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Further
Reading ...
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Make Your Career Offshore Proof - Max Stein
There has been a lot of talk recently about American jobs moving overseas…offshoring is the buzzword for it. During difficult economic times it is often easy to find a scapegoat to blame for a downturn in jobs. While government reports and...
Online Forums Help Businesses Generate Additional Streams of Revenue - Neil Armand
Small businesses and inventors often find it difficult to reach the global market because the traditional transfer of intellectual property is complicated, costly, fragmented, and slow. A number of online forums, including Patentcafe.com (...
Your Life - Your Choice - Lorraine Pirihi
I've just recently returned from a week's holiday at Camp Eden, a holistic health retreat in Queensland. I'm sure many of you would have been there or know someone who has. It's a great place for a holiday …time out just for yourself. For me it...
Can I Really Make Money Online? - Patty Baldwin
You certainly can! You can also make money by investing wisely or working a 9 to 5 job, or starting a business. Play along with me for a minute. Let's just say that you stumbled across a message hidden in a book in the attic of your grandmother's...
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Getting And Keeping Customers
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Written By:
Sibyl McLendon
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This is why you have a site in the first place, right? The idea is to make money, to get customers and keep them. There are some things you are going to have to do to accomplish this.
Take a good, hard look at your website. Are there pictures of your product? If so, are the pictures clear and easy to see? If a customer can't really see the product, they might be uncomfortable buying it. Are your descriptions of the products easy to read, informative and to the point? If you are selling a T-shirt, for example, have you told the customer why this is a great T-shirt to buy? Did you give them the size and color choices? Did you tell them if it is washable or not? That it is well-made and will last a long time? Think about what you would like to know if you were going to buy a product that you could not hold in your hand. What would you want to know about it?
You have got to have a clear, easy-to-understand return and refund policy, and you have got to provide a link to it on every product page. No one is going to want to buy a product that they can't hold and not know if they can return it if they are not satisfied, or it wasn't what they really wanted. Make your customer feel comfortable about buying from you.
Try to have a testimonial page. Get satisfied customers to write a short note about how great your product or service is, and show potential customers that others consider you to be honest and your product to be a good one.
Seriously consider having a contest to give away something for free. You can sign up for a free email address, strictly for people to enter your contest at. Give them the rules of the contest, and a link to the email address to enter. Choose a winner once a month, or whatever, and then ask the winner to provide you with a testimonial about your product that you can put on your testimonial page.
Occasionally, offer your customers something free with an order. Give them a "buy three-get one free" deal. Maybe you have a bunch of some product sitting around that won't sell. Well, why not give one away with every order over $25 or $50, or - continued below ...
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continued ...
whatever. Send them a free pen with your business name and website address on it with their order. Make them feel like they are important to you... because they are.
Consider putting out a newsletter. Get others, or experts in your field to write for it. Encourage people to pass your newsletter on to their friends. Bravenet has a great free email newsletter program you can sign up for. You can find a lot of places on the Internet that offer free articles for you to publish in your newsletter. Here are a few to start with:
http://www.articlecity.com/index.shtml
http://ezinearticles.com/
http://www.ideamarketers.com/library/mainarticle.cfm
Be honest in your dealings with your customers. Be friendly. Send them a thank you email, and follow up with them at least once to see if they re satisfied. Offer them updates to your site, and to notify them of sales.
Offer them as many features as you can. Here are 2 gift certificate sites that will allow you to offer gift certificates to your customers:
http://www.giveanything.com/
www.GiftCertificates.com
Always have your company name, physical address and your email address accessible to the customer. It makes them feel more comfortable to know that you are a "real" business, and that they can write to you if they need to. Consider putting up your picture for them to see. This makes you real to them, and not just another faceless website.
Do anything that you can think of to make your potential customer feel welcome, safe, and valued. It will really pay off in the end.
About the Author
Sibyl McLendon is the owner of Spirit Web Design http://www.spirit-webdesign.net. She has been designing
sites for 3 years. Visit Spirit Web Design for
useful information on website marketing.
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| _Additional Resources ... |
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Innovation Makes Leaders - Pavel Lenshin
Basically what innovation does is making your business unique and often more progressive in its development. Looking deeper at positive influence of innovation allows us to notice clear tendency from business stagnation to rapid development...
Marketing Tips 2 - Chuck and Sue DeFiore
This month we will deal with the issue "How Can I Get Name Recognition". Some of the ways in which to get your "name out there" are to call your local television and radio stations, and ascertain whether there is a medium you can get your name in. A...
"Trading With the Help of the Experts" - Joseph Sgro
Would you be interested in live trading seminars captured on DVD and CD? While I was scooting around on the web looking for interesting resources for my members I came upon a great way to learn to trade - using the experts! How many times have you...
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