.

* offer a reward for introducing a friend to your service

For service providers:

* A pdf guide or white paper on a topic of interest to potential clients available for download - if it’s branded, you’ll get the call… see http://www.aedgency.com/resources/guides/

*An invitation to all your clients to join you on a night out

* offer a reward for introducing another company to your service

* Run a fantasy football or similar league for your clients with an attractive prize for the winner

* create an award – i.e. if you are an accountant launch a competition via your website or create a micro-site for the best business plan – you’ll have a great chance to get media coverage, traffic and all those new businesses will need accounting services…

You can use one or all of these techniques at different times of the year – your aim always is to delight your customers.

Posted at 10:39pm and tagged with: Customer Service, online business, online reputation, start a business, two column,.

March 1st 2012

On… Keywords

Don’t obsess over highly-competitive single words or phrases in a bid to rank number 1 – for starters, cramming in the word “accountant” onto every page of your website in the hope of ranking number 1 for the search term [accountant] will not work – Google will see this as keyword stuffing and actually penalise your site. It’s far better to study the words and phrases that users actually type in to Google. You can do this through Google’s own keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/

For example, data for the term [accountant] reveals that it is indeed a popular search phrase. Without doubt it’s worth creating pages of content that include the term [accountant] but this simple research also shows that by creating additional content that focuses on [accountants], or [accountancy] together with specialist pages containing specific content on [tax accountants] and [accounting services] your pages will appeal to a much larger amount of search traffic; i.e. those users who are searching for derivatives of the word accountant and words relating to the topic or service. So you might not achieve the top position for [accountant], but you’ll be receiving lots of qualified traffic who are interested in your specific accountancy services, rather than  unqualified traffic who may or may not have been looking to hire your firm.

Posted at 11:31pm and tagged with: keywords, seo, search engine optimisation, online reputation, marketing,.

February 29th 2012

On… Website content and your online reputation

1 note

An often quoted phrase you may have heard is ‘content is king’. It’s not wrong. Good content is key to a good website. Good content is attractive to human users because it helps inform, educate, inspire and importantly, sell your product or service. This means more users visit, more users benefit from your content and ultimately more users become consumers of your product or services. Good content is also attractive to other website owners who want to provide relevant, interesting or value-added content to their users, if you’ve got good content, then they will link to your pages. Good content is also attractive to Google and the other search engines because good content means that Google can supply a suitable solution to their customer’s search – a link to your website. But here’s the best bit – if Google thinks the content is good (read: accessible, structured and relevant) and other websites think your content is good, and thus link to it… then Google thinks that these third-party votes of confidence (links) are

Reputation

A by-product of providing good content on your website (text, images, videos, downloads etc) is that other websites will link to your content. This is great in itself because it positions your website as an authority on your given product or service, it results in more traffic as users of other sites click on the link to consume the content on your pages and it also makes Google sit up and take notice of your web pages resulting in more visits from the Googlebot.

Posted at 11:31pm and tagged with: online reputation, start-up, start a business, website,.