Building a long-lasting profitable business means building customer loyalty that lasts. How do you get your customers to come back time and again? How do you get them to tell your friends about you? How do you build up so much goodwill that customers will overlook your occasional mistakes? How do you make your customers love you?

Be Undyingly Dedicated to Customer Satisfaction

The best and most successful companies in the world are companies that care deeply about the customer experience.

Amazon.com was not the first company to sell books online. In fact, they were number four or five to come on the market. The reason Amazon dominated the market was because they had a customer-satisfaction focus. They made sure that everyone who came to Amazon was satisfied. Today, they boost a conversion rate of over 12 percent as a result of the brand they built up.

The same can be said of PayPal. PayPal was not the first to launch an online payment system. Many competitors came into the space after PayPal, including eBay, which launched its own competing payment system. People kept coming back to PayPal time and again because PayPal had an incredible focus on making the customer experience smooth and easy. They kept the number of steps you needed to take to a bare minimum and adapted to customer demands, while other competitors failed to do so. Eventually eBay had to shut down their version of the company and acquire PayPal, because it was so clear that PayPal had so much customer loyalty that they couldn’t compete.

An unerring focus on customer satisfaction and the customer experience is the number one most important thing for building customer loyalty.

Ask for Feedback in Multiple Media

Asking for feedback is integral to providing a great customer experience. You need to know what your customers like and don’t like about their experience in order to innovate.

Ask for your customer’s feedback in many different media. The most basic method is to ask for feedback via online surveys, but don’t stop there. Ask for their feedback by telephone and in person.

Ask for feedback from people who bought, from people who might buy but haven’t, and from people who decidedly didn’t buy. Get feedback from everyone. Only with diligent feedback can you build a really great company.

The bottom line is that building a great company means building a brand and a product that customers love. In order to do that, you need to pour all your energy into the customer experience. Everything else, including marketing, comes second to building a brand and product that customers can feel proud to be associated with.

Here is a great free white paper from top internet marketer James Yuille on how to gain and retain more customers, the life-blood of any business, especially in these challenging economic times.

This White Paper is accessible to Platinum Members.

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It’s not just about getting customers on the internet these days. It’s about keeping them.

First of all, let us just say that they are ONLY a customer if they ACTUALLY BUY from you.

Otherwise, they are just traffic. So make sure that your site is giving your prospective customers enough information for them to feel confident enough about you as a company, and about your products, to part with their email address (LEAD), or make a purchase (CUSTOMER).

Lead generation is a worthy goal for ANY site, since it allows you to follow up with your prospects, and help lead them to a purchasing decision through multiple points of contact in the form of free email newsletters, branded tip sheets and so on.

It may take more than several steps and weeks or even months for people to make an actual purchasing decision, and only after various other activities like comparison shopping, looking at features and benefits side by side.
Once they have gone through this process, then they might decide to buy from you. And remember, even in a recession, people are still buying. They are just shopping more carefully.

So your website should be all about superior customer experience. Even small companies can do well if they know their niche and offer the traffic that comes to the site what they are actually looking for.

(HINT: You could certainly lure people with a PPC ad in Google that said FREE Xbox, but if they got to the page and did not see that specific offer, they would soon click away, and never come back).

So make sure that you view each PPC ad as a promise that needs to be fulfilled, and each keyword as part of a dialogue or continuing keyword conversation with your customer. Do not try to trick them with misleading ads or pages crammed full of keywords you know get a lot of traffic, but are not really relevant to your product or service.

Once they spend money and become a customer, what can you upsell, or cross-sell to them? Just think of the success of the McDonald’s happy meal for them, when all most people were really coming in for was a burger.

You might not have a great deal of content now, but if you keep the upsell or cross sell in mind, you can start planning other products in your pipeline which will also fulfill that niche’s need, not only more than likely increasing your sales, but also bringing up the average order value.

It is all about keeping the customer happy, and coming back, by offering a superior level of customer service.

In this presentation, you will hear three top Gartner Group and SalesForce executives discusses the present and future of customer service on the internet, from the technological, cost saving, profitability and consumer satisfaction and retention standpoints. You will also learn how a superior customer service experience is one of the key brand differentiators in both the B to B and V to C markets.

Webinar details: Run time, 34 minutes, self executing presentation module, no special software required.

Access available to Gold and Platinum Members.

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