Category: Learn

Without profit, there is no business, and without customers, there is no profit. Customers are the sole provider of a business’ measure of success. Successful businesses know that their customers are their #1 priority in making a business work. Not only do you have to have new customers, it is even more important to keep the customers you already have. That is why customer loyalty is so important.

Small businesses and startups may struggle with their execution of customer service because of a lack of resources or time. So how is a small business supposed to face off against a large corporation? The answer is loyal customers. A loyal customer that has a satisfied relationship with a business and will often frequent the business, and go above and beyond for the business, too. Loyal customers often bring friends with them to their favorite stores and promote their favorite stores on social media. When you have created enough loyal customers over time, your business will be a success.

If you’re not convinced why you should be going out of your way to build relationships with the customers you already have, here’s a list of things a loyal customer can do for your business.

Loyal Customers Stick Around

Once you have a customer’s loyalty, you will find that they won’t visit your website a few times and then never come back, or stop into your shop and then you never see them again. A loyal customer truly appreciates what is at the core of your business, it resonates with them. If things are not going well in the business, your loyal customers will keep showing up and give your business the benefit of the doubt.

They Frequent Your Store More Often

A loyal customer may come to your store more often than they would need to, just because they like being there. If you own a restaurant and you have the same man come in every day with lunch, sometimes with friends and sometimes just alone, there is a reason he returns every day. He probably enjoys the food, but he also probably really enjoys being on a first-name basis with everyone who works there. He can come in and everyone says hello to him and remembers his name and his favorite order. He feels special at the restaurant because he is appreciated there. When a customer feels appreciated, then that is when you have created a loyal relationship.

Loyal Customers Have Your Back

Your customers probably shop other places when they have to for other things they need or when they are in a pinch. But they always have your back. Most people eat fast food at some point or another, and you probably have your favorite fast food place that you think is better than everywhere else. So if you end up at Wendy’s and you really love McDonald’s, you’re not going to run around the next day and talk about your Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger; you’ll still be lamenting about how you’re craving a Big Mac right now.

They Offer Amazing Feedback

Since you have established a good relationship with your customers, you can now ask them for favors. Returning customers make for great focus groups and usually have a lot of opinions about your products and services. You know that they are satisfied with your business, but they might have some handy suggestions you’ve never thought of before. Don’t be shy about mentioning a customer satisfaction survey – the ones most likely to take it are your loyal customers because they don’t want your business to go anywhere. Your loyal customers will always give feedback that will ensure that your business stays afloat because that’s their aim, too.

They Will Promote You

As mentioned before, loyal customers will talk about your product often, which then brings in more customers. Word-of-mouth is a powerful marketing tool because when a suggestion is made by a person that we trust, we are much more likely to go with their suggestion. An easy way to create word of mouth from your loyal customers on social media is to create a hashtag with your business name. Without fail, your loyal customers will post themselves wearing, drinking, eating, or whatever it is they do with your product, with the right hashtag in the photo.

To drive sales to your business, you need to be sure that you are marketing to the correct audience. And as your customers change and grow you will also need to make changes and adjustments to your marketing techniques. One way to do this is to create a buyer persona. Having a target audience is great, but having a buyer persona will give your team a clear focal point to help them build the best marketing campaigns for your target customers.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term “buyer persona” it is merely a tool to find out more about your customer. It is a detailed representation that includes the ideal customer demographic background, hobbies, career, and personal interests. To find out about these details, you will need to do some in-depth marketing research on your existing customers. Here are some tips on finding the ideal buyer persona.

Collect Data

Find data on your buyer persona through your social media presence and website. Get the data on all of the emails they open and don’t open, which page of your site has the most clicks, and analyze the results of survey data. Each aspect of this data is a part of your customer’s digital behavior.

Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a great tool that will give you information about the activity on your website. It works for social media posts as well, it will track the movement of your audience and show you how your posts are performing. There are several other social media analytics tools available that you can use to analyze your social media presence outside of Google Analytics, including Quintly, Followerwonk, and ViralWoot.

