Wed 19
Jun

Using Social Media To Increase Customer Service

By Azam Corry in Social Media No Comments 

Social media is no longer just for growing and promoting your brand: It’s becoming a fast-growing channel for customer service. It’s been estimated that over 50% of consumers are now using some form of social media to directly reach out to businesses to report satisfaction, file a complaint, and/or ask questions, according to a 2012 Social Media Report by Nielsen.

Not only that, but one in three social media users prefer using social media to contact a company as opposed to using a phone or sending an email. Furthermore, reports estimate that by 2014, the number of customers using these channels will be so great, that ignoring customers via social channels could be as detrimental as ignoring a phone call or email is today.

The fact is businesses need to move beyond using social media just for marketing, and instead start focusing on using social networking to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Here are some good ways to start.

Build Relationships By Engaging & Follow Through:

To build relationships with your customers, it’s critical to reach out and follow through. Social media isn’t just about releasing information about your business – it’s about engaging with your customers

The best way to spur engagement? Ask questions!

Ask a simple question that relates to your business. For example, if you’ve recently made a changes to your product or service, you can use your Twitter or Facebook account(s) to ask what people think about the difference, whether they like the product, why or why they don’t, etc. You can come up with any question you want, but try to make it fun or interesting.

Respond Quickly & Follow Through

Customers are beginning to learn the power that they yield by taking complaints online, where a negative posting has the potential to go viral. A business that responds quickly to a customer problem can not only nip the problem before it blows out of control, but can also enhance the feeling of positive sentiment toward the company.

Even if the information that you are planning on sharing is something you know the customer doesn’t want to hear, knowing that an employee followed through in a quick and professional manner mitigates the negative impact. According to an article by Thomas M. Tripp and Yany Grégoire in the January 2011 edition of MIT Sloan Management Review, “When Unhappy Customers Strike Back on the Internet customers will tolerate the occasional service failure as long as the process seems fair from the customer’s prospective.

Basically, following-through and responding in a prompt manner that shows that you’re actually listening can keep your customers committed to your brand even if you slip up.

Be proactive

Embrace the idea of proactive customer care. Social media gives your business a great medium to reach out to customers before they have the chance to become frustrated and dissatisfied about an issue. Using this level of customer care holds great potential for improving customer relationships so if you have a known service issue, be proactive and make your customers aware of the problem and let them know how you plan to fix it and within what timeframe.

A second benefit of being proactive is that by releasing your message on social media, the masses have instant access to what’s going on, thereby saving time and resources that would need to be spent answering questions and addressing complaints individually during a crisis.

Dedicate Resources

A study done by the American Marketing Association showed that many marketing teams aren’t staffed appropriately to be able to handle all their marketing responsibilities with social media activity. Marketers typically should be focusing on pushing out information about the company, so it’s important to dedicate the proper resources to have staff listen and respond to what your customers have to say. If you don’t have the necessary staff on hand, then consider hiring a social media consultant or agency to support your company’s ability to provide customer service via the various social networks.

Social customer service is so much more than what many people still perceive to be customer service and the call center. The benefits of being able to engage with customers in proactively and socially in real time are endless, allowing you to create strong social advocates of your brand, getting insight into your position relative to competitors, and unlocking details that can potentially make your product or service better.
David Marlow has an IT consulting businss in Washington DC and enjoys working with his clients to help them reach their goals through the use of technology.

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Mon 17
Jun

The Most Popular Affiliate Marketing Solutions

By Azam Corry in Affiliate Marketing , Small Business No Comments 

Running an affiliate program can be a time consuming endeavour. Tracking sales manually is impractical if you expect more than just a handful of sales coming through your affiliates, and it’s often not a good idea to try to write your own tracking script because of the risk of unscrupulous affiliates trying to exploit your system.

The best option in most cases is to use third party affiliate software.

There are many affiliate marketing packages available, either standalone applications or more common software scripts that run on your own or the third party’s web server. When you’re looking for the right software, consider the kind of affiliate program that you want to run, the payment methods you want to offer, and the number of affiliates you expect to attract.

