Using a spreadsheet or index cards to manage your clients may make sense when you’re first starting out: there aren’t that many to keep track of, and the clients you do have don’t have a long history with your business.

However, as time goes on, your client list grows, your track record with existing clients becomes longer and more complex, and you need a better way to manage these relationships.

That’s where a client relationship management (CRM) tool comes in. CRMs are not just for big multinationals. There are tremendous benefits to the technology even for small local businesses. The tool is designed to make it easier for both your sales and marketing teams to work effectively and drive even more conversions. Read on, and I’ll take you through all the benefits of incorporating a CRM tool into your workflow.

Scale More Easily

A lot of small business owners are happy to manage their client information in a spreadsheet or word document. At the same time, business owners hope to see their companies succeed and grow. When you’re creating your own haphazard method for tracking your customers, you’re practically ensuring an information bottleneck as your business continues to expand.

CRM tools are designed to grow with your business. When you acquire new prospects, upsell existing customers, add new products and services, or begin a new outreach campaign, these tools are designed to meet you where you are and then keep pace as you broaden your horizons.

A spreadsheet doesn’t have the same flexibility; you’ll soon find yourself struggling to add new columns and tabs, and information will get lost in the shuffle. A spreadsheet also doesn’t integrate with your other marketing and sales tools or provide reports and analytics in the same way that a CRM tool can.

Enhance Customer Experience

Customers today are won and lost based on the experience they have interacting with your business. There is a lot of competition out there, and with the digital landscape being what it is, it’s likely that your customer can find another business that does what you do. So it’s a highly personalized customer experience, with strong attention to detail, that will allow you to stand out from the pack and turn your prospects into return customers.

CRM tools allow you to track all interactions with a customer across platforms. When did they last make a purchase with you, and what was it? Did they submit a review of the product or service they bought? Did they reach out via phone, email, or online chat with a question about their recent purchase? Are they on the mailing list for your newsletter?

There are so many ways in which you interact with customers, and it’s near impossible for a human to track all of these touchpoints effectively and accurately. Having this information all in one place allows all members of your team to better serve customers.

Marketers can send targeted messaging to users who have expressed an interest in a particular good or service your provide. Salespeople can be more proactive about reaching out to customers that they haven’t heard from in a while, and can make a thoughtful reference to something they discussed in their last conversation when they reach out to reestablish contact. Your customer service team can see a history of issues a user has had with a given product and can meet them where they are, rather than making the customer rehash their issue each time they contact you with a question.

Knowing what your customer has done in the past allows you to be thoughtful about your interactions in the future. Adding a personal touch to your interactions is what distinguishes your brand. You increase trust—a key part of the customer relationship—when you show that you not only know what you’re doing, but that you care about the customer and their individual needs.

Send Targeted Messages

As I mentioned briefly above, one of the major benefits to marketers using a CRM tool is the ability to undertake customer segmentation based on past behavior.

Customer segmentation is what gives your marketing efforts that personalized touch. CRM tools allow you to group prospects and clients based on a variety of different attributes: where the lead came from, how they’ve engaged with you in the past, what they’ve purchased from you, or demographics like age or location.

You can then easily send relevant messages to those who meet certain criteria in a given group. All leads that came from attending an event you hosted last month can receive an invitation to your next event, complete with an early bird registration discount. All customers who purchased a given service in the past year can be sent a free copy of your latest white paper on a related topic. All of your customers in the Northwest can be notified when you’re speaking at a conference in Seattle.

Now, sending a message about your Seattle conference appearance to your clients in Pennsylvania might lead them to unsubscribe, since you’re clogging up their inbox with irrelevant messaging. But if that same client receives a personalized note from you, following up on their recent purchase and providing them with a training video about how to better use the item that they bought they’ll likely have a very different reaction. Email segmentation allows you to not only build trust, but also make sure that the right offers are getting in front of the right people, thereby increasing the likelihood of a conversion.

Manage Your Sales Pipeline

CRMs don’t just allow you to track the behaviors of existing customers, you can use them to manage your prospects, too. When you can see where all of your prospects are in the customer journey, you can better understand what changes you need to make to your approach to win over more new business.

CRM tools can allow you to see bottlenecks in your sales pipeline. Is there one particular area where conversions just don’t seem to be happening? Once you can see that issue, you can begin to address it. Maybe lots of prospects are eager to sign up for a free trial of your service, but then they’re not converting. That means you should focus on what’s happening with their free trial experience—are they underwhelmed with their experience, or are you not providing adequate follow-up after the trial in order to get them to commit to the paid version?

These tools will also allow you to parse your data based on factors like deal size, expected close date, and last point of contact so that you can direct your sales team to go after the most promising leads or those with the most pressing deadlines attached.

Finally, you can keep better track of the deals that you’ve lost. When you understand when and where you lost out on business, you can then begin to gather the information around the why. Did you drop the ball and wait too long to provide them with information? Did they find a similar product or service at a much lower price? This is the kind of information that allows you to improve your approach with future prospects and ensure your success next time around.

I’m Sold! How Do I Find the Right CRM?

Hopefully I’ve convinced you of the many benefits to adding a CRM tool to your business. But now the question becomes, with the myriad of options, which one is best for you? The systems run the gamut in terms of capabilities, so the real key to finding the right one is selecting the tool that best aligns with your goals and needs.

Just because your friend uses and loves a given CRM for their business doesn’t mean it will serve you just as well. Find the CRM that allows you to collect the data that you most want to track and provides the marketing automation features that are most important to you. You’ll also want to consider your team’s level of tech-savvy and workload and select a CRM that lines up with their abilities and bandwidth.

A tool like Hubspot’s CRM is free to use and is very comprehensive. The downside here is that the tool is complex. There will be a learning curve when you implement any new tech, but some CRMs are more involved than others. No matter what program you settle on, you’ll want to be sure that you’re providing your team with the appropriate training and support to make sure that you get the most out of your new system.

A nice middle ground for small business owners is ActiveCampaign‘s CRM. The system allows for marketing automation alongside more traditional sales and CRM features. The platform is fairly intuitive and they offer a variety of pricing options based on your needs and budget.

