How To Encourage Your Customers To Stay Loyal

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Loyal Customers|How To Encourage Your Customers To Stay LoyalThe money, time and effort that you put into building your business is always at risk. One day without the right number of customers could see your company suffer catastrophic failures, and that’s why it’s so important that you can take steps to attract loyal patrons that will support your business for the foreseeable future. Many businesses can find it difficult to retain customers and encourage them to shop again, yet it really doesn’t have to be this way. There are so many tips and tricks that you can utilise to ensure your business can thrive with repeat patrons that appreciate your service time and time again, and it couldn’t be easier to get started today! So, if you’re ready to find out more about how you can encourage your customers to stay loyal to your business, then read on to uncover some of the best steps that you can follow to see results in no time at all.

Quality Customer Service

It’s absolutely vital that you are able to offer the highest quality customer service to all patrons that come into contact with your business, as this is one of the key features that can influence whether you can secure or lose a customer. Perfecting your customer service skills is such an easy task, as there are so many training courses and guides or tutorials that you can utilise to develop your interpersonal skills and learn how to handle yourself over the phone, via email and in person. This training must be carried through to every member of staff that can come into contact with the public, as your customer service has to be reliable and consistent no matter what. If a customer feels unhappy with the service that they receive then it’s likely they will post a negative review, which can then influence whether other potential customers decide to shop with your business or take their money elsewhere. On the other hand, taking the right steps to provide excellent customer service will motivate happy patrons to leave positive reviews, therefore attracting other people to spend with you too. Customer service can seem like a difficult feat when you operate a business that works solely online, however there are certain techniques that you can implement that can really help in providing constant customer satisfaction.

Make Your Service More Personalised

Quality customer service is extremely important, but it’s equally as important to offer a personalised level of service that really makes your customer feel valued. There are many ways to do this, such as adding business thank you notes to every order or even sending personalised emails to thank them. This is also where you can make good use of the personal information that your customers have been giving you. For example, it’s very common for businesses to send discounts and vouchers when it’s their customer’s birthday. This is a great way to encourage your customers to stay loyal and it’s also a positive influence on their perception of your brand. These small gestures can seem small, but they’ll add up over time and keep your brand in the customer’s mind, ensuring that they’ll use your services in the future instead of choosing a more robotic competitor that doesn’t offer a personalised service. While it can take a little longer to send a personalised message, it’s a great way to establish a stronger relationship with your audience and will certainly make them feel more valued if you’re willing to put in a bit of extra time.

Take Part In Regular Testing

Another essential activity that you must take part in to ensure that you can gather loyal customers is regular varied testing. You have to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and use your service to identify whether you have to make any specific improvements, otherwise you will be completely honest the wiser to the faults that might litter your organisation. Gather a few different people, perhaps with varied responsibilities and backgrounds to offer a less biased insight, and test the different features and services that your business can currently offer customers. Collect each individual’s feedback on how they felt their experience went, and utilise this information to move forward and make improvements to increase your levels of customer satisfaction. There are also many other important types of testing that you can explore, including regularly examining the skills and knowledge of glue employees to ensure that they can stay in line with your business’s high standards. Always offer training opportunities and information to those who need it, and encourage an open atmosphere in which employees can share their issues if they should ever have any. As well as this, learning how to understand and assess your SaaS customer health score can aid you in identify some of the downfalls that your company may be experiencing, as it can offer an in depth look into when and potentially why your customers decide to leave your business. There’s no point in gathering all of this information if you’re not prepared to act on it, so it’s important that you can utilise the data that you collect to make improvements and progress to provide a better standard of service.

Encouraging customers to stay loyal has never been so simple when you are able to make the most of the top tips and tricks detailed above! Start off by focusing on the customer service that you provide, ensuring that you and your staff have all of the right training, knowledge and interpersonal skills that are needed to offer the best quality experience. Always take part in regular testing to ensure that you can identify problems and seek solutions in super fast time!

5 Critical Areas to Focus to boost your Local SEO

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Local SEO|5 Critical Areas to Focus to boost your Local SEOAs a small business owner, growing your business is full of impediments and challenges. Local SEO is one such hindrance that remains a mystery as well as area of expertise that is beyond the scope of entrepreneurs. With limited resources and budget, entrepreneurs cannot afford to hire a full-time SEO expert for their firm. Here business owners should churn down specific areas where they can afford to focus in their busy schedule. According to Local Dudes Marketing, a San Diego SEO marketing company dominating your business on Google for local search queries is easy if you focus on these 5 important areas. Take a look!

