Enhance Customer Service, Marketing and Online Reputation Management: Part 1

This post is a mash up of two previous posts with some new information. This is about using all the information resources available on the web to enhance your brand and customer service, but, the emphasis will be on social networks. Why social networks? Well, consider that the basis of social networks is building communities of friends and other like-minded individuals. And, there's not enough time to get into all the other informational resources!

Let's focus on Twitter as a tool to enhance your customer service, marketing and online reputation management. From a customer service standpoint, you can use Twitter to monitor all the mentions of your brand and get a pulse on how people interact with your brand. To make this easy on yourself, use Summize to quickly search all the mentions of your brand. Type in your brand and see if any conversations pop-up. If Summize returns results for your brand then you should be flattered (if all positive) that people talk about the brand. If you don't get any returns, then its a marketing opportunity which will be discussed in the next post.

Assuming you see conversations about your brand, quickly go over the conversations and get a feel for what people are saying and how they interact with the brand. There's nothing like an unmoderated and candid forum to gauge how much people like what you do or offer. Its inevitable people will have some negative comment to make and that should be an opportunity for you to make good. After all, customers remember you most when you make a bad situation a positive one. If you find a negative comment, reach out to that individual and let him/her know you want to make good on the negative experience they had and invite them to email/call you at their convenience to hash out the issue. After you take care of the situation and the person is happy, ask them to mention it on Twitter and give them an incentive to move quickly (i.e. free shipping on next order).

Roll this out slowly and build on your experiences. Create a plan of action that addresses who is responsible for checking Twitter/Summize, how often it will be done, customer follow up and reporting. Its important that an individual is assigned this task and they are given guidelines for customer follow ups, empowered to act quickly and have the ability to report on resolution (i.e. SugarCRM).

This is an opportunity to engage customers in another medium and show the importance you place on their ongoing experiences with your brand.

SEO Software Update

In a recent post I said we weren't ready to change/replace WebPosition...well, things have changed. I was convinced to switch to WebCEO (http://www.webceo.com/). What's great for businesses with a tight budget is you can get a lot of functionality for free. That's right...WebCEO has a free version that has a lot of great features.

Its definitely worth checking out as another tool to put in your SEO toolbelt.

Monitor Your Online Reputation

An issue that repeatedly comes up for businesses is monitoring their online reputation. With all the new mediums these days, it’s hard to keep up with who is saying what about you and your business. If you have any customers, it’s safe to assume someone has said something about your business online. The easiest way to monitor this is by utilizing Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts). Simply enter your keywords, frequency and your email address. I recommend setting ‘Type’ to comprehensive so you get full coverage across the web.

Use this tool to see where your site is being mentioned and in what context. If it’s good, then you should be happy and you may want to consider some marketing opportunities with that site. If it’s not all good, then you use it as an opportunity to correct the issue and make the customer happy.

I'm not going to name the business that recently benefited from using this Google service because they're trying to dig out of a whole caused by one of their customer service reps and its a public company. I was having lunch with the marketing manager and the topic of online reputation management came up. He wanted to know what he could to monitor the business and I suggested Google Alerts. Two days later, I get an email thanking me for this little but significant suggestion because he found a couple things. First, he got an alert for a total of 53 postings about a particular customer service representative who was very harsh with customers and basically didn't provide a level of service consistent with company policy. Several customers stated the rep used foul language with them, called them 'stupid' and hung up on several callers. The rep was immediately terminated. The other incident involved some issues of insider information being leaked to the public which is huge for a public company. After two weeks, the perpetrator was discovered and disciplined. This saved the company hundreds of thousands in fines from the SEC.

In short, if you're concerned about your business reputation on the web then you need to sign up now!

Contact MJM Ecommerce for ecommerce and online marketing solutions

Numbers to Chew On

For those online marketers or business managers who engage in PPC and SEO take a look at these numbers from Nielson ReelResearch:

- When a brand name appeared in both natural search and paid search results, the brand attracted 92% of the total clicks
- Natural placement without paid search attracted only 60% of clicks

I’m going to write about advertising’s impact on search queries and how you can monetize other people’s efforts…so come back soon.

Promotions Test

I recently ran a split test on an email list featuring two unique promotions. The first was free ground shipping on orders of $85 or more and the other was 15% off $85 or more. I chose $85 because I wanted to raise the bar by 10% over the current site AOV.

Each promotion was mailed to over 70,000 subscribers (total list is over 140K) and I waited to see which performed better. It was amazing to see how many orders were submitted for the free shipping promotion. In fact, the 15% discount email only generated 13 orders compared to the 89 orders for Free Shipping. I realize the studies show that more people are willing to pay full price and receive a shipping discount, but, I wanted to see if it held true for this subscriber base. The shipping cost on an $85 order is $7.50 and its clear that the better savings belonged to the 15% discount. According to this test, more people were willing to pay full price on products and receive free shipping because shipping costs are seen as an inconvenience. Be careful when you do a shipping promotion. You should clearly define the restrictions of free shipping because you don't want to send an order to Mexico (for example) for free.

Test promotions on your subscriber base and see what works for you. Always be willing to test because its the only way you'll learn what works and what doesn't work.

SEO Software

Recently I was doing a google search for 'seo software' to keep abreast of any recent developments that may have occurred. I cam across SheerSEO which was the fifth listing on the first page of results. I hadn't seen them before, but, I was compelled to visit their site because the description line hit two things I was looking for: Google position and backlinks.

It turns out to be a great piece of SEO software that all internet marketers should add to their SEO toolbelt. I'm not ready to replace the other program we currently use (Web Position) because it doesn't have all the capabilities I want. However, its a web based application that provides me with data I can use when I'm out of the office and without my own computer. It can also be especially useful for small businesses that don't have large budgets or extensive SEO knowledge, but, need insight into their site's search engine performance.

Visit the site at www.sheerseo.com.

Crazy Egg – Visitor Visualization Analytics

I read about this in a blog a couple weeks ago and that evening installed it on MJM Ecommece’s site. It’s a rather nice looking tool and simply takes what you get in Google Analytics (site overlay report) and makes it a little prettier. I’m using the free version of the tool at the moment to better understand the value of this tool. The subscription plans, otherwise, are very inexpensive.

It’ll be an excellent tool to visualize effectiveness of a new design or navigation scheme. We have an A/B test in the works and we’ll be sure to use Crazy Egg to supplement our reporting on the effectiveness of the test pages.

Try it on your site and let us know what you think. Visit www.crazyegg.com.