From Building Trust & Strong Customer Relationships
Converting Interest To Sales With Trust Seals By Harper Roark
We all know that the single greatest way to convert interest into sales is to build trust between your company and your customer. But establishing that trust can be more difficult than it initially seems. What are the best strategies to build trust and increase sales? There are a lot of different pieces to the trust puzzle, but most of them can be categorized into the following 3 main ideas: be authentic, be uncompromisingly scrupulous in how you deal with your customers, and take web security and the privacy of your customers seriously.
How Trust Seals Increase Sales
Business owners are always searching for new ways to boost sales conversion and develop better relationships with potential customers. We see a lot of questions in forums by business owners asking whether or not trust seals make a difference in sales. Our answer is a simple yes. Anything that creates trust between a business and customers is always a good idea. Trust seals are proven to increase conversion by 15% in A/B split tests but usually they increase sales by a lot more. That’s a lift you can take to the bank.
Do Your Employees Love You? Company Culture Impacts Your Growth And Profits
Do your employees love coming to work everyday? Do they enjoy what they do, and do they want the company to succeed? If your answer is “no” you might want to reconsider your company’s culture. Employees who love their job, who feel appreciated and who enjoy being in the office are more productive. Great company culture also attracts talent, and employees who are customer-focused. Successful companies are companies where the employees want the company and their clients to succeed and they do everything they can to make it happen. If being in the office is miserable, if relationships between workers and management is bad, it’s impossible for employees to care about clients. They simply want to do their job AND GET OUT. Clients know when they are cared about and they usually prefer working with companies with dedicated, happy employees over a miserable office environment. Next time you think about “improving” productivity, why don’t you ask employees what would make them more productive at work?
Holiday Advice: Partner Up With Your Clients Instead Of Pitching To Them
Towards the end of the year your clients are going to be looking at the books and either jumping for joy, coming to terms with loss, or figuring out where to make adjustments. They’re also stressed with family, and the holidays in general. It’s a delicate time where clients need to know that you’re all in it together not necessarily the best time to be trying to hard sell them. They need guidance and support and maybe a reminder of why they need you. It’s an excellent time to share trends that will impact their business, give them one-on-one attention, and identify a business opportunity that they’ve overlooked. Try this article for more: Partner, Don’t Pitch.
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Has Social Media Eliminated the Need for Face to Face Networking?
Many business’ have been forced to adapt to the incredible shift in networking from traditional face-to-face networking to the new utilization of social media for meeting people, making deals and building contacts. Some would argue that traditional forms of networking are obsolete though others would argue that using both forms equally is best for optimal results, to boost traffic, make contacts or increase sells. Check out this article on networking and let us know what you think in the comments below. Has Social Media Eliminated the Need for Face to Face Networking?.
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3 Reasons Why You Should Be More Customer-Centric by Andrew B.
For most businesses, it’s not that you don’t care about any issues beyond your bottom line. Apparent social apathy is usually due to the fact that cash flow is crucial and takes a great deal of focus to maintain. You’ve spent a huge amount of your money and time developing a near-perfect business machine. Why can’t your customers just accept that your system is better than the one they’re asking for?
The fact is, your strategies and products don’t mean a thing if you don’t make your customers’ experience and needs the focus of your company policies. Here are three reasons why you need to invest in customer-centrism if you want to be successful in the long-term.
Customer Loyalty
If you want a good example of how disregard for customer-centrism can impact your customer loyalty, you needn’t look far. Stories abound, from failed social networks to multi-million dollar Hollywood flops. But here I’d like to focus on a single, personal example: Sears. (See Reference Here)
When I was growing up, Sears was a big part of my life. My parents and grandparents frequently took me along on their shopping trips. The reasons for going to Sears were clear, even as a child: Sears had Craftsman tools and Kenmore appliances. As a young adult in college, I was thus quite excited to get a job at Sears and be a part of such an historic company. I looked forward to selling the brands I associated with quality. That, unfortunately, is not how my time there would play out. I watched their legendary guarantees become diluted to the point of being unrecognizable. I saw the Craftsman tool brand outsourced and replaced with inferior products to save the company money at the customers’ expense. I saw the needs of the customers disregarded while our CEO’s pet project–a frankly ridiculous internal social network–was made the focus of our outdated training. It quickly became clear that whatever Sears had to offer a century ago was long gone.
About a year or so later, I moved to a different state for a management job. It seemed sad to me that such an iconic brand should disappear, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt and decided to do some Christmas shopping there. My wife and I encountered the same, ignorant mess that I had seen at the store I worked in 500 miles away. I haven’t been back since. In fact, I don’t know a single person in my age group who shops at Sears anymore. Not when a more customer-centric experience exists elsewhere.
Employee Retention
Do you remember your college days? Somewhere between a slave-wage job and late-night studying you had dreams that kept you going. You wanted to be successful, sure, but odds are that you wanted something more: to make a difference, in some way, for good.
One of the top reasons employees quit is that they either don’t feel their work makes a difference, or that they believe their employer is exclusively self-serving. Your workers want to feel good about what they do and the company they work for. When you can’t satisfy their need to make a positive impact, they either leave or work less efficiently. Serious amounts of money are lost every year due to employee turnaround. If you want to avoid the costs of retraining and encourage your employees to stick around, one of the easiest ways is to become more customer-centric.
The Media
The media, like the internet, is a two-edged sword. While they occasionally will distribute good news about your company, that’s not what drives up ratings. That comes from bad news. Media reports, factual or not, impact your business in a big way. Interestingly, an openly customer-centric attitude can diffuse the customer outrage that stems from shocking news reports.
An example of this recently played out at Costco. They experienced a nightmare scenario: customers started contracting hepatitis from a Costco product. The news was all over it, making sure that everyone knew that Costco was distributing diseased berries.
Costco’s response was expertly executed. They acknowledged the crisis and took responsibility for selling the product, even though the contamination wasn’t really their fault. Then they offered hepatitis vaccinations as a gesture of both apology and active concern for the wellbeing of their customers. They tried to make things right, before anybody forced them to. The media circus, now void of any controversy, quietly acknowledged Costco’s good response and let the story die. Costco still suffered some damage, but it never turned into the disaster it could have been thanks to their customer-centric response.
It’s impossible to describe the perfect way to become customer-centric. The path to success in that arena is as unique as your industry. Even so, the benefits above hardly scratch the surface of the positive effects a customer-centric mindset can have on your business, and serve to demonstrate that the investment in your customers is always a worthwhile one.
Monetate Marketing Infographics//
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Five Great Sources For E-commerce Success
Increase Traffic. More Traffic Means More Money. One of the first challenges of having an online business is getting people to see it. The second challenge is getting new customers to trust your site enough to purchase from it. This simple list is a quick and direct basic list on how to get your site seen.
Build A Solid Online Business: This is a blog by a man who has managed to really make the internet work for him. Just one of his efforts makes six figures per month in ads alone. How did he do it? Well, lucky for all of us he gives away his secrets on this site.
The Importance Of Trust In Business: Trust has always been essentially for conducting business and it’s never been more important than it is now. If you are selling merchandise from your website, you have to convince potential customers that you are safe and secure. They can’t pop into your store and shake your hand, and they can’t inspect the merchandise before they purchase it. The only way to convince them is by reputation and third-party verification.
Third-Party-Verification: Third-Party Verification allows your business to convince potentially customers that your business is safe, secure, and reliable. The extra trust goes a long way, improving sales conversion almost immediately.
Internet Retailer: If you own a business online regardless of size, from startup to corporate 500 status, this is the top source for e-commerce news. Study it daily.
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