Communicating with your customers while in your store or restaurant is easy; unless we grew up under a rock, we naturally know how to maintain relationships while interacting in person. Communicating online is more challenging, especially when your customers can choose to replace you with your competitor in one click. Due to our increasing presence online, this type of communication is becoming equally if not more important than offline communication. There are some simple practices that can be done to improve online communications with your customers.
Email has become the essential communications tool over the past twenty years. Since it’s fast and easy, everyone else, including your competitors, is using it too. Advertising blocking, junk filters, and massive amounts of emails that go unread are some of the challenges with email communications. How do you get around it? How can you maintain a good email readership with your customers? One option is providing them with useful information in the form of industry specific educational content. Farm Steady does this very well; they regularly (but not overwhelmingly often) send emails with recipes and ideas for how to use their product. Since they only send one or two emails a month with valuable content inside, customers look forward to opening and reading their emails, which dramatically improves their open rate.
Giveaways and discount codes are also a great way to ensure your emails are being read, but don’t do these too often so they don’t lose their element of novelty and therefore devalue your product or service.
A big recurring question is how to get out of the junk folder? When a guest visits your website, ask them to subscribe and remove you from the junk folder right away. When they put their email address in the sign-up form or box to subscribe, or provide the check mark for offers when making a purchase, send them an email right away. Thank them for subscribing and ask them to make sure that emails from you go to their inbox. Let them see immediately what emails from you will look like so they can begin building trust in your brand’s communications. By acting right away, you’re ensuring that they are still thinking about you.
Read 5 Tips for Writing Emails for more information on how to do this well.
Text Messages
People read text messages more than any other form of communication. Use text messages for vital information such as appointment time, shipping information, or issues with their payment method. Don’t overuse texting, or you will find yourself unsubscribed and avoided forever.
Some tips:
* Keep messages short. A good email or text should take only 15-30 seconds to read and absorb. Have the entire message fit onto the first screen.
* Establish the right tone in the subject line and the first three words of a note.
* Using email to compliment helps people remember you for kind words.
* Keep your objective in mind, and establish a clear goal for how you want the reader to react to your message.
Chat
Chat is my favorite method of online communication. I’m one of those people who looks for the person who’s working in a retail store so that I can tell them exactly what I want, then I go look around while they are working on finding what I want. I like to be efficient with my time and chat helps. Offer a chat service with a few people working, be honest about the wait time, and offer to get back to them at an appointed time if the chat resources are too busy. Chat should be able to answer questions about size, color, and the look and feel of the product you’re selling. I have a retail customer who uses artificial intelligence for the first basic questions, and then uses that technology to allocate human resources as needed. If you have the budget, it’s worthwhile, and even Facebook offers some basic levels of this service so check it out.
Making your website friendly with regular updates will entice visitors to come back over and over again. When you’re communicating effectively via email, appropriately using text messages, and being available for chat, your customers will feel engaged, which will lead them to trust you and keep coming back.
Hire a consultant or team to help you determine exactly who your customer is, and once you know who they are, use market research to determine what they are most interested in. Use social media and email to keep them engaged in what you know they are interested in. It may seem like a big investment at first, but the return on investment should come back pretty quickly.
Get creative and have fun with it. Don’t go over your budget; you need to be realistic about the costs, so determine up front what you’re willing to spend and how much work you’re willing to do. Subscribe for more business, sales, and investing posts. Have a lovely day!