Today’s business owners are able to collect a lot of information about their customers and prospects, and it comes from a lot of different sources. As a business continues to grow, it’s nearly impossible for a person to accurately track, manage, and analyze all of this data on their own. And when you’re not able to see it all in one place, you’re missing out on valuable conversion opportunities. Turning to a CRM tool to help you manage the information, streamline the way you interact with customers and prospects, and get specific about the way that you approach each individual can empower you to take your business to the next level.

If you liked this post, check out our Guide to Customer Relationship Management.

Every business owner knows that the key to generating referrals is creating a positive customer experience. When someone has a great interaction with your brand, they’re more likely to go and recommend you to their friends or colleagues.

One recommendation can mean a lot to your business, but what if you could turn that happy customer into a referral champion: someone who refers your business again and again?

It is possible to foster relationships with clients so that they become referral champions. Read on as I take a look at the steps to nurture these relationships and keep customers referring your business for years to come.

What is a Referral Champion?

Simply put, a referral champion is a happy customer who refers your business to more and more friends. Of course, there’s a bit more to it than that. A referral champion is likely someone who’s had more than one interaction with your business. A customer wouldn’t necessarily recommend a dry cleaner after visiting the shop just once, but if they take their shirts there each week to be cleaned and are consistently happy with the results, they’ll be more likely to suggest the business to a neighbor.

The other alternative is that it’s someone who had a truly remarkable experience with your business. Back to the dry cleaning example: a woman has a formal event this evening. She’s gotten a black ink stain on her cream wool dress, and it needs to be cleaned by that night! Her regular dry cleaner is way across town—she doesn’t have time to get there—so she turns to you. You’re able to remove the stain and have the dress ready to go by 5pm. That’s the kind of exceptional experience that may lead her to refer you based solely on that one interaction.

This is why you often hear me talk about the importance of creating an amazing customer experience. Whether someone is going to use your business just once or come back again and again, the experience must be high each time. It can be the first step to establishing a great referral champion relationship.

How Do You Find Them?

So now we understand what a great referral champion looks like, but how do you identify your potential referral champions from amongst all your customers? This is where calculating Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) comes in. The CLV represents what a customer will be worth to you over the entire lifetime of your interactions; this takes you beyond looking at a single transaction and helps you to see the bigger picture.

We’re able to take that formula a step further to include a customer’s referral value (CRV) as well. V. Kumar, a professor at Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business, and his colleagues offer a comprehensive approach to calculating CRV, which allows you to identify the number of referrals you can expect to get from each customer based on their prior behavior.

The formula also takes into account whether or not those referrals would have found you on their own without their friend’s recommendation. If that customer would have done business with your company anyway (which surveys showed was the case about half of the time), then the overall value of the referral is lessened.

Make it Easy to Become a Champion

Now that you understand the nature of your relationship with each customer, you can begin to get strategic about how to create the strongest referral champions possible. Some of your customers have a high CLV—they’re doing a lot of business with your company—but they haven’t yet become strong referral champions. Most happy customers say that they’d be willing to put in a good word for a business, but not all of them follow through.

In order to create referral champions, you want to make the referral process as simple as possible. Your customers are busy people and don’t have time to search for ways to refer you. You need to put that information front and center. Call to action buttons on your website, links to your Yelp or Facebook profiles in your email signature, and simple forms that ask for as little information as possible will all reduce friction in the referral and review capturing process and will drive your happy customers to share their positive feelings toward your brand.

Take Care of Your Existing Champions

There are some customers that already have a high CLV and CRV—they’re giving you a lot of their own business and are consistently referring you to friends. For customers like this, you want to be showing your appreciation for both their return business and steady referral stream.

There are a number of things you can do to thank them. Consider hosting an exclusive event for your best customers. Present them with a coupon to use on their next purchase, or with a gift card to their favorite local shop. Send them a free copy of your latest white paper or eBook on a topic they’d be interested in. Even a personalized phone call or email can go a long way.

The important thing here is to make sure you’re keeping the customer experience highly personalized. Your best customers don’t want to feel like they’re getting generic communications—they went out of their way to refer you, so you should go out of your way to send them a meaningful thank you.

Incentivize the Process

Whether someone is already a strong referral champion or is a happy customer with the potential to become one, instituting a referral program can be a good way to ensure that your customers continue referring your business well into the future.

There are a few tricks to creating an effective referral program. Make sure that the offer you’re making is one that customers will actually find beneficial, and create incentives for both the person doing the referring and for their friend. This will make it all the more likely that once that friend becomes one of your customers, they will turn around and refer one or two of their friends.

Referral champions are invaluable to your business. Each and every referral counts, so when you’re able to create a customer that generates multiple referrals over the years, that’s like striking gold. Keeping the customer experience high, making it easy to refer their friends, and going the extra mile to provide personalized service are the hallmarks of an effective referral champion program that will keep you in business for many, many years.

If you liked this post, check out our Small Business Guide to Referrals.

When you think of your business’s sales strategy, you may be tempted to think of it as only relating to the actual transaction where a customer pays for the good or service you offer.

However, businesses today can’t think of their relationship with their customers as a linear one. Instead, people have the opportunity to interact with your brand in a wide variety of ways: on your website, in-person, over the phone, via email, in Google search, or on social media. And they go through different phases, from just coming to know of your product to (hopefully, eventually) being a return customer who refers others to your business. The sum of all these interactions with your brand is what we call the customer journey.

Because this journey is not a straight road, your sales team can play a role in each phase of the journey. As you think about building an hourglass that addresses marketing needs for prospects and customers at each phase, you should also consider how your sales team fits into the hourglass model. Whether someone is hearing about your brand for the first time or is making their 50th purchase, your sales team has something to offer them.

We’ll take a look at the stages a customer goes through on their journey of interacting with a brand, and how sales can play a role in each phase.

Getting to Know You

When someone is just encountering a brand for the first time, you have a tremendous opportunity but also a great responsibility. They know nothing about your business, so it’s up to you to create a cohesive image that quickly, easily, and clearly communicates who you are, what you do, and why you do it better than anyone else in the game.