Here’s a quick look at some of the most popular affiliate marketing programs available today.

iDev Affiliate

iDev Affiliate is an easy-to-use affiliate management application. The standard edition costs $99, while the Platinum edition costs $299. If you have money to burn, they also run a Black Tie service; for $599 they will set up and configure the application for you.

iDev Affiliate supports two-tier commissions, and there are lots of plugins available to expand the software, adding Quickbooks export support, language packs, etc. These packages require an additional fee.

The main downside to iDev Affiliate is that the Standard Edition is not SEO friendly. The Platinum Edition offers improved SEO features. If you’re an affiliate marketing newbie, then this package is worth a look, but only if you’re buying the Platinum version.

Post Affiliate Pro

Post Affiliate Pro allows you to run multiple affiliate websites, and offers multi-language support for the affiliate and merchant interfaces. The basic package costs $199, while the most expensive package costs $1899. The company also offers hosted packages for a monthly fee.

Post Affiliate Pro is SEO friendly, and offers lots of useful features such as split commissions and coupon codes. It’s also easy to extend the functionality of the package with your own plugins, as long as you are familiar with PHP coding.

Commission Junction

Commission Junction is a well-known hosted affiliate network. Running your program through this sort of network is a quick and easy way to get started in the world of affiliate marketing. Commission junction is incredibly popular with webmasters, and by choosing them to host your program you will have instant access to a huge number of potential affiliates. Commision Junction allows you to run programs that pay per sale or lead.

The main downside to Commission Junction is that it does not offer much in the way of branding and customization options.

Clickbank

Clickbank is another popular affiliate network. Their software is easy to use, and there are some branding options available for merchants. It is easy to get a product listed on Clickbank, and there is an active community of webmasters promoting products via the Clickbank network.

The main downside to Clickbank is that the commission options are quite limited. If you are promoting a simple product such as an ebook, then Clickbank is a good option. For complex commission structures, choose one of the premium products that offers more customization options.

Crispin has worked with Clicksure for many years. Read more about Clicksure reviews.

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Fri 14
Jun

How To Write Magnificent Copy In 5 Steps

By Azam Corry in Content Writing & Marketing , Copywriting No Comments 

A decent piece of content can be made when the writer has a solid topic, enough knowledge on the subject and audience, and a small amount of writing skill. The problem with this formula is that you don’t want your writing to be good – you want it to be great. Paying attention to all the tiny details within your writing can help you to create a magnificent piece of copy that you can be proud of.

The following five tips are important for every writer who is looking to elevate their writing ability above and beyond the competition. Whether you are writing a video script, ad copy for paid search management, or looking to improve the onsite content on your website, these tips will help you create a great piece of content.

1. Write How You Feel, Then Edit

Your writing should portray how you feel about the subject. In order to persuade your readers to your point of view, you must first build trust with them. If your writing sounds like a boring edition of the encyclopedia, it’s going to be difficult to build trust with your readers. Combine your education about the subject with the trust you’ve built, and your readers will quickly understand your point of view.

When you start your writing piece, it’s better to include too much personality that can be edited out later, rather than trying to include more personality later on. A writer should feel passionate about a topic, and simply put that passion into words in order to provide a valuable reading experience for the reader. Don’t be self-conscious about your writing; simply tell your story.

2. Take A Break

Once you have finished your masterpiece, you shouldn’t send it off right away. Any writing piece can be improved if you give yourself the chance to sleep on the material and work on it more in the morning. When you give yourself a break in between writing and editing, it quickly becomes obvious how you can improve even your best pieces of material. Any changes made at this point will only increase the quality of your piece.

3. Have Someone Else Read It Out Loud

Reading your work aloud gives you the chance to pick up on problems with the flow that you may not have noticed when you were writing it. Having someone else read it aloud makes it better because they don’t know the topic or the writing, and aren’t prepared for any turns you make in the writing. This is a technique that is often used when an individual is learning to write, but can also be utilized by current writers to improve any piece of material that is written.

4. Perform The Breath Test

Putting too many words into one sentence may not seem like a serious problem, but if you have a hard time reading the sentence out loud, it’s probably time to trim back. Only put one idea into each sentence, and avoid adding extraneous words to your sentences. Any ideas you have should be expressed in a succinct way.

