8 Ways to Attract New Customers to Your Small Online Biz
You need to be enlightened about e-commerce marketing to attract new customers to your small online business. Choosing a marketing plan that provides you with the best online reputation and protects your brand as you attract new customers would be best. Find ways to make your online business accessible using different search engines as you also exploit social media platforms. The following are the main ways you can get the customers you need for your small online business:
1. Make Sure that People Can Find Your Business Online
In most instances, people create first impressions about you based on how you present yourself online. That is why you should make sure that your business is findable online. Ensure that people who search your business online find trustworthy and accurate concerning you and your venture.
2. Provide Your Customers with Reliable Services and Delivery Plans
Your online business can benefit from offering consistent services and delivery to your customers. Your current customers will keep coming for more, improve your relations with your customers, attract more clients, become ahead of your competitors, and provides you with more revenue.
When you provide your clients with reliable services and trusted last-mile delivery solutions, your business will have a better reputation among its existing clients. You will end up acquiring more customers because of the excellent company image.
3. Top-notch Online Presence Is Critical
First, evaluate your online presence and find out if you need to make any amendments. If you find that people can't find your business whenever they search for such others on the web, work on improving your online presence for them to see you in the future. If you have a significant online presence but people get irrelevant information after opening your page, create and manage an online profile or website to change that.
If your business has an excellent online presence with great results, find ways to improve your audience's relationship through interactions and participation. The aim of having a good online presence should never be to make sales. When you use your social media sites to sell products or services, you might lose your target audience.
4. Use a Single Business Name
Using a single domain name to identify yourself on social media platforms is excellent. However, you may find a workable strategy if someone else has already used your preferred name or if it is too long. If you find it impossible to use one name on all social media pages, choose not more than two names that you can use.
One should be your original business name and the other a name that you can use when your other name is unavailable or inappropriate. Choose one of the names as your domain name on all your social media pages. Create a strategy to link your names.
5. Ensure Your Social Media Pages Remain Active
If possible, open accounts on all social media platforms. You can check from different online sites to avoid using a name that others have already used. Focus on using networks common to your customers and start from there.
6. Concentrate on Sharing Content
Most successful online businesses focus on sharing relevant and valuable information instead of concentrating on sales. If you want to remain visible online, focus on consistent post scheduling and sharing content. You may also share some blog posts or posts from other social media platforms.
7. Be Keen about Your Online Reputation
Always stay online to appreciate any kind words people share on your platforms. Also, respond to comments and concerns. You can easily monitor your social media networks by requesting alerts whenever someone mentions your name.
8. Stay Active Online as Much as Possible
Always post what people will be interested to see. Whenever you find some information you'd want your social media audience to see, please post it on your platforms. You may increase interactions by posting questionnaires and polls for your audience to participate. Additionally, interact.
Follow other people, subscribe to their pages, comment on their posts, join other groups and ask questions to improve your expertise on online interactions. That will increase your popularity among other business people and contribute to your business success.
Bottom Line
The above are the eight main ways to help you attract new customers to your small online business. Utilizing them will help your business scale higher heights.
How to Get Accurate Customer Insights Using the Voice of the Customer
Stepping into 2021, customer experience is gradually becoming a top priority among businesses. Almost 86% of customers are ready to pay more for a service that’s backed by an outstanding customer experience.
In the modern age of marketing, firms invest heavily in acquiring quantitative data - consumer surveys and polls. This information helps shape their strategies and make “data-driven” decisions. While they are invaluable for analyzing the demographics of customers, they shower very limited light on the “whys” behind customer behavior.
The result? Many businesses are falling short of targets, losing focus on the human quotient of customer experience. In turn, this is expanding the “empathy gap” between customers and organizations. A recent Forrester survey revealed that a majority of companies are struggling with an increased CX leadership gap.
To counter this scenario, your business must be on the same page as their customers, offering solutions in a manner that resonates with their demands. This is where the Voice of the Customer (VoC) can prove to be the ideal framework in playing an integral part in developing growth strategies.
What Is Voice of the Customer (VoC)?
Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a medium to gain in-depth insights and an enhanced understanding of your customers’ expectations and demands. This process will leverage your organization to acquire the thoughts of your customers, the emotions that they feel, and the friction points that they encounter.
By utilizing VoC, your employees will be in a better position to craft powerful marketing messages that appeal to your customers. As a result, your organization will be well-equipped to develop attractive products and services that aid customers to overcome their most pressing problems.
Methods for Capturing Voice of the Customer
Nowadays, there’s an abundance of tools and techniques to gather customer feedback. All these methods can ignite your organization’s efforts in the quest of improving CX. Here are some effective ways to collect data that can be utilized in gauging customer demands.
Customer Surveys
Customer surveys are pretty simple to set up. They serve as reliable sources for revealing the strengths and weaknesses of a business. Surveys can be constructed to record responses with a combination of either true or false, yes or no, or even open-ended questions. Once created, you can send out surveys via email or responses, or even encourage customers to mark their responses directly on your website.