These early stages of brand discovery—the know and like phases of the hourglass—are often thought of as the territory of the marketing team. Creating advertising campaigns, compelling calls to action, and social media profiles fall under their purview, but sales has a role to play even this early on in the customer journey.

Outbound marketing efforts may well include your sales team. If you undertake telemarketing or cold calling, have a booth at a trade show, or have a giveaway of branded items at a community event, these are opportunities for your sales team to be the first point of contact with prospects.

While outbound marketing techniques have become less popular in recent years, if it’s done correctly, it can help you to create positive associations with your brand in the minds of prospects. The key here is in making sure that you have a sales team that’s comfortable with having a conversation that touches on the important differentiators for your brand, but at the same time doesn’t feel scripted. With the right sales team in place, it’s possible to create positive personal connections with prospects immediately, and that really allows you to stand out from your competition that’s relying solely on inbound techniques.

Coming to Trust You

A recent survey from Wantedness.com found that, in the U.S., 79 percent of consumers said they would only do business with brands that show they understand and care about “me.”

The trust and try areas of the hourglass are where there’s the greatest crossover between your marketing and sales teams, and so they should be working in tandem to create that highly personalized approach. In order to be most effective, they need to have access to each other’s information: sales needs to share their CRM data, while marketing should provide a window into their analytics.

While some prospects will react well to personalized email campaigns and targeted paid advertising on Facebook, all managed by the marketing team, others will need a bit more hand-holding from someone in sales.

Having a call to action button on your website that makes it easy for prospects to request a demo and get in touch with a member of your sales team can help funnel those prospects that need a little extra attention to the appropriate salesperson. Additionally, creating a shared inbox for your marketing and sales teams will allow your marketing folks to easily hand off prospects that would like more, detailed information to the sales team.

The Moment of Truth: The Purchase

This is what the sales team has been waiting for. After playing a role in introducing prospects to the brand and being responsive to their questions in the trust and try phases, the prospect is finally ready to convert.

Of course, the buying phase of the customer journey where the sales team plays the most obvious role. It’s also a point that some business owners take for granted. Just because someone has become a customer does not mean they can now be forgotten.

As Joey Coleman and I discussed in a podcast episode, creating a standout customer experience is an important part of taking people from one-time customer to repeat client. The sales team needs to make sure that the first time someone buys from you, they have an optimized experience. That means automated updates on their purchase, an easy way to get in touch if there’s an issue, and a proactive approach from you.

If your sales team is able to provide a stellar experience for a customer’s first time buying from your company, they’re a lot more likely to come back again. The trick here, of course, is that the stellar experience needs to be repeated on each subsequent interaction. Your sales team can never take a customer for granted, because if they do, that customer will eventually drift away to a competitor.

Part of the trick here is to establish crystal clear processes for your sales team’s interactions with customers. Make sure you have a customer service platform in place to ensure that any issues are being addressed in a timely manner and that efforts are not being duplicated (which wastes your team’s time and frustrates and confuses your customer). Consider a platform like ZenDesk, which allows you to track customer support requests across channels.

Building a Referral Engine

The final stage of the hourglass gives your customers the opportunity to generate new leads for you. When you empower your sales team to effectively generate referrals, you can build an engine that fuels your business growth for years to come.

Encourage your sales team to be proactive about gathering referrals. If they have a positive interaction with a customer, have a formalized process in place for getting a written review from that person.

Customers will also be more likely to refer you if you remain top of mind. Your sales team should be using a customer data platform to track interactions with customers. If you haven’t spoken to one in a while, have your sales team reach out. A personalized email or phone call might not only bring them back to make another purchase themselves, it will also position you to be the business they recommend later in the week when their friend happens to ask if they know a company that does exactly what you do.

If you think of your sales team as a group that only springs into action the moment someone wants to make a purchase, you’re missing out on the enormous potential that they have to support your business throughout the customer journey. When deployed correctly, your sales team can be by your customers’ sides each step of the way, which only serves to strengthen their relationship with your brand and makes them more likely to establish long-term connections with your business.

If you liked this post, check out our Small Business Guide to Sales and the Small Business Guide to Shaping the Customer Journey.

“The purpose of a business is to create a customer.”

Peter Drucker, Austrian-American management consultant, educator, and author

We live in a world where businesses strive hard to outdo each other and win customers. Enduring business success is what most firms seek but very few achieve. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses have shut shop after 4 to 5 years of ordinary existence. These unsuccessful businesses never had the opportunity to break through and make their presence felt in a world dominated by cutthroat competition.

So what separates the successful companies from the unsuccessful ones? The answer is simple – recurring revenues!

Recurring revenue is a concept organization seek to achieve on a regular basis. This helps them engage in the intricacies of business more confidently without worrying too much about profits.

Recurring revenue is possible only if a business has a steady flow of customers. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to get recurring customers. A lot of organizations deal with one-time customers who never return again. It’s time to convert them into trustworthy customers. It’s time to tweak the business strategies deployed by your organization and gain more acceptance with a widespread customer base.

Here are some tips to ensure your competitors don’t march ahead of you in the future. These tips are simple and may appear easy to implement. We recommend you implement them the right way to gain long-term benefits. Brainstorm with your team before embarking on a future course of action.

1. Offer exceptional products or services

One of the main reasons why a customer returns to a seller is to make use of the exceptional products or services on offer. Does your business offer goods that can rival those offered by competitors? If your answer is no, then it will take a while before one-time customers turn into lifelong ones.

You will have to sit with the team and iron out any deficiencies in your offerings. This will help you take a more balanced and positive approach towards ensuring customers remain with you for the long term.

2. Introduce customer loyalty programs

Make it a habit to reward loyal customers for their association with your brand. Launch a customer loyalty program and ensure that a lot of your customers sign up. Offer them discounts on their next purchase or after they have reached a pre-determined dollar value in purchases.

The way your loyalty program performs will rely solely on how it is run. You will need to spend significant time and efforts to understand your customers and whether the loyalty program caters to their varying tastes.

3. Send timely updates about exciting offers

You will have access to the customer’s email IDs after they sign up for the loyalty program. Send updates about offers in a timely fashion to ensure customers are aware of new deals. This also encourages them to visit your store or office more often!