Define the Buyer Persona

After you’ve collected all the data, you can now ask yourself who the customer is. Start by asking specific questions such as, “how old is the customer?” “What is her/ his salary?” “What does she value?” Once you have covered a list of specific questions, you can ask the broader questions like “who is the ideal customer?” This should combine all the answers you have found through the previous answers. Once you have seen the specific personality of your ideal customer, you can now market to them on a personal level.

Discover The Way Your Buyer Persona Finds Your Business

Now that you are aware of your ideal buyer persona you can ask yourself what brought your buyer persona to discover your business? Did they Google your business and find it through an organic search? Were they referred to by a friend? Or did they stumble across your social media presence? These details will help you to identify the marketing channels that will best serve you.

Once you have discovered your buyer persona, you can use this persona to personalize your marketing strategy. Not every customer you receive from your target marketing will be the exact match to the buyer persona. You will find that only aspects of your buyer persona match your audience, but the audience will nonetheless feel that you are directly addressing them because they fit at least some part of the mold. You can also create multiple buying personas if your product is broad enough to reach people in different age groups, occupations, and interests.

With this information, you can create targeted ads, personalized email messages, and blog content that they will be interested in responding to. Once you have reached your customers on a personal level, they will turn into loyal consumers of your product.

Not only will you be providing content that your buyer persona will want and respond to, but you can also begin to learn more about your customer and their buying process. Once you have found what triggers their purchasing decisions, you will see an instant improvement in your inside sales. And at the end of the day, the most important thing is making a purchase and providing your customer with the items that they want and need.

If you are the owner of a small business, then you have probably struggled with creating an online presence that gets noticed. In your continual attempts for growth, you may feel that you and your small team are stretched pretty thin, and you don’t have the time or the resources to spend on working on your online presence. However, having a professional appearance online in this digital age is a necessity for any growing business (especially when there are many recruitment tools like browser extensions that can show all your online presence in one file), and luckily there are many tools available to you that can help you build the online presence that will drive more customers to your site. No matter what your budget is, with these simple tools your small business will begin to look like a giant company powerhouse.

However, before we get started, first you have to create a plan for the growth of your brand. Set goals and intentions. Write down your aims and objectives. Strategize ways to achieve these goals. If your goals are broad, break them down into smaller goals that are easily achievable. For example, if you want to increase views on your blogs by 40% then break that goal down into intentional steps, such as:

• I will write a blog post every day.
• I will interact with other blogs under the same umbrella.
• I will review products on my blog for free. Etc.

Each of these small steps will eventually lead back to your ultimate goal of getting more page views. This is also a great way to track small progress, so you don’t lose sight of the big picture.
Now, onto the available tools that will assist in fortifying your online presence with greater professionalism.

Time Management Tools

There are several affordable tools available that can help you manage your time and projects.
Calendly is an excellent scheduling app that you can send to your clients when trying to schedule a phone call. It will send your client time frames that work for your business, and they choose the block of time that coincides with their schedule.

Toggl tracks your work time logged on a project. Toggl can help with scheduling and precise invoicing. You can even check your work report to see when you or your employees were most productive.

Slack is the tool you should be using if you have a team of remote workers. You can keep all of your projects and pitches in one place and create a message board between workers so that you can stay on top of projects together.

CRM Software

CRM stands for customer relationship management. You can find CRM software by several software companies, including SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics, InfusionSoft, and Insightly. This software is designed to help your small business by building trust and loyalty between the business and customers. This is done by managing your calendar and to-do lists, tracking leads, managing data, managing contacts, and assessing the value of your marketing techniques.

Intuit QuickBooks

QuickBooks is a great accounting software to track income and expenses. There are different packages that you can choose from at Intuit QuickBooks, including three different small business plans and a freelancer plan. The plans differ slightly in what they offer but even the most low-cost basic plan can help you manage tax deductions, organize your receipts, create invoices that you can track and cash from your software, and you will also be able to run necessary expense sheets.