Local Site Listing

Citations play a huge role in boosting the local SEO campaigns. And, if you want to target users with local intent, you must build citations using local resources. Here local listings such as directories, business pages, local blogs, and review websites focused on local businesses can be vital to get effective results. Apart from SEO perspective, local site listing can be an incredible source of traffic that not generate traffic but help you get more revenue from targeted users.

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Local SEO|5 Critical Areas to Focus to boost your Local SEOOn-page SEO

For achieving the results you’re aspiring for in Local SEO, you cannot undermine On-Page SEO anyway. On-page SEO tends to remain as crucial for local SEO as for International SEO. Make sure to optimize your title, description, and alt text to match the queries with local search intent.

Apart from the optimization, put a great deal of effort in researching and finding keywords that are used by users in your area to find your business and related products. And, make sure to target keywords from local point of view. So, Instead of going for simply “Italian Pizza”, you can optimize for local search to make it look like “Italian Pizza in New York”. Undoubtedly, these changes will open up your business to witness phenomenal results.

Other necessary additions include NAP, this factor is imperative to prove the legitimacy and credibility of your website to search engines. Make sure to add your Name, address, and phone numbers are consistently added to your listings as well as landing pages.

Reviews

Reviews are crucial to develop trust, credibility, and make your business stand-out from the competitors. A few reviews definitely make a good impression on your customers and overall help you gain more and more customers. To master SEO, don’t be afraid of offering some free products to get some reviews to get local SEO success.

Social Media

Social medial is not all about sharing images, thoughts, and gossiping, it can be an amazing place to reach out targeted local audience too. If your don’t have social presence, make sure to create business page with NAP details and create posts with hash tag that includes local keywords to engage local audience.

Content

Instead of going for Marketing Services, you can strive to create engaging and useful content that people would love and share. You can focus on making stories about your product or services with local keywords to get traffic relevant to your products. Use content marketing to win natural backlinks. And, thus eventually gain more traffic.

Final words

Local SEO can help you dominate organic search and reduce the marketing cost to fit your pocket. And, using it to your advantage is definitely the way out to grow and succeed.

Do More, Together: 5 Effective Ways to Improve Collaboration Among Employees

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |collaboration among employees |Do More, Together: 5 Effective Ways to Improve Collaboration Among EmployeesNobody ever said that business was easy.

50% are forced to cease operations within 5 years of starting up. Of course, numerous factors separate the best businesses from the worst. One thing’s for sure though:

Companies with employees that don’t work together face an uphill battle.

Collaboration boosts everything from operational efficiency and effectiveness through to the working environment and company culture. Communication, morale, and teamwork all get better.

In other words, it’s good for business.

Want five tips for improving collaboration among employees? Keep reading.

1. Set Up Post Work Activities

Getting to know each other better is key to collaboration.

After all, employees are more likely to work well together when they’re friends and not just colleagues. Setting up activities outside of the office facilitates that relationship-development.

Being outside of the working environment is important. Without their usual tasks and responsibilities to complete, employees will relax and strike up a conversation; they’ll hear each other’s stories, laugh, and find common ground.

This is a recipe for better communication and relations within the office as well.

2. Run Team-Building Exercises

Team-building is another classic route to better collaboration.

Every aspect of these activities and exercises is intended to bolster relationships and communication. They bring people together around common goals and foster team-work in the process.

More to the point, they’re fun!

Good team-building tasks inevitably make people smile, laugh, and bond. They learn lessons to take back into the office.

3. Ensure Strong Leadership

This one’s a little out of left-field.

However, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of strong leadership in encouraging collaboration. Someone that leads from the front and by example will set the standard of what’s expected from their employees.

Good leaders set their expectations of employees and support their development. They’ll keep people on track with roles and responsibilities, and work to improve their confidence.

All told, employees feel empowered, supported, and valued. Feeling like an important part of the team, they’re more likely to contribute to it and collaborate with it.

4. Create Sharing Opportunities

Employees should feel empowered at work.

They should have the chance to speak up, voice their ideas, and share their thoughts with the group. Everybody should have a turn to talk and to feel part of the discussion.

It’s the job of any manager to make this happen.

Quick-fire morning meetings, scrums, time-outs, and group-thinking opportunities will help.

5. Employ Collaborative Technology

A dynamic team will also benefit from tools specifically designed to improve collaboration.

Software or apps, such as Slack, that enhance communication provide a good example. Employees can share messages with ease, post notifications, share documents, and discuss particular issues.

Utilizing these resources, alongside others such as an appointment scheduler, will keep everybody in sync and on task. Productivity will improve and operations become more streamlined.

Time to Improve Collaboration Among Employees

Businesses are more likely to succeed when staff members work together.

