As summer winds down, enjoy the days before the hustle and bustle of fall starts, but also take some time to think about where your business is heading. Are you where you need to be? Integrating your online presence with your real life business is key in today’s digital economy. As you think about your efforts, consider these three things.
Go Mobile
You should be considering all your online efforts from the mobile perspective first, not as an afterthought. I am surprised by how many business owners I speak to who have never looked at their website, landing pages or customer emails on a mobile device. Yet those same business owners use their phones every day to read emails, search the web, and interact with companies where they are the consumer.
Millennials are digital natives who increasingly do everything from a mobile device. (Millennial teens spend a whopping 17 hours out of 24 hours each day using technology! Cell phones were identified as the most important electronic device while television was ranked the least important – Refuel Agency).
But all Americans are using mobile technology at an increasing rate – 64% of Americans now own a smartphone, up from 58% in 2014 (Pew Research). Mobile email was barely a blip in 2011, representing only 8% of email opens, but today mobile accounts for the majority of email opens (Litmus), and overall there is more internet traffic today on mobile devices than desktop devices.
You can read more on how to move your business to mobile here:
Tell Your Story Online
Building a business ultimately comes down to building relationships. Storytelling is a powerful technique for building relationships. Storytelling is not really about you, it is about your customers and the value they receive from your products and services.
I’m often asked what should a company write about? Every day in person you likely already tell your customers stories – about a new product, how to use the service better, about your company’s values and team, your differentiator, your customer’s success stories. These belong on your website so that prospective customers can decide if you are right for them.
Read more about telling your story here:
- Tell Your Story Online to Reach More Customers
- What Do I Write About on My Website?
- Use Video to Tell Your Story
Give Your Customers a Great Experience
Everyone is familiar with horror stories of the DMV, medical billing, or trying to deal with the cable company. People share poor experiences. On the flip side, a company like Uber is successful not because they have a better car, but because they make the whole experience so much easier and hassle-free.
Technology has leveled the playing field, for smaller and medium size businesses and there are things you can be doing to ensure your customer has a great experience while at the same time streamlining your own operations. Can your customers get their questions answered on your website, or contact you on social media? A fitness center uses an auto responder series of emails for new clients to increase retention and help customers make the most of their membership. If you have appointments, can your customers schedule your service online? Netflix and Amazon are two large companies who personalize your experience with them based on your history, but smaller companies can do this too. A pet store segments their customer list by type of pet and sends tailored emails to each list to get much better results.
Read more about customer experience here:
- Give Customers a Great Experience
- Get Started with Personalization
- The Secret to Growing Your Business Online
It’s so important to step back now and then to think about how your customers learn about you and what the experience of doing business with you looks like. How can you be that organization everyone wants to deal with? Today customers do not want to be “sold,” but they do want to buy, and these three things can grow your business.