Research shows that after twenty words in one sentence, 10% of your readers will fall. You can determine if your sentences are too long by reading them aloud. If you have to pause in the middle of the sentence, then it’s probably too long. At this point, you can either cut the sentence into two different parts, or simply cut out some of the fat in the sentence.

5. Rewrite Passive Voice

Although many writers shy away at the term “passive voice”, it’s a fairly easy problem to spot, and should be fixed in any piece of writing. In order to spot passive voice in your writing, think of the action. If someone is doing something, then the voice should be active. If someone did something, then the passive voice is appropriate.

The problem with passive sentences is that they feel lifeless to the reader, while active sentences offer energy and feel tighter to the reader. Although at times it is necessary to use passive voice in your writing, the best writers keep it to a minimum, and do much of their writing in active voice.

To Sum It Up…

Whether you are just starting a hopeful online writing career, or have written for years and are looking for ways to improve your writing pieces, these simple tips can ensure that you are creating the best work you’ve got. With more personality, a little bit of time, the help of a friend, and a little bit of editing, every writer can improve a piece of material that was already good to begin with.

Dorian Travers is the Internal Marketing Strategist at digital marketing firm Wpromote, and has always had a particular interest in content marketing and creating brand development strategies.

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Wed 12
Jun

Top Five Budget Cloud Services For Small Businesses

By Azam Corry in Marketing Resources , Small Business No Comments 

Even people who lack IT skills can easily access state-of-the-art technology and often there’s no need to ask for the help of professional.

In fact, most of today’s business technology needs can be met with cloud services. But with so many products out there, how do you know which is the right one for you? Here are five of the best cloud services around.

1. Dropbox

Although Dropbox wasn’t the first cloud storage service, it’s definitely one of the most popular. You might even be using it to store personal documents onlnie.

Dropbox runs on a range of platforms and it also has a wide app integration, unlimited uploads from your desktop and mobile devices, a user-friendly interface and a proven track record.

You can start off with a free 2GB, which is less space than its competitors offer, but you can up that to 18GB of free space through incentives such as referring friends.

If you’re a business owner, you might need more room. Dropbox charges $9.99 a month or an annual fee of $99 for 100GB. There’s also a useful Dropbox for teams starting with a shared 1TB of storage for up to five users.

If you’re not a fan of Dropbox, there’s also other cloud storing services you might want to try, such as Google Drive and SugarSync.

servers for cloud computing

2. Trello

Trello provides users with a simple and effective web-based workspace that comes with everything a team needs to work on complex projects.

What’s great about it is that it’s incredibly simple to use. You can visualise tasks and move them around by simply dragging and dropping them into the Pending or Completed columns. This allows you to keep track of projects with ease.

You have your boards, lists and cards that can be used to organise any project, from a product release to a social media campaign or just an employee’s to-do list. You can also assign tasks and deadlines to other members of your team, making collaboration hassle-free.

3. MailChimp

MailChimp is a newsletter service that allows you to design, send, and track HTML email campaigns through an easy-to-use user interface. Although they offer their service free of charge for up to 2,000 subscribers, it can get fairly costly once you exceed this limit.

MailChimp can also be integrated with other cloud apps such as Zendesh, Freshbooks, Shopify, Magento. It’s a great email marketing solution for small business owners.

4. Mavenlink

Mavenlink is a project management tool that lets you collaborate, track tasks and time, share files, set budgets for projects and send invoices. So, it’s the complete solution for planning and managing your projects online. Mavenlink also integrates with Google apps if you want to add your calendar or tasks to the system.

5. Zoho CRM

As the name says, Zoho CRM is a customer relationship management tool for tracking leads and customer prospects. However, you can also use it for customer support management or marketing automation. Although it may not be as smooth or robust an application as Salesforce.com, for example, it’s still a great solution and well worth the price.

Of course, there are plenty of other great cloud services out there – why not share your favourites with us in the comment below.

Alex Gavril is part of the 123-reg.co.uk blogging team. The company has just launched a new range of cloud servers.

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