I got an email from my bank the other day that started “DEAR NONE”.

The last time I checked, that wasn’t my name. If my bank doesn’t know my name, I start to get a little worried. After all, my name is tied to my money at that same institution.

Your online marketing and efforts will have many places where you can greet the customer by name. This may be in an email or on the customer’s online account screen.

If you are going to call a customer by name, make sure you call them the right name.

My bank’s example above highlights what can happen when a programming error (can’t find the name) makes its way to a document the customer sees.

Make sure your applications and emails can detect when a name isn’t found, isn’t available, or another error happens and then don’t use the customer’s name.

In case of emergency, it is OK to be generic by omitting the name altogether or even starting with the “dear valued customer” salutation. Granted, you don’t want to use generic greetings all the time, but they can fill in when something isn’t working right.

Do you know your customers’ names? Use them wisely and it will positively personalize the experience. Use them poorly and they detract from the customer experience.

How will you know if your business and marketing efforts are really working? You’ll need to try different things and measure the results.

Testing is fundamental to improving your efficiency and business. Without trying new methods, formats, processes, or messages, you’