Perform research to understand the kind of deals people love to receive. This will ensure that you are on the right path to ensuring people take complete advantage of the offers you provide.

4. Take complaints seriously!

A complaint is an opportunity to convert an angry customer into a happy friend. How does your team handle complaints? Do they go into defensive mode? Or do they take a genuine effort to provide a logical solution?

Remember this – customers appreciate businesses that go the extra mile to keep them happy. You should ensure that customers don’t feel neglected. Keeping them happy is the need of the hour!

5. Surprise customers whenever you can

It’s important to make customers feel positive about your business. Achieve this with useful gifts that they can put to use immediately at home or at the workplace. Choose impressive giveaways such as pens, totes, or mugs to keep customers hooked to your brand!

You could also send cookies, provide personalized service, or send “Thank you” notes. Another way to surprise them is by sending messages on birthdays and anniversaries. A pleasant surprise will make a customer feel good about your brand, granting them a positive experience to remember your brand by.

6. Highlight your business on social media

It’s important to make your presence felt on the Internet. The best way to do this is by creating social media pages. Create attractive and interactive posts that help you interact with followers on a daily basis, ensuring that your brand remains on their minds for a long time.

A social media campaign needs an effective content calendar to ensure that posts are successful. Make sure you have a talented resource who is capable of creating posts that resonate with followers. Use these posts to strike a meaningful chord with them. Your goal should be to highlight your brand as an industry leader who cares deeply about what the customer wants.

What kind of strategy have you adopted to gain customers for life? Has it helped you? Share your experiences in the comment box below!

About the Author

Dave Sarro is the President and CEO of Promo Direct, a #1 promotional products company in the US that is focused on supplying a range of promotional giveaways to businesses, educational institutes, and NGOs of all sizes in the US. Dave is a consummate marketing strategist, key authority in the promotional industry and responsible for driving the company towards its mission of delivering quality products and optimum user experiences.

Today I’m thrilled to share the story of my long-time friend and Kansas Citian John Couture who is the founder of the Bier Station, as a part of the “Amex Welcomed” program with @americanexpress, which is showcasing the people behind our favorite local businesses that welcome Amex. Did you know that over 8,000 more places in the Kansas City area started accepting American Express® Cards in 2016?

I first met John when he was a high school student working at a local video rental store. (Remember those?)

A few years later, John and his business partner, Dan Kiefer, created Bier Station, one of the most successful neighborhood beer bar and store concepts in the nation. Bier Station routinely makes top 100 lists and best of state lists from sites like Thrillist.

But it wasn’t always smooth sailing.

Before Couture could realize his entrepreneurial dream, he had to get a local and state ordinance changed for his concept of a combined neighborhood bar and retail bottle shop.

To make his concept viable in KC, Couture hired an area law firm to help lobby the City Council to change tavern licensing. He also had to secure written consent from a majority of the property owners within a certain radius of the business – a door-to-door errand at best.

In this interview, Couture shares a bit of what he’s learned and gained along the path of building a wildly successful small, local business.

To me, the biggest takeaway from my time with John is when he talks about what they look for in employees. In the beginning, they looked for people who were very knowledgeable about craft beer but found they could teach that knowledge. Instead, they look for people who love serving and being a part of the business. You can’t teach kindness, positivity, and can-do attitude, but turns out you can teach the meaning of IBUs. Cheers!

Questions John J: I am talking with John Couture, -founder of Bier Station. Tell us a little bit about Bier Station.

Answers John C:  Bier Station is the Midwest’s first craft beer tasting bar and bottle shop. Essentially this is a concept that was started on the West Coast in Portland, Oregon. If you can imagine a packaged beer store with coolers, blended with a regular pub that has taps and food, you get kind of an idea of what we are.

Q: What makes this place special?

A: We have won quite a few national beer awards and we have the vibe of a neighborhood pub. We attract a lot of people from around the neighborhood who push a stroller here and stop in for a sandwich and a beer with their kids. It’s a very unpretentious, almost like a European coffee shop style vibe. At the same time, we have a national reputation and attract people I would call “beer tourists.” Being a neighborhood beer bar with a national reputation is what I would say sets us apart.

Q: Would you say that that neighborhood family feel is something that was intentional from the very beginning?

A:  Absolutely. When we opened the store, my kids were about two and four years old. My kids go to school right up the street and one of the dreams I had for opening my own business (once I got past the sheer terror of starting a business and working 23 hours a day) is that someday my kids could walk down after school and have a pretzel and do their homework here. I wanted to make sure that people felt comfortable coming here with their kids.

Q:   What has been the hardest about growing a business?

A: Probably paperwork. Sitting next to me is a six or seven-inch stack of envelopes that I was trying to get through today. There’s so much busy work when you’re running a business that you wonder where the day went. When people ask you how you spend your time, I just say, “I’m just busy.”

Q: What’s been your secret to getting people that fit into the culture of your business?

A:  When we first started out, we were really hyper-focused on making sure we had people who knew as much as possible about craft beer. I think one thing I’ve learned is that we’ve had better experiences hiring people that are just good people, that are fun to work with and take their job seriously and work hard, but are willing to learn.

Q: What’s the most fun about what you do?

A: It’s still work, for sure. You have some tough days, but, it ultimately does feel like you’re kind of hanging out with friends. We all get along really well. A lot of our staff hangs out outside of work, which always is a great indicator.

Q: How do you fight the grind of it to stay motivated and inspired?

A: You’ve got to always stay fresh. We never want to rest on our laurels. One thing we’ve done this year is another extension of what I believe in – trying to give back to the community. This year we’ve been doing a lot of fundraisers. We partner with breweries and they donate a keg and we donate the proceeds from that keg to a positive choice. We’ve raised about $70,000 for about 15 or 20 charities so far this year.

Q: Do you have any people that you would call mentors?

A: Jill Green was my business coach. I went through the Kaufman Urban Entrepreneur Program. She has opened up Outback Steakhouses in new markets. So, she knows restaurants. She really gave me the confidence to believe that we could actually make it work. She believed in us and helped me develop the business plans.

