Customer Service – Palmer Web Marketing

Most online transactions are fast, efficient, and completely lacking human contact. Why not shock your customers once in a while with a truly personal online experience? Below are 13 ways to get personal (in a good way) with your customers.

1. Shock your first time customers by calling them within a day of their order. Ask them for feedback and thank them for their support.

2. Post online profiles of everyone at the company, but ditch the boring executive bios. Instead post profiles from the rank and file, the people who actually interact with your customers on a daily basis. The profiles will remind your customers they buy from people, not an “organization”

3. Take one day a month and answer the phones yourself. Tell customers who you are and get their feedback first hand. Customer’s love to opine when they know they’re talking to a decision maker. (I guarantee you will walk away with loads of new ideas from this tip).

It’s staggering to consider how many marketing failures are the result of broken promises.

We rarely think of it this way, but every button, every subject line, every headline on our website is a promise. Whether or not that promise is kept determines whether we win the trust of our visitors, or lose them for good.

To illustrate, let’s take a look at a fictional shopping scenario, not unlike an experience that happened to me recently.

Customer receives an email from electronics retailer with subject line “HDTV’s Starting at $700″
Customer opens email and finds a graphic showing only 1 TV and no details. BROKEN PROMISE:
Subject line promised an HDTV for $700, but email contains no support for this theme
Customer clicks on Button that says “Shop HDTV’s”, and is taken to the website’s homepage, which differs completely in the look and feel of the email creative. BROKEN PROMISE: Button claimed to let visitors begin shopping the TV models, instead they’re left stranded on a seemingly unrelated page
Visitor reaches HDTV category page displaying dozens of HDTV models. The $700 model is the last item on page 5. BROKEN PROMISE: This retailer made it very difficult find the $700 TV model promised in the subject line
Once on product page, customer clicks “Add to Cart”
Customer lands on a page upselling the extended warranty. BROKEN PROMISE: Customer received no confirmation that item has been added to cart

Getting Personal with your Customers

Web Marketing Success in 3 Words