Hopefully, the tips here will help your company improve collaboration among employees and boost your chances of success in the process.

Want more articles like this one? Check out more of our blog today.

How to Build Customer Relations That Cannot Be Broken

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |build customer relations |How to Build Customer Relations That Cannot Be BrokenAre you a switcher?

Switchers are unhappy customers who switch from one company to another. Across the nation, businesses are losing close to $62 billion every year because of switchers.

As a business owner, you work hard to provide your customers with incredible experiences. However, sometimes things that are outside of your control are going to happen. Thankfully, business owners can learn to build customer relations that survive bad experiences.

Are you ready to find out how to create loyal customers? Read on to find out the secret to building resilient customer relations.

Build Customer Relations

The first step in learning to build customer relations that last is by knowing where you stand.

Here’s a short quiz to evaluate your company’s current customer relations:

  1. Are your customers recommending your company to family and friends?
  2. Are you attracting new customers regularly?
  3. Do you have a positive customer retention rate?

If you can’t answer yes to the questions above it’s probably because you need to improve your customer service in one or more areas. If you want to be a customer service expert, that means you want to build meaningful relationships with your clientele. Depending on the nature of your business and the budget you have at hand, you can achieve this goal by investing in phone systems for small business or training your employees to improve their customer service. Any of these strategies will require resources from your business, but as long as they’re implemented with consistency, these can serve as bridges for your business upon which to build customer relations.

The best way to lay the foundation for any relationship, whether business or personal, is with trust — and it’ll be very easy for customers to trust your brand if you prioritize their needs and provide excellent customer service whenever they reach out to you.

Be Real With Your Customers

Customers can’t trust you if they don’t know who you are. One of the biggest steps in learning to build customer relations involves learning to be yourself.

Customers want to know the real you. While it’s true you can’t come to work and behave the same way you might at home, this doesn’t mean you have to be fake. Authenticity will go a long way with each of your customer interactions.

If you want to be real with your customers, start by letting them know what your business does and what your brand is. Are you a business that prioritizes customer service? Or do you want to be known as a business that provides high-quality products and services? Regardless of what you want your business to become in the eyes of the public, it’s important that you communicate this message properly.

As a business, you should be real with your customers by setting their expectations and letting them know what your business can and can’t do. Transparency is always key when building customer relationships with your target audience.

Ask the Right Questions

One way you can be truly authentic with your customers is by asking them questions that matter. Let’s say for instance that you work in the hospitality industry.

As the customer is getting ready to leave your hotel, ask them, “Will we be seeing you again soon?”. After you ask the question, be quiet and give your customers a chance to answer. There are typically 3 answers your customer will give; Yes, Maybe and No.

Aside from building customer relations that can’t be broken, asking the right questions at the right time can also help your business improve its process. The information you can gain from your customers during this phase can help your business streamline its efforts, so you’ll end up providing products and services that suit your customers’ needs and wants.

Retaining Happy Customers

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. You can always ask customers if they’ll be bringing their business to you again.

If the customer says, “yes”, you’ll know you provided A-class service. However, just because a customer says they’ll return, that doesn’t mean you should end the conversation.

A happy customer is likely to want to share details about their interactions with your company and employees. Taking the time to listen to a customer talk about their positive experience, shows them you truly care. If the competition isn’t willing to really listen, you’ll instantly have a loyal customer.

You can also use the conversation as an opportunity to learn more about what you’re doing that’s working. Perhaps the customer loved the way you packaged their documents, or they enjoy your user-friendly website. The more feedback you can get from customers, the easier it’ll be to keep making them happy.

Winning Back Unhappy Customers

Let’s pretend you ask a customer if they’ll be returning to your business and they say, “maybe”, or “no”. When a customer feels comfortable saying they’re unhappy, you have a golden opportunity to win them back. However, it’s a delicate situation and you have to be careful to position yourself correctly in the conversation.

Contrary to popular belief, winning back unhappy customers is an attainable task. When you come across unhappy customers, take the time to listen to their concerns or complaints. Often, customers are unhappy about a specific business if they were unsatisfied with the products or services given to them. If this is the reason why your customer is unhappy, provide a guarantee that your business will do better moving forward.

Stop Saying Sorry

You never want the customer to feel as if you’re arguing with them or pushing them to choose your company. This is why you should avoid saying “sorry”, and instead show sincerity by actively listening.

Statements like, “I’m sorry to hear that”, can sound like an excuse to customers. It’s also a bad idea to say sorry since you don’t know what the customer’s experience was yet.