Also, John McDonald from Boulevard Brewing. He really believed in our concept. He saw how much we cared about beer and he gave us some amazing suggestions. He also donated the labor for his top draft technician, who’s one of the best people in the Midwest at that, to help us build out our tap wall. I come from a family of two Catholic high school teachers. We didn’t have unlimited means. We really had to stretch our budget to open and he saw that we needed some help and helped us out. We’ll never forget that.

Q: Where are you on the path to world domination?

A: You know it’s funny, my business partner and I have talked about opening up a second location. I think a lot of people stumble by assuming it’s easy to open up a second location if the first one is successful. Honestly, for right now I think we’re good with one. I’m supporting my family. Our staff seems happy. My business partner and I are happy. We’re not greedy. I think that we might be happy just having our piece of Kansas City for now.

“This post is sponsored by American Express, but all opinions are my own.” 

Why do your customers buy? What are they looking for? Why do they convert on your site?

Ask most marketers or business owners these questions and you’ll usually get a lot of very specific answers. “We have the best prices”…“Our product has more features than the competition”…“Our customer service is incredible”…

Now, all of these answers are great, but most of the time, they don’t answer the real question: why do your customers buy from you?

What do your customers really care about?

When someone clicks on an ad and visits your page, it’s true that they might be looking for the best price or a certain set of features. It’s even possible that they might be looking for testimonials about customer service.

But how do you really know that your customer service testimonials are why people convert on your site?

Maybe you think it’s your testimonials, but it’s really your price…or your features…or that cute puppy in your hero shot. When you get right down to it, most of the time you don’t really know why people decide to buy from you.

However, that doesn’t stop us from assuming that we know why people buy from us. Humans have this funny tendency to believe that “if it matters to me, it must matter to everyone!”

So, if you value your customer service, those testimonials about your awesome customer service reps must be why people convert, right?

Well, maybe.

But what if you change your site to emphasize your testimonials and your conversion rate goes down? What then?

Was it a bad month? Did you use the wrong testimonials? Or did you change the wrong thing on your site?

Testing your website

As any good scientist will tell you, if you really want to prove something, you need to run a test! In online marketing, we call this conversion rate optimization, but it’s really just the art of creating hypotheses about your website and testing them.

To show you how this works, let’s use SurvivalLife.com as an example. When Survival Life set up their site, they used a clean, minimalistic site design—you know, the kind web designers rave about.

The team at Survival Life loved the design, but they were smart enough to realize that what they loved might not be what their audience loved. So, they decided to test an “uglier” design against their award-worthy template.

To their surprise, the ugly design far outperformed their original template.

But why? Most web designers and even conversion experts would tell you that a clunkier, uglier site will get worse results than a simple, beautiful template. In fact, that’s what the team at Survival Life believed, so why did their uglier site design work better?

The answer is fairly simple. The “ugly” site design was what their audience resonated with.

Although website design best practices can help improve the performance of your site, your site traffic is always unique to your site. That means no one—including you—can completely predict which site elements or changes will improve your conversion rates.

However, just because you can’t predict how your audience will respond to a change in your site doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try out new ideas. The key is to test them. That way, you can tell which changes make a difference…and which ones don’t.

How to effectively test your website

So, if simply making tweaks to your site that you think will improve performance isn’t a great idea, how should you test your website?

Once you’ve come up with a few testing ideas, here are a variety of tools you can use to test your site (VWO, Optimizely, Google Experiments, etc). Each of these tools has different strengths, but they all serve the same fundamental purpose: they allow you to compare the performance of different designs and site elements.

Since the specific tool isn’t as important as the tests you’re running, we’ll focus on how to run and analyze your tests in this article (for more info on testing tools, click here). To run an effective website test, you need to understand 3 basic testing concepts:

1. Your traffic changes over time

As any good marketer knows, your traffic changes over time. You have good months and bad months. As a result, your conversion rates are constantly changing.

Why is this important? Well, say you added a bunch of testimonials about your customer support team to your website. You run your test and conversions increase by 15%!

That’s awesome, right?

Well, maybe (this statistics, so get used to that answer).

What if a competitor just went out of business and all of their former customers came to your site and made a purchase? That’s great for your business, but it doesn’t mean that the change you made was the reason why your conversion rate improved.

This is part of the reason why it’s always important to include your original, unchanged design as a control in your test. That way, you can directly compare the conversion rates of both pages—even if your traffic changes.

So, if that competitor goes out of business and the conversion rate on your new design goes up by 15%…but the conversion rate on your old design goes up by 20%, you know that your new design actually hurt your conversion rate.

2. Confidence

Yes, I’m about to get statistical on you. But, before you hit the back button, give me a chance! This is critically important information and I promise I’ll explain things in the simplest, most painless way possible.

Still with me? Good.

In statistics, confidence means the same thing it does in everyday life. The only difference is, in statistics, confidence comes with a number.

So, if you were married to a statistician, you might tell your spouse, “I’m confident that I’ll be home by 5:30.” Your spouse might reply, “When you say you’ll be home and when you’re actually home are different 68% of the time, so I’m 68% confident you won’t be home by 5:30.”

Then, your spouse might text you the following image…

…followed by the statement, “I’m about 84% confident you’ll be home by 6:30, so I’ll have dinner ready then.”

As you might imagine, being married to a statistician could be a bit harsh…

That being said, this is exactly how confidence works in statistics. Essentially, confidence describes the likelihood that two groups or situations (when you say you’ll be home vs. when you actually get home) are not the same.

The more overlap you have between your two groups, the less confident you can be that they are different. Case in point, the more often you are home when you say you’ll be home, the less confident your spouse will be that you’ll be late.

Similarly, if you create a new version of your homepage with a 50% better conversion rate than your original design, but your confidence is only 50%, that means it’s even odds that your improved conversion rate is solely due to chance.

As you might imagine, more statistical confidence is always better.

In website testing, most people shoot for at least 95% confidence. At 95% confidence, there’s only a 1 in 20 chance that the difference in your conversion rate is due to random chance, so you can feel both emotionally and statistically confident in your results.

The good news is, most website testing programs calculate confidence for you. All you have to do is use it to decide your winner.

3. Traffic volume

At this point, you’re probably thinking, Okay, I get it. External changes can affect my conversion rate and I need high confidence…but how do I get those?

The answer is fairly simple: traffic volume.

If your normal conversion rate is 15% and you run a test on 10 visitors and one of the visitors to your new design converts, guess what, your new conversion rate is 20%!

Your confidence, however, is probably around 0%.

In this scenario, there’s a very good chance that your one converting visitor would have converted on your old page design, too. There’s really no way to know.

But, if you run that same test on 10,000 visitors and 20% of the visitors to your new page convert while the old page keeps converting at 15%, you’re looking at a confidence of over 99%. With that much traffic, you know you’ve got a winner on your hands.

The exact amount of traffic volume you need to get meaningful data from your test will vary from test to test. With that in mind, it’s usually best to keep running your tests until you get to a confidence level you’re comfortable with. Otherwise, your test is basically useless.

Conclusion

Website design doesn’t have to be a guessing game. At Disruptive, we’ve used site testing to increase our clients’ profitability by millions.

The key is knowing how to run an effective test.

If you’re willing to challenge your own preconceptions about your traffic and test all your ideas, you can identify exactly what your potential visitors want from your site. All it takes is a little time, effort and statistical know-how.

Have you ever made a site change that didn’t work out? What happened? How do you improve the performance of your website?

About the Author

Aden Andrus has developed and marketed millions of dollars of successful products. He lays awake at nights figuring out new marketing tactics and is constantly upping Disruptive Advertising‘s internal marketing game. He loves to write, dance and destroy computer monitors in full medieval armor.

Whether you are a B2B or a B2C organization, one thing you already know is that you need to provide quality customer service in order to be successful.

Chances are, your mission statement or company vision includes something about customer service. You may even have customer service-related quotes around the office. But how often, if ever, do you take a step back and evaluate whether or not you are actually providing good customer service?

I’m not talking about damage control when you receive a customer complaint. I’m not even talking about a root cause analysis for that same complaint. I’m talking about a soul searching, top-to-bottom, resource-demanding review of how customer service is defined by your organization and whether or not you are actually accomplishing it.

If you’re interested in that sort of self-evaluation, and you should be, here are five important questions to help determine if you’re doing customer service right.

1. What is good customer service for my organization?

Companies that provide quality customer service do so by establishing trust with their customers, communicating sufficiently and timely while also listening, and delivering high-quality service or products.

However, I would encourage you, when determining if your company provides good customer service, to consider what should be an obvious metric: how often you generate business from referrals. If referrals don’t make up a significant portion of your business, find out why. Successful customer service creates life-long customers who share their wonderful experiences with others.

2. Is your organization listening?

One thing is for sure. Whether you are listening or not, your customers are talking. And I don’t mean with their wallets though that is certainly one way they might be talking, or not talking as the case may be. They’re also talking through social media, online reviews and to their family and friends.

Are you listening to what your customers are saying online? Managing your online reputation is an important part of customer service. Gone are the times when customer service happened only inside of your business. Make sure that you have social media accounts managed by your team and respond to your customers there. Which takes me to my next question…

3. No, really. Are you listening?

Listening requires participation. If you’re not actively communicating with your clients, you’re not listening. A recent post on Duct Tape Marketing discussed the 5 levels of listening with the top level being empathic listening. While you might not be engaged in a verbal conversation with your clients, though I recommend it as often as possible, you should still approach any feedback that comes from your clients with the same empathy that you would hopefully show in a conversation.

As an extension of this, if you’re really listening to your customers, what are you doing with the information? A typical business hears from 4% of its dissatisfied customers. That’s a small sample of the actual number of dissatisfied customers.

Therefore, it’s critical that not only do you pay attention to what they are saying but that you make business decisions intended to remedy the problem. I’m talking real solutions; not band aids.

4. Does your customer service scale?

As small business owners and marketers, we have the upper hand when it comes to customer service. Our small size allows us to personally interact with our customers. Even if your business is large enough to have someone that handles your customers, they likely do so directly instead of through a customer service-killing IVR or via an unmonitored inbox.

Definitely, capitalize on your small size and be as customer-friendly as possible. However, I’m betting that you don’t see yourself as a small business owner forever. Your short term plan and long term plans include growth. So how do you scale your customer service for growth?

Don’t forget what made you successful in the first place. Adopt a big business philosophy in all aspects of your business with the exception of customer service. Maintain your current small business approach to customer service and if you’re doing it correctly now, you will do it correctly in the future. Then, align departmental goals around the philosophy and hold them responsible for it.

5. Are your competitors providing superior customer service?

Oftentimes, customer service can be what differentiates you from your competitors and that’s not a good thing if you’re providing poor customer service. Play it safe and assume that they are doing a great job of providing customer service and you need to increase your effort.

Did you know that your customers are likely willing to pay more for quality customer service? I’m not suggesting that you charge more; I’m recommending that you pay attention to the importance your customer’s place on being treated right.

It should go without saying that you don’t provide first-rate customer service because you want to be better than your competitor. You do it because it’s embedded into who your company is at all levels of the organization. If that’s not who your company is then that’s a good place to start making changes.

About the Author

Itamar Gero is the founder and CEO of SEOReseller.com, a white-label digital marketing solutions provider that empowers agencies—and their local business clientele—all over the world. When he isn’t working, he’s traveling the world, meditating, or dreaming (in code).

There’s a misconception that great customer service requires endless resources and personnel, complex software systems, and outsourced call centers. While those tools can certainly help large corporations feel more connected to their clients — perhaps increasingly so through automation and social media “bots” to jump on quick replies — there are still few substitutes for human interaction and response.

And here’s the good news for small businesses and entrepreneurs: It doesn’t take an endless budget or countless hours to make your customers feel valued and heard.

Below, I’ve outlined five of my favorite strategies for making customers feel valued. All are cost and time-efficient strategies your larger competitors may simply overlook or ignore.

They’re not always flashy or “disruptive” in the Silicon Valley sense of the word, but these techniques are tried and true ways to stay connected with the clients you want to retain — whether you’re Business to Business, Business to Consumer, or somewhere in between.

1. Respond to Inquiries Right Away

While this seems like an obvious choice for companies who want to go above and beyond in customer service, a lot of businesses still get it wrong. That’s because “right away” often gets misconstrued as “within 24 hours.” A business day’s time might still be a timely response, but it won’t come as a pleasant surprise to anyone.

Instead, treat — or have someone on your team treat — at least some of your customer inquiries as extremely time-sensitive messages.

To keep myself accountable, I’ll often have customer messages forwarded directly to my personal inbox, putting their needs front and center among the most pressing concerns of the day. That makes it difficult to not work toward a resolution right away!

Is it a permanent or very scalable solution? The answer is likely no. But even occasionally prioritizing customer inquiries for rapid replies sends an unforgettable signal to clients and customers.

2. Surprise Them With Snail Mail

Letter writing is a lost art, but absolutely nothing beats the feeling of communication you can touch. Handwritten thank you notes, company branded swag, and the occasional fruit basket (seriously) can be cost-effective methods of getting in front of customers who might only think of you when A) something goes wrong or B) a contract is up for renewal.

Don’t leave positive associations up to chance. Small tokens of appreciation are always appreciated. You have nothing to lose beyond a few minutes of writing time, some letterhead,  and the cost of postage.

Your customer retention metrics will thank you.

3. Update Them on Industry Trends

I’ll preface this strategy by explaining what it shouldn’t be: Under no circumstances should your client communication ever feel like a sales newsletter. (After all, our inboxes are already too full.)

But sending customers an occasional update on your industry can have a positive impact on the relationship in two key ways.

First, it helps establish you as an already-knowledgeable resource working hard to stay on top of your game. Bigger companies may rest on their laurels as industry leaders, but not you: Your team is constantly checking the pulse to stay ahead of trends and pass that value on to customers.

Second, it’s a relatively non-invasive way to illustrate the importance of your product or service. Did the industry itself grow? Are more customers than ever looking for the service you provide? A quick industry update can remind clients/customers that you’re one of the best investments they’re making.

4. Celebrate Their Success

This tip is more applicable to B-to-B companies, but it illustrates an important lesson for all entrepreneurs.

There’s a big difference between collecting invoices and truly celebrating your customers as valuable professionals and businesses in their own right. Take time to check for news on their triumphs — like a new fundraise, executive hire, or acquisition — and send them a quick note acknowledging the success.

Clients want to know you’ve got their backs day in and day out. Staying abreast of their successes makes sure you can send the right message when dispositions are at their best.

5. Share Your Triumphs (and Challenges)

Have you recently partnered with another company or organization to give back? Are you expanding service at no extra cost? Certainly, these are all things customers will appreciate hearing. But what if I told you it’s just as important to communicate challenges?

As entrepreneurs, we spend a large portion of our time running around to put out fires big and small. And for the most part, our clients and customers don’t really care: They expect the work to get done, the service to be provided, and the product to be delivered no matter the obstacles we face.

Occasionally it can be good to give customers a peek under the hood — but generally only when it’s an issue you swiftly overcame.

Sharing an anecdote about a potential roadblock you beat or a snag your team quickly disarmed can illustrate your business’ agility and adaptability. This is an especially potent thing to signal for smaller businesses because it gives customers yet another reason to prefer you over a larger, slower-moving industry behemoth.

Ultimately, the best — and often least used — strategies to make customers feel valued rely on clear two-way communication. Use the above tools consistently to signal your unique value. And at the end of the day, who doesn’t appreciate getting a handwritten letter?

About the Author

JJ Ramberg is the host of MSNBC’s Your Business and the founder of Goodshop — the world’s first shopfunding site.

Are you happy now? Or simply, happy overall? As a company, you don’t just want your customer happy in this moment in time. You want them happy all of the time.

According to McKinsey & Company, evaluating a customer’s satisfaction throughout his or her entire journey with a company is 30% more predictive of overall customer satisfaction than measuring happiness based on individual interactions.

What does this mean?

Delightful customer service can’t simply be limited to solving problems, such as reacting to customers who are calling to complain their online order was never delivered or that the software they downloaded no longer works on their computer.

Creating happy and loyal customers must be the mission at each and every touch point with the brand. It’s not just reactive. It’s proactive, too.

Proactive customer service, as opposed to reactive, means delivering an efficient and helpful experience from the customer’s first interaction with the brand, whether that’s in a brick-and-mortar store, on a website or otherwise. If a customer has a positive experience from the get-go, they are more likely to be a repeat customer. In fact, engaged consumers buy 90% more often and spend 60% more per transaction (source).

So, how can your brand stop waiting and get proactive with customer service? There are a few strategies to keep in mind:

1. Make answers easy to find

According to a report from Aspect’s Cloud Solutions, one-third of customers say they’d ‘rather clean a toilet’ than speak with customer service. That’s unfortunate (and kind of gross), but it says a lot about how customers are changing. They want to find answers to their questions on their own, more and more frequently using their mobile device and by browsing a brand’s website or social channels.

Therefore, develop a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page on the website for straightforward questions, create how-to videos to teach customers best practices for using the product, create e-books providing more information on the company’s services, and, overall, make sure all content about your products and services proactively address the customers’ most common questions and concerns.

The easier (and faster!) it is to find solutions on their own, the happier the customers will be.

2. Provide accurate information

Though you might make answers easy to find on your website or your customer service representatives are always available on the phone, proactive customer service requires that your information always is up-to-date and exact.

It’s incredibly frustrating for customers to receive a response from one customer service representative, only to get a different response from another employee. Make sure that the information they’re receiving is accurate and consistent so that they don’t have to contact you again should the issue resurface (see the statistic above in #1).

3. Be honest and forthcoming

While real-time responses might be the expectation from customers, don’t sacrifice accuracy or honesty just to get an answer to them as soon as possible. Instead, let them know when they can expect a phone call or email response and that the team is working on getting a resolution for them. People can be understanding when they know they have been heard and that someone is working to find a solution. Being upfront with information and setting expectations will go a long way in making a customer feel valued and engaged.

 4. Welcome customers and keep in touch

The point of proactive customer service is to build a relationship with consumers outside of when they have a problem or question. To accomplish this, brands should welcome customers and stay in touch with them via social media, email or snail mail.

To make customers feel like a part of the brand’s community, keep them up to date on new products or service offerings, as well as events being hosted by the company. Additionally, like and respond to customers’ own updates. For example, FitBit and Nike cheer on their customers via social media when they’ve accomplished a goal. Pampers, the go-to diaper supplier for millions of moms, makes relevant comments on parents’ photos. These seemingly small interactions go a long way in building a relationship with customers.

https://twitter.com/Pampers/status/757953984455909376

 5. Keep improving

Making customers a part of a brand’s community is a two-way street. Their input and feedback must be heard, in addition to them receiving updates and news from the company. There is some great insight available by taking relevant suggestions and listening to customer chatter online.

Take, for example, a beauty company that was considering updating its formula for a best-selling face cream to change the cream’s color from blue to white. After researching online and realizing that its primary customer base called the cream “the blue stuff,” the brand ended the endeavor and instead embraced this nickname in its communication with customers.

While many people might think of customer service as only relevant when there is an issue with a product or service, proactive customer service works to go beyond those touch points. This approach can help build better relations with customers, increase communication with them should there ever be a problem, and make them feel like a valued part of a brand’s community.

Ian Landsman is the founder of HelpSpot HelpDesk, help desk software for customer service professionals. He writes a regular blog about the fundamentals of excellent customer service, titled The Delightenment Blog. Follow Ian via Twitter and LinkedIn.

With the proliferation of media and the rapid adoption of digital channels, consumers are bombarded with thousands of brand messages and stories every day. In fact, marketing experts estimate that, on average, people are exposed to over 5,000 advertisements each day, making it harder than ever to gain the customer’s attention.

The reality is that you have six seconds to tell your brand story and make a connection with your customer. Yes, six seconds. A 6-second window to give your customers, your audience, a reason to care, and a reason to want to learn more about your offer. Success in those six seconds depends on the perceived value that your brand will bring to the customers’ lives: the “Why you do what you do.” This message needs to be always refined through the lens of simplicity, clarity and alignment; the three foundational pillars that a brand story absolutely must have to connect and engage with the customer.

The Big Difference Between “What” and “Why”

Why should a customer care? Why should they listen to your story? Wrestling this question to the ground from the customer point of view requires you to go to a deeper and more emotive level of engagement with your customers by distilling down the “why you do what you do” as a company into a “why” that captures the customer’s imagination.

Most marketers focus on the “What”: the product and its functionalities. Whereas the customers are willing to know “Why” that product is so different than all the other options available, and “Why” does it matter to them. For customers, the “Why” must speak to the true impact and purpose that you deliver to their life. It must resonate with the customer in such a way that he or she wants to be a part of the brand story.

With that in mind, here are the top five guidelines to create a compelling 6-second brand story:

1. Start with the Mind of the Customer

Your brand story must be simple, clear and aligned with your customer’s needs and wants. It must be bold and encourage exploration.

2. Simplify a Complicated Issue or Problem

Simplify the essence of “Why” the brand matters, or what is the value that it brings to the customer. Most customers have neither the time nor the inclination to try to figure this out on their own, which is why this question needs to be answered through the simplicity of a great story.

3. Stir Emotion in the Consumers Mind

Give people a reason to care, a reason to buy, and a reason to stay. People don’t buy from making logical, rational buying decisions. They make emotional decisions and then justify those decisions by rationalizing them with facts.

There is a huge difference in whether your audience views your story as just another transactional relationship or a story that emotionally connects with their professional or personal journey.

“Good marketers tell brand stories; great marketers tell them with purpose.”

4. Be Memorable in Striking a Chord that Prompts an Internal Question or Reflection

What do you want people to think when they see or hear your brand? People will be more engaged if they can actually relate to a story rather than listening to fact-laden statements about the wonders of a product.

5. Make your Customer the Hero of the Story

Compelling stories resonates when the audience can put themselves at the center of the story. We must make customers the hero, while the brand assumes the role of a mentor. When your goal becomes participation, rather than control, the hero is more likely to let you into their world [and their story]. You can start by focusing on experience-based efforts for a better customer engagement.

“Make the customer the hero of your story”

– Ann Handley, MarketingProfs

That’s it! Sounds easy right?

Not really… Creating a compelling 6-second brand story can be challenging. It requires a diverse set of scientific skills and an artistic eye. No matter how short the message is, never short-change the depth and richness of the story. And always remember to ask yourself: does your brand story pass the test of simplicity, clarity, and alignment? Can you tell the brand essence in six seconds? Is the story so compelling that it can transform your customer into a storyteller on your behalf?

The Power of Transformational Marketing: Aligning the Story, Strategy, and Systems

 Once you have the Story, the next step is to connect with your customers through formats that they consume, in channels that they use, across every touchpoint in the buyers’ journey. Your customer is not only at the center of the story but also at the center of your strategy.

“Story without Strategy is Art; Story with Strategy is Marketing”

Your Strategy should be a clear path to reach your target audience with the right message, through the right channel, at the right time. It requires ruthless focus and consistency throughout your entire organization, both internally and externally.

Now, all that’s missing to truly transform your marketing is the alignment of the Systems, which is how you communicate that Story to the consumers. It enables you to flawlessly execute your Strategy and measure the return on your marketing investment. All the enabling technologies, employee communications, sales collateral and processes must be fully aligned to bring your brand to life.

This is the secret of Transformational Marketing: Having the right Story, the right Strategy and the right Systems in place to unleash the true power of your brand. Transformational Marketing alters business models by changing how organizations market, communicate, and sell to customers. By providing products and services that actually make the customers’ lives better, companies build valuable customer experiences and transform customers into brand advocates.

Dave Sutton is a global authority today on Transformational Marketing– enabling businesses to reach, connect and engage with customers in a way that gives them a reason to care, a reason to buy, a reason to advocate and, most important of all, a reason to stay. He is the founder of TopRight, LLC– a Transformational Marketing firm that helps companies move to the top right quadrant of their competitive frame, and corner the markets where they choose to compete. TopRight’s 3S Playbook model of the right Story, the right Strategy, and the right Systems turns sales transactions into customer experiences that connect and communicate why you do what you do and what difference it makes for your customers. Follow Dave @TopRightPartner.