Posts

How to Increase Your Ability to Connect with Your Customer

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Connect your customer|How to Increase Your Ability to Connect with Your CustomerHaving the ability to successfully connect with your customer can mean the difference between a thriving business and a stagnating business. Even if you have the best product in the world, if you can’t communicate effectively with your customer, you may well struggle in selling it. Customer Engagement is a vital component of any business strategy. Generating new leads that actually lead to sales is of paramount importance. Plus, once you have these customers, you need a strategy to get them to stay. To help your business connect with your customer, here are a few ideas:

Research your Target Audience

In order to connect better with people, it helps if you understand a little bit about them. So, it makes sense to research your target audience. You need to pose questions to yourself like what characteristics does my key customer hold, age range, family, gender, etc? Also, delve deeper and work out what their likes and dislikes are, what motivates them what value does your product or service pose in their lives? The more you can learn, the more you can develop better marketing material and improve communication between yourself and the customer too. Use as many sources as possible in your research, from your customer files to social media don’t forget to look at your competitor’s social media accounts too.

Branding

Your brand is your identity and is key to connecting with your customers. Working on your brand is where you develop a recognizable logo and color scheme along with an entire company philosophy. Your logo is an emblem of this philosophy, and when someone sees it, they are meant to conjure images of your company’s personality, culture, core values, and ethics. It is worth creating your brand identity with your key customer profile in mind. You are working for your customer to make their lives better so use this information to your advantage. Think about the things that they like and position yourself against this. If it is sustainability, then ensure you have sustainability at the heart of your business. Your brand acts like a foundation to your content and allows for a joined-up approach. Ensure that you have your brand narrative and creation story clearly shown on your website, so anyone interested in your messages can see that it is a vein that runs through the company as a whole.

Customer Service

If you invest in developing a great customer service team, then you can win around even the angriest customer. Anyone that has an issue will want to contact your company, and your customer service team are the fact of your brand. Ensure that your onboarding process is aligned with your company culture so that you employ the most suitable people. Ensure that your staff have the ability to treat every customer as they come and are not restricted by a script. You need the customer to understand that you see them as an individual. Adiotnaly use services such as het vertaalbureau for translation so that all, customers foreign and domestic can be understood.

Why Engaging with Previous Customers Is Key to The Success of Your Handmade Crafts Business


Running your own business selling things you have made yourself can be a hugely satisfying way to make either your main or secondary income, and is becoming extremely popular as the trend for artisanal crafting continues, with some great sites like diyformula.com also helping more people learn more skills.

With people running businesses from their homes and workshops making everything from furniture to home-made cheese and jewelry to upcycled clothing, there are all kinds of entrepreneurs out there trying to sell their lovingly crafted items, and this can make some sectors of the market fairly competitive.

This means that to have success and get more of your products out there, you need to master marketing, and one of the most vital tools in your arsenal in that respect is the contact details of the people who have bought from you before.

The Classic Sales Mantra

Even in big business, all people involved in sales are taught one thing very early on in their careers:

‘It is easier to sell new products to existing customers, than to sell existing products to new customers.’

Assuming your customers are all happy with their purchases, they are the people it will be easiest to sell further items to. They already have familiarity with the existence of your business and have had a good experience shopping from you already.

Word of Mouth

The other thing your previous customers can do for you if you keep them engaged is recommend you to friends, or share your social media content. As people who already like you and your business, they may well be happy to pass on your promotions or new products to people they know, even if they don’t need anything new for themselves at the present time.

This is worth its weight in gold for you, because as much as you may try and use social media for outreach, it counts for little without people supporting your posts and sharing them with others.

Keeping in Touch

Of course, it can be easy to forget a company you bought something from, even if you were delighted with it. For this reason, it is important to keep up engagement with your past customers. Email newsletters can be a good way to do this. As long as you don’t spam your customers, most people don’t mind the odd email with a special offer or a peek at new products.

Encouraging people to follow your social media accounts is also a good way to keep up engagement, though as this is an extra step for the customer to take, you may find you get through to more of them if you offer an incentive, like a small discount or free shipping if they like your Facebook page or follow you on Instagram or Twitter.

When you gain new customers in real life settings, such as at craft fairs, always be sure to hand out business cards with every purchase and if possible, ask people to like your page there and then from their phones (again, in exchange for a small discount or gift).

Never underestimate just how important it is to keep hold of the people you have already won over to your business!

