Web Marketing Strategy Update

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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Negative comments in a public sphere do not immediately seem like a positive thing for a company. But by using the right response strategy, it’s possible to address online complaints effectively and productively.

1. Be Patient

When complaints come up, it can be easy for you to lose your patience with your customers. They frequently view situations differently from the way you view them, so it can be difficult to accept complaints and criticism. Still, customer service is a vital part of doing business, and the social media sphere is a great place to promote your company’s appreciation for the customer. Be patient with complaints and do what you can to address them.

2. Answer No Matter What

When using social media sites, it is absolutely vital for your company to be social. That means acknowledging and responding to complaints of all types. Unless you are a major company that gets hundreds of negative comments on your social media feeds every day, you should work to address every complaint that comes up among your social media followers. Even if the complaints seem unreasonable to you, you should work to satisfy the customer.

3. Contact Them Privately

In dealing with people who are upset on your social media pages, it is best to contact them privately, in addition to any public response you may post.

In your private messages, you should keep in mind that reacting in a negative way will likely cause the individual to post your message in a public setting, making your issue even worse. In order to avoid that, make sure you are consistent in your public and private messages, but try to get into more specifics with the customer in private. That can help you minimize the attention given to the issue and also help your company provide a satisfactory solution.

4. Respond to the Original Post

On the social media page, you should always post some type of response to the initial message. Sometimes your response can be straightforward, acknowledging the individual’s complaints and asserting your company’s dedication to high-quality customer service. Sometimes, it may be appropriate to a bit more light-hearted with your response, such as by humbly addressing the mistake with some type of self-deprecating joke. In cases in which you feel the general public would probably view the complaint as unreasonable, you can even poke fun at the original post, although you should be very careful not to offend users with your response.

5. Let the Community Respond with Complaints

When you post a response, you should also expect other members of the community to chime in with their own messages. This can be a good way to turn a negative situation into a positive. Even if other users respond with more complaints, you can work with the group to identify suitable solutions to their issues, and you can demonstrate your company’s commitment to customer service.

6. Remove as a Last Resort

Of course, you should always keep in mind that your social media page is your domain. If things get out of hand, you can remove posts from disgruntled Facebook followers.

This option should be used as a last resort. Removing posts when they present reasonable complaints is not a good idea because it tells followers that your social media page is not a truly authentic forum. With social media, you sometimes need to take the bad with the good.

That said, it is also important to maintain a respectful atmosphere on your social media boards, so it makes sense to take down posts that involve inappropriate material.

Toby Gonzales is the Revenue Manager for FBiFrames.com. He enjoys helping businesses implement their social media marketing plan.

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These days anyone can launch an ecommerce site and sell products online anywhere in the world, whether you have a physical store or not. Consumers’ behaviour has changed in the past few years and due to the convenience factor and the lack of time, they’d rather buy their stuff online and have it delivered to their doorstep than have to waste time going shopping.

However, it’s one thing to open an online shop and another one to make it profitable. If you’re struggling to generate enough sales and just can’t figure out why, take a look at these five ecommerce mistakes that online shop owners often make. These are all simple things, but they can hurt your sales if you’re not aware of them. But once you are, it’s easy to get your site to convert better.

1. Your Site Is Too Slow

Consumers choose to buy products online because they know it takes a few minutes to get all their shopping done. If your site takes too long to load, your customers will feel as if they are standing in line at the cash register. Did you know that 40% of consumers will abandon a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load? One second delay can see a 50% reduction in a site’s revenue. In other words, you may have tens of thousands of visitors but if your site takes too long to load, your customers will lose their patience and just move down the list to one of your competitors.

What to do: The best thing you can do is test the loading speed of your site and if it’s too slow, simply move your site to a hosting provider that can offer the strong and fast infrastructure you need for your site to load quickly.

2. Your Site Doesn’t Look Safe

No customer will buy from your site if they feel unsafe. Trust is one of the most important things you need to focus on building when managing an online shop. People need to be reassured that your site is secure and that they can share sensitive information with you, otherwise they just won’t risk doing business with you.

What to do: Use a security seal. This will show in your visitors’ browsers letting them know that your site is safe and secure.

3. Complicated Order Process And Checkout Procedure

Time is money, even more on the web where people want to get their shopping done as easy and painless as possible. That’s how your order process and checkout procedure should be – easy. Just look at Amazon and eBay, the world’s favourite retailers. Buying a product from their sites is just a matter of a few clicks, sometimes just one if you have an account. So, if your order-process is too complicated, you’ll be losing customers just when you were about to make a sale.

What to do: Have one of your friends who is not web-savvy try to buy something from your site. See where he gets stuck and try to simplify the process. Usually, the ordering should be done in 3 easy steps: click buy, add delivery information and pay.

4. Lack Of Customer Testimonials

Most people look for reviews, recommendations and feedback from other customers before buying a product online. They want to know other customers’ opinions of the online shop or the products that they want to buy. This can be decisive to whether they buy a product from your site or decide to take their business elsewhere.

What to do: There’s no such thing as a successful online shop without product reviews from customers. So, if you want yours to convert give your customers a positive purchasing experience and also the possibility to write their reviews after purchase.

5. Poor Customer Service

Bad feedback from customers can ruin a business. If you’re not responding to your customers’ enquiries before and after they buy a product from your site, you will gain a bad reputation in less than a day. Ecommerce is highly competitive and if you’re not taking care of your customers, someone else will.

What to do: Provide excellent customer service and the positive word will spread out about your business.

Alex Gavril is part of the Webfusion hosting blog team.

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The social media world changes rapidly. Fueled by public concerns it is already reshaping itself around seven new trends. In this new age of business, companies that adapt the fastest will reap the greatest reward.

Bypassing the Big Brands

Today’s consumer has a variety of choices when it comes to for purchasing the goods and services they desire. Even some of the bigger brands are being sidelined as people opt to buy directly from each other or other sources offering better value. As such, brands need to position themselves as the value choice option, by making the brand product better, or cheaper, or more highly trusted than the alternatives.
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