Giving a Gold-Standard Web Service for Your Clients
The following is a guest post by Trevor Munday. If you would like to write for this blog, please check out the guidelines here.
Remember the last time you had great customer service in a shop? I do, and as a result I’ll go to that shop out of choice, even if it’s a little out of my way. Conversely the place with the bored teenagers who made me repeat what I wanted three times and hardly made eye contact? Well I don’t go there unless I truly have to, and even then I’ll never spend more than I originally intended. The fact is, we like being sold to well, and this is no different on the web when you are promoting your own site and services.
Here are some tips on how you can effectively sell online.
Be Professional
That doesn’t mean you need a top-draw web template with fancy motion graphics (unless, of course, you are advertising motion graphics services). Be clear and be accurate with your information, make sure there are no misspellings and the language on the site is business-orientated. Established companies can get away with being colloquial as it looks informal and “cool”; home businesses tend to suffer unless it’s a very specific market you are targeting.
Hint: Take a peek at a few of your competitors, especially any major companies that offer services in your sector. What do you like or loathe about their site? Are there any improvements you can make to your own that can be easily implemented?
Be Informative
Chances are, your client-to-be is going to be browsing the web for lots of sites to compare. Make life easier by stating what you do and what it will cost them prominently on your landing page. I’ve always hated antique shops where they hide the price labels on the window items – what are they hiding? Will I look cheap and get sneered at if it’s too expensive and I leave the shop? All that pressure! It’s enough to make me not want to bother. If I know the price of something in the first place then both I, and the shopkeeper, know where we stand and we can move on to a business transaction from there.
Be Helpful
Here’s where good customer service comes in. Many shops I frequent are ones where I didn’t buy initially, but gave me a good experience when I last visited. The same with websites: making useful information or services available will get you noticed. True, not everyone who takes your content will be an eventual client, but amidst the dross on the web people remember – and share the location of – useful resources. Asking users to part with an email in return for a PDF or useful widget or tip isn’t too much to ask, and making regular contact with that address to highlight new content or gently remind about your other services, can often lead to a new customer.
Hint: Get your touch frequency right. I’ve downloaded an article to be spammed every day with increasingly high-pressure emails about subscribing to a paid service. If they had simply alerted me to something relevant, I might have thought “Hey, I use this site a lot, maybe I need to get a subscription” instead of hitting the unsubscribe link.
Go the Extra Mile
Sites, like shops, get a lot of traffic and you can either watch them leave or try and engage with them to find what they want. If you have analytics installed, look at the bounce rate of your pages: anything over 50% indicates users are not seeing what they are looking for on that page, so try something different. Give them something new, or try positioning content differently. Pushing a relevant piece of content in front of a user is the equivalent of a sales assistant asking “excuse me, can I help?” and helping a customer get to what they need. Even if the customer doesn’t bite this time around, seeing something different might encourage them to visit again to see what’s new next time they are online.
Hint: remember your email sign-up? Why not survey these folks and find out more about what they are after? There are lots of free survey tools that will let you ask three questions that will help you focus content on your site, and you can leverage this against a discount or free product offering to a lucky winner.
About The Author
Trevor Munday is an online marketing executive and currently works for a company that deals with credit cards for bad credit.
Tags: customer service, freelancing, great customer service, home business, web service
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Tagged with: customer service • freelancing • great customer service • home business • web service
Filed under: Entrepreneurship • Small Business • Work From Home
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Good tips! I think comparatively an IMer is harder compared to the normal established bricks and mortar companies. You know an IMer has to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously. I think for an online marketer, as long as you got good contents, half the work is done. You just have to learn how to get people to focus on your work. So, how to stand out from the crowd or how to lessen the distractions all come into play. Essentially what value you bring to people.
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Nice tips! let me take note of everything..
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Some of the tips sounds very helpful. I agree with you Trevor, other than just selling the product or service there are other factors which makes the customers feel good. I believe even online business can build loyal customers, customer satisfaction is a must for any business. Running an online business means to cater to people from across the world and we have to be ready provide excellent service.
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Your article on giving good service to visitors was very informative, and brought from a good viewpoint. Yes, I can agree that I also will make it a point to return to a store where I have been treated well.
This is greatly overlooked today. Corporations with many stores fall short in this respect. I am always astonished when I am even waited on as if I am a real live person, and the salesperson is not on the phone while waiting on me.
We should interact with our visitors as much as we are able. Being able to comment, and getting a reply is one of those places where we can meet our visitors and find out whether we have fulfilled their needs.
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Twitter: stainedglasstut
says:
Hey Trevor!
I really admire and appreciate your thoughts and ideas,your experiences and research done is so firm,well fabricated and easy to understand.I do believe in idea to be “Helpful”,” Be Professional”,”Be Informative” and “Make a look of your site like a shop”….These all points are so important to implement when anybody is going to start a web business.Thank you for sharing such an informative content with us.I have get benefited with all your tips.
THANK YOU and GOD BLESS!!
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Great article with very helpful advice. I also agree with one of the comments above about benchmarking your online business against others in the industry. Many industries have businesses that are “professional” and “informative” companies and without the benefits of face-to-face interaction it becomes harder to differentiate one from another online. That’s why I agree with “go the extra mile” especially in differentiating yourself be benchmarking against the top performers in your industry.
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This was really a great article, no doubt. Beside Shop sites that get a lot of traffic what other sites would you suggest can get lot of traffic?
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Good tips.I also agree with all of the comments.Be Professional”,”Be Informative” and “Make a look of your site like a shop”….These all points are so important to implement when anybody is going to start a web business.
thanxx for the nice post.
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Thanks for sharing. Your tips sounds very helpful. I agree with you Trevor, other than just selling the product or service there are other factors which makes the customers feel good.
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