It might seem strange to consider customer service as part of marketing, but it absolutely is. After all, where would you be without your customers?
If you have profiles on review sites like Yelp, be sure to encourage customers to review you there (while staying within guidelines about how you can and cannot solicit reviews).
Make sure your customers have multiple channels to reach you. Calling customer service lines is all but archaic these days, as technologies like chatbots are rapidly replacing them. Social media,too, is a great way to connect with customers where they’re already spending time.
Whatever channels you use to connect with customers, make sure you’re prompt at responding to them, and that you do your very best to remedy a bad experience they’ve had with your brand. How a customer feels after walking away from this interaction will determine whether she buys from you again or refers new business to you.
Nowadays, consumer psychology and strategy go hand in hand. It is really not a surprise that understanding human behavior has become a key element in every field, be it fashion, entertainment, consulting, etc.
Consumer psychology is even more important for marketers since their main job is to persuade people to buy a product, and how can you do that without having a clue about how your consumers think?
Hiring a remote customer service team for your business can provide cost savings and productivity gains. Even though remote work comes with many benefits, it can also present many challenges for you.
To reach the goals and the results you need, you have to manage your remote customer service team effectively. Your remote workers can provide a world-class service that satisfies customers and encourages repeat business. But for this to happen, you have to courageously lead your team, so that your company has reliable, respectful customer service all day, every day.
Managing your remote customer service team can certainly be hard, but it can be done. The following four tips will help you make it happen.
When is the last time you bought something online, ate at a restaurant, or went to a movie without seeing what other people thought of it first? If you’re anything like me, it’s probably been a while. I look for the star rating on Amazon, and on podcasts I subscribe to. I scour Yelp for restaurant reviews before I choose where I eat, and I never buy movie tickets until I’ve paid a visit to Rotten Tomatoes.
We rely on other people’s opinions way more than we realize in making decisions as consumers. The information is so widely accessible, so why risk shelling out money on something if we aren’t pretty damn sure we’re going to like it?
For nearly two decades, email marketing has been an integral part of digital marketing. However, the process of email marketing in itself has undergone a sweeping change. Email blasts have lost their sheen in an increasingly evolving digital marketplace.
Over the course of time, marketing automation platforms gained a lot of momentum for their proven benefits that increase the impact of email marketing. This also raised the ROI for all the marketing efforts. Read on to discover more about marketing automation vis-a-vis traditional email marketing and, at times, how both of them can be influential when bundled together.
Market research is vital for the success of your enterprise. Depending on the nature of your business, your market research needs will vary. Although most companies are aware of the importance of market research when starting out, many overlook the fact that market research should continuously be a part of your ongoing market strategy.
Market research is an incredibly valuable tool in order to help you find information about your competition and potential new customers as well as beef up your subject matter expertise (SME).
Key information areas include who offers similar products/services to you, who has a need for your product or service and how much are they willing to spend. Market research can help you define how much people are willing to spend, how often they will utilize the product or service, and what specifics they are looking for within the industry.
“There’s no sweeter sound to any person’s ear than the sound of their own name…” ~ Dale Carnegie
Carnegie had many one-liners and bits of wisdom, but this is one of his best. Your name is one of the first words you’ll ever hear. You’ll have it spoken to you softly as your mom cradles you in her arms, yelled to you when you’re in trouble and used to personalize some of life’s finest moments.
This one word - your customer’s name - matters more than any other in marketing. Why? Because it stops making the transaction feel like, well, a transaction. Instead, it makes the experience personal. Personalization in marketing is one of the best ways to really connect with your audience.
You had the best intentions with your new customer relationship management (CRM) software but it didn’t work. Your team didn’t get on board with it and as a result, you stopped using it too. Now, you’re back to square one. You know you need a way to track your customers and leads, but where do you begin?
Your CRM can fail for a number of reasons. The most common is the lack of adoption by your team. To help you use your CRM more effectively, here’s how to fix poor adoption and get more out of this powerful business tool.
There have been many evolving definitions of ‘customer experience management.’ Are you sure you have the right one?
No surprise, it is all of them. Put simply, customer experience is the sum of all the interactions and experiences encountered by a customer throughout a brand’s customer lifecycle.
Only retail is booming. E-commerce is growing at a tremendous pace even outpacing traditional retail sales. By the end of the year it is expected that e-commerce is going to be a $1.5 trillion dollar industry. Most online retailers are enjoying the growth in sales that they are experiencing, but not every online retailer is prepared to deal with returns as well as they should be. Shorr Packaging has put together an informative guide and graphic that covers E-Commerce holiday returns best practices.
The guide and graphic covers in detail the importance of making online holiday returns as easy as possible, what customers want when processing online returns, how to reduce return rates along with general best practices for returns for e-commerce retailers.
An interesting statistic that’s covered in the graphic is that the holiday returns process is the number one reason in-store-only shoppers refuse to buy online. This is a big opportunity for improvement for online retailers. To learn more about improving the e-commerce returns process check out the infographic below.
Customer loyalty programs are often overlooked, but with the right delivery, loyalty programs can go a long way. Through the use of referral programs, cash incentives, rewards and discounts programs, customers are bound to flock to businesses that are the most loyal to their customers. Here, get customer loyalty tactics that help you drive repeat sales.
Every consumer will ultimately tell you that they love a good deal. Who doesn’t? Because of this most retailers offer discounts to help drive sales. Sales increase and customers are happy. Research has shown that discounting e-commerce products can provide long term harm to your business. Slant Marketing has put together a very useful and informative infographic that covers the topic of discounting in e-commerce sales..and how to increase e-commerce sales without slashing prices.
The graphic covers the dangers of discounting. There can be short-term benefits, however discounting of the long-term does more harm than good in e-commerce sales. E-commerce companies should focus on addressing the real problem at hand, and that’s why people are not buying your products. There is some really cool information presented on what stops customers from buying and also what keeps customers buying. Anyone involved in e-commerce sales could benefit from the information presented in this infographic.
Whether online or in-store, retailers count on the holiday season to drive towards their annual goals. This year, many retailers are facing a variety of challenges and changes that will affect their ability to capture market share and wallets across the country. Let’s look at some of these key trends affecting retailers this holiday season.
If you follow economic data, and I do, you know the country’s official unemployment rate is at or near full employment. That means retailers are going to have a harder time finding their temporary holiday employees to staff their registers, stockrooms and fulfillment centers. Macy’s announced its hiring 85,000 temporary holiday employees, Wal-Mart, 60,000. And they’ve started hiring early because they know they’re fighting an uphill battle for help.