7 Reasons Your Website Conversion Rate Is Low

We often hear about the importance of website traffic. SEO and marketing companies often promise to multiply their clients’ traffic by huge amounts. But, in reality, traffic means nothing if your website users don’t turn into customers. In fact, if you are getting tons of traffic, but users are simply visiting your website and then leaving, it is something to be very alarmed about. It means that there is something wrong with your website, and this is why your conversion rate is low. Are you making one of the following mistakes?

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article
Photo courtesy of Pixabay

  1. You are attracting the wrong audience – Often, conversion rates suffer when you are attracting the wrong audience to your website. This occurs when you are targeting the wrong keywords, posting content on unrelated websites, and generating content that does not appeal to your target market.
  2. Your content is uninspiring – The importance of interesting, original, engaging and informative content cannot be ignored. Getting users to your website is one thing, but you need to keep them there, and the only way to do that is with inspiring content that encourages them to engage. Take a look at this blog post for more information on creating content that converts.
  3. Your website lacks consistency – Your internal CTAs and external campaigns set specific expectations, and your sign up pages and landing pages need to deliver on these expectations. Message inconsistency is a huge problem that will result in people looking for a business that is more reliable.
  4. You aren’t tracking current website performance – This is one of the biggest mistakes business owners make today. How are you ever going to boost the performance of your website if you don’t know how it is performing at present? With expert analytics and reporting for your small business website, you will be able to determine where you are going wrong, enabling you to make the necessary improvements that will boost your conversion rate.
  5. Your calls to action are vague – In simple terms, if you don’t tell your website users the steps they should take, they aren’t going to take them. You could design the best home page in the world, but if it doesn’t lead anywhere, the bounce rate is still going to be high. Your calls to action need to be clear and specific to what the user is looking for.
  6. You don’t use persuasive language – The chances are you are going to need to be persuasive, unless you have an offer that is completely irresistible. You need to address the problems that your target audience experience, and paint a picture of what they can expect once they have purchased your product or taken advantage of your service.
  7. Your product or service is ill-defined – Lastly, one of the main reasons why conversion rates are high is when a firm’s product or service is not defined effectively. You may have an incredible product or service to offer, but if you aren’t doing it justice in terms of the description, no one is going to be interested. Write the description from the customer’s perspective; think about what matters to them most.

30 Minutes To Build Your Freelancing Blog

If you’ve always had a soft spot for the digital world, you may be interested in embracing the blogger life. Bloggers work primarily online – although they can do their research and meetings offline too if this is necessary for their articles – and have found a way to monetize their writing hobby. Here’s a little hint for you, it isn’t the actual content that generates revenues, but the advertising that can be published on the website, as display ads or as part of a link building exchange – all in the sake of white hat SEO. So here’s how to build your perfect blog site in 30 minutes only.

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Time 0-5 Min: Get The Basics Sorted Out

Before you start writing, you need to consider how you want your blog to be called. This will be the domain name of your blog, which is the URL of your home page. Domain names are renowned for being extremely difficult to find, so if you need a little inspiration, why not try a domain name generator like this one. It’s a brilliant way to find awesome combinations! Additionally, you will need to sort out a server solution for your website – here for ideas – , as most blogging platforms only offer limited storage space for free. If you want to become a professional blogger, you’ll need to produce a lot of content; ergo you need a lot of storage space!

Time 5-10 Min: Shape It

Now, it’s time to be looking out for design and layout options. First of all, think about your logo, as a logo will make your blog appear professional. You can find plenty of affordable tools online to design your logo, or you can simply get in touch with a designer on Fiverr.com if you want a unique touch. You will find some great blogging platforms, such as WordPress, that offers hundreds of customizable layouts to give your blog its identity. Some come even for free, so in a matter of clicks, you can have the template you want.

Time 10-25 Min: Build Your Brand Message

It’s now time to prepare all the main elements of your blog: Build your brand online, as seen on the blog. You need to know what your brand is, which means you need to know what makes you unique as a blogger. Are you a mother of three talking about parenting? Are you a survivor of a disease who wants to help people recover their health issues? Define who you are, and make sure to explain it in your About-me page. Also, add a contact page with your blog-related social media platforms – which you need to create – and a contact form for readers who want to contact you.

Time 25-30 Min: Go Life

Last, but not least, your first post on the blog needs to be as good as you can get it. How to write the perfect blog? It’s simple. Focus on who you are writing for – for instance, if you are the mother of three mentioned earlier, it’s likely that you are writing to all parents, future, and present – to identify what your audience is interested in. It will give you the boundaries of topics you can discuss. And then start writing your first post! It doesn’t have to be long – 300 to 500 words is a healthy average. Finally, check your grammar before publishing!