One of the best ways to have difficult conversations with customers, is by asking open-ended questions. An open-ended question is one that you cannot answer by saying yes or no. Instead, open-ended questions cause people to think, speak, and reflect on how they’re feeling.

Ask Open-Ended Questions

After a customer tells you they might not be returning to your company, or they’re not coming back, politely ask them why they won’t be returning. You can say, “I don’t want to bother you, we pride ourselves on the experience. Please tell me, why wouldn’t you come back?”

The main idea here is to ask an open-ended question that will help reveal the full story of your customer’s experience. After the customer explains why they’re unsatisfied, make sure you reply with a real response, not something fake.

To keep it real, avoid having employees use scripted responses. Instead, summarize and speak back the story you just heard to the customer. Now, they’ll know you were listening, and they’ll be able to offer any details they may have left out.

Express Genuine Interest

Chances are you’re super excited about the product or service you have to offer customers. Your excitement is contagious and people want to know that you care about your brand and your products. When you’re interacting with your customers, listen more than you talk.

Focus on Customers Life

When you speak with customers, the majority of the conversation should focus on things that have to do with the customer on a personal level. Ask the customer how they are doing, how their family is, what life goals they’re achieving, and so on. If you’re providing a service for their business, find out how their company’s doing.

The more you can learn about your customers, the more you’ll be able to find ways to provide value to them in your relationship. Oftentimes, companies fall into the trap of promoting their specials or deals or packages to customers that don’t need it.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Actively listening to your customers will help you avoid suggesting products or services they don’t need. Sure, a company’s package deal may be great for somebody looking to get a bundle, but what if the customer just wants to buy one thing?

If employees try to push the package deal on them, the customer may leave upset, or worse buy the product and not get enough value. A customer that doesn’t feel heard, or doesn’t receive value from your company, isn’t going to come back.

Small Words Big Sales

Listen to your customers, the smallest things they say can sometimes lead to the biggest sales. Not only will you get sales opportunities, but you’ll also be building meaningful relationships.

Another benefit of listening closely is you’ll create a work culture that cares about the customer first. When new customers see the way you treat your existing customers, don’t want to be a part of it.

Strengthen Every Relationship

Now you know how to use expert customer service to build customer relations. Taking the time to listen to what people have to say, is one of the strongest ways to show you care.

Remember, customer relationships aren’t static, they’re always changing. For more ways to keep up with your customers in the ever-changing market, check out the rest of the site.

3 Important Tips for How to Start a Manufacturing Business

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StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article |start a manufacturing business|3 Important Tips for How to Start a Manufacturing BusinessWith the growth of online side hustles and Digital Age focused businesses, most people don’t consider all the benefits that a manufacturing startup offers. Even though an online business provides you with the flexibility to deal with digital products, there are some drawbacks.

For example, several online businesses require physical products to ship to their customers. This means the rise of today’s online businesses heralds the need for fair suppliers and manufacturers. This is your chance to start a manufacturing business.

Now the question is – how?

Before jumping in, there are a few things to consider. Keep reading to learn what these things are.

1. Create a Quality Business Plan

A new manufacturing company can be extremely lucrative. However, before the profits begin rolling in, you have to create a business plan.

The business plan you create is where you are going to outline the methods for your company moving forward. This is where you can figure out things like material sources, product projections, ethical standpoint, and the marketing strategies you will use.

This is also when you will outline how you will conduct business with other companies, along with how you will treat your clients and employees through your business processes.

Remember, the manufacturing industry is changing, and democratizing knowledge is a must to achieve success.

2. Consider Location

As you are planning to begin your manufacturing company, location is an important factor. Figure out where you are going to set up your manufacturing operations. You also need to decide where you are going to sell your products.

In the beginning, you may be able to operate from home. However, as your business grows, you will need specialized equipment and a bigger commercial space.

Thinking about where you are going to sell your products can be found out by researching various marketing channels.

3. Take Baby Steps

Opening your own manufacturing unit is something that takes a lot of money and time. You can’t afford to make mistakes.

It’s best to avoid risks during the initial stages by renting or leasing space and equipment rather than buying it upfront. Depend more on low-investment tools and manual labor for the initial months because your product is likely going to go under several last-minute changes during that time.

A smart mantra to follow when opening a manufacturing company is to start at a crawl.

Are You Ready to Start a Manufacturing Business?

If you want to start a manufacturing business, there are more than a few factors to consider. If you want the best chance of success, be sure to keep the tips and information here in mind.

In the long run, when you have the right strategies and tips, you will be much more likely to find success. If you are searching for additional information about business practices and more, be sure to check out some of our other blogs. We post regularly to keep you informed.