The benefits of using customer surveys are plenty. From focusing on new areas for expansion or innovation to identifying verticals that require improvements, these survey data help boost the overall experience of customers.
Responses can be acquired in bulk, inviting more participants to fill out surveys. You can even benefit from a collection of pre-made questions written by experts. While some of this data can collect feedback from open-ended questions, many of these metrics can be leveraged by organizations with a check on customer satisfaction.
Feedback Polls
Feedback polls are forms that can be added right to your website. These forms help gather both qualitative and quantitative information about the users interacting with your site. These tools mainly target capabilities and reporting dashboards that aid in viewing responses. They come through as unobstructed means for customers to review their experiences.
Feedback polls also present opportunities to collect contact information of customers upon completion. This is a huge bonus for businesses, allowing customer assistance executives to directly reach out to agitated customers and offer personalized resolutions. Organizations with the highest customer satisfaction level recognize the value of closing the feedback loop. Hence, they have incorporated this practice of including VoC into their optimization roadmaps. Even if you fail to implement this exercise in the short term, we recommend developing strategies towards achieving this capability to re-shape your customer-centric approach in the long term.
Social Listening
Customers heavily engage with social media platforms to share their experiences. As a result, 54% of customers that browse social media channels to research products, rely on social media to make purchasing decisions. With negative reviews drawing in a lot of attention, you can make use of social listening tools to utilize these opportunities to highlight your customer service. These situations can prove to be ideal in converting negative comments into new business possibilities.
Where Organizations Miss Their Mark
Despite the positives of the Voice of the Customer, several organizations fail to extract the most out of this approach. Here are some of the touchpoints where companies fall short of implementing VoC effectively:
Problem #1: They Approach Customers with the Wrong Questions
Today, it’s fairly easy to gather customer feedback with affluent tools available in the market. But this can backfire if you’re asking the wrong questions to your customers.
If your team members are presenting leading questions to your buyers, they’ll come back with only those answers that restrict their ideas to the question-set. Even closed-ended questions do much of the same, revealing little about how customers feel about your products or services. You will never know of their demands and expectations that customers might be having from your business.
Along with the right set of questions, timing can play a major role in making or breaking your customer satisfaction game from your business. If you ask survey questions in the middle of their shopping cycle, you are sure to frustrate customers and increase your cart abandonment rate.
Problem #2: Their Efforts Are Developing Silos
With organizations expanding in stature, lack of transparency and adequate knowledge of products and services being offered among employees can lead to the emergence of feedback silos. This can hamper the growth of organizations, degrading customer experience on a large scale.
Below enlisted are some signals that customer experience silos are developing in your business:
- Decision-makers among scattered departments have little to no knowledge of the recent strategies and developments of the company.
- A lack of collaboration and ownership among employees, when it comes to handling customer queries on product features, service details, and other particulars.
- Communication gap among the higher management and grass-root sales representatives within the organization.
Problem #3: They Counter Customer Feedback with the Wrong Attitude
Businesses are often passionate about their efforts in providing a fantastic product to their target audience. With negative viewpoints flowing in, it’s difficult to control emotions and respond to customers with the wrong attitude. In many instances, organizations are left with notions to disregard their customers’ opinions. This approach only pushes you far away from your customers, degrading your brand value.
In the quest of acquiring real customer feedback, the findings can turn out to be shocking and uncomfortable. However, this can prove beneficial, highlighting the underlying issues of your organization and exposing areas to improve customer experience.
How to Effectively Leverage a Voice of the Customer Campaign?
Just the idea of incorporating VoC tools and gathering customer feedback isn’t enough for business success. You must actively hunt for opportunities and collaborate with team members to act on the problems uncovered.
Here are ways to install a proper framework for VoC and strive towards cumulative success.
The three basic steps of a successful VoC program involve inquiry, analysis, and execution.
The process kicks off with a strategy to collect customer feedback by asking the right set of questions. The consultants, then, dedicate themselves to analyze the key insights in trying to gauge customer demands. The final step involves the execution of sought-out strategies to reduce the “empathy gap” and take the customer experience journey to an all-new level.
Even business leaders must develop a culture that welcomes feedback. It must go beyond simply stating whether an organization or department requires improvement. Rather, it must strive for finding ways to better the customer experience from every vertical of the company.
Summing Up
In order to surpass your competition and target constant growth, your organization must get into the minds of customers. With the process of the Voice of the Customer, you will not only discover who your customers are but also realize their purchase patterns, their preferences, and their dislikes. Using these findings, your organization will emerge offering better products and services and urging customers to come back for more.
Author Bio
Matt Canada has a background in graphic design, customer service and management. In his current role, he oversees marketing activities for Tatvam and also supports sales activity