Recruit The Right Talent

There is a way to recruit the best candidates for your small business, in the same manner, a large company recruits their talent. Plum is a tool to help enterprises to match the right employee to available positions. Plum has created application surveys to examine the workplace psychology of prospective employees and divides these people up into the areas that they would be best suited for which will help you trim down potential matches to the people best suited for the job. It will also let the prospective employees know where they stand in the hiring process so you won’t be bothered by several follow up emails.

Global Call Forwarding

Since you’re already here you may know a bit about the virtual phone company, but in case you weren’t sure how the company could help your business create a professional presence, here are a few things that Global Call Forwarding can do to make your business presence more attractive:

• Provide virtual local or toll free numbers, including vanity numbers
• The ability to use extension numbers so your customers will be directed to the office they need right away
• Record calls for later analyzation
• Call transfer services
• An account management page where all of your phone records and data is stored in one convenient place

Any business no matter how small can have the ability to look like a substantial professional corporation. If you want your business to attract more customers and make more sales, then apply these tools to achieve a professional online presence so you can begin to see results.

As your company expands its reach to international countries and different time zones it may become harder to keep your company operating as one. Many companies expand to different countries around the globe, and even smaller companies will expand their reach to other countries because of the profitability and ease thanks to the developing technology. To keep your company growing, here are a few tools that can help companies in their international expansion efforts, or to maintain greater control with employees across the world.

Virtual Phone Systems

Virtual telephone systems are the best way to stay in contact with your sister businesses overseas, as well as your consumers overseas. The virtual phone system makes it possible for international employees to work together and more efficiently. It’s also a great tool to use for customer service. Virtual telephone providers often provide a variety of features that allow employees to manage their relationships with customers with greater ease.

These features can also help with better training. At Global Call Forwarding, one feature that can be very useful is Call Recording. This feature can be used to inspect each call and analyze whether each sales team is following the same protocol. It can also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of each call for future reference. After successful use of this tool, it will be easier for your international teams to remain consistent. Whether they are in America, England, or India. To follow up on other details, simply look to the Account Management feature that is also featured at Global Call Forwarding.

Virtual Phone Numbers for Your International Team

Using virtual phone numbers will reduce challenges and allow your international teams to create relationships with their local customers. This should be the #1 goal of each of your international teams. Finding new customers and keeping them is the reason you expanded your business in the first place. If your customer service call center operates in India, you can still use local area codes from places all over the world using a virtual phone system. For example, your Indian customer service reps can place a call using a local area code to San Francisco in America. And that’s yet another important tip: you should always be using local area codes for your customer service calls. A customer in San Francisco is unlikely to answer a call from India, but much more likely to answer one with an area code from the San Francisco area. Not only because an India number might be foreign to them, they will probably also associate the number with extra fees.

Advanced IVR and PBX

When you have remote workers all over the world, an advanced IVR / PBX allows each worker to work from different parts of the world without being left out of important updates or team calls.

The IVR can be programmed to connect your teams by creating a welcome message followed by important announcements. This can all be done with your company phone system and does not require any extra hardware. Each phone system carries necessary information, such as accounts and contacts, that each international team needs to know. They can access this important information at any time, which is essential since they will all be working in different time zones.

The IVR system can be used to create a private telephone network that only you and your employees can use. They will each have their own extension that can be accessed by other employees. Using your own private system within the virtual phone system you already have will lower your operating costs, as well.

If you allow your employees to work remotely in different countries, it is likely they will be more productive than if they were to have to report to an office. Keeping your team together through a virtual phone system will create a great working experience throughout the globe. It might seem like the teams would feel disconnected, but having the ability to contact your international team’s number through an easy-to-use virtual phone system will actually help each team work together more effectively.

For your company, expanding should be a goal. However, expansion can become quite tricky if it is not handled well. Communication becomes key to the expansion of international territories.

Using a virtual call system to keep your various teams connected will allow each team to work more efficiently separately and remotely while maintaining an overall synergy for your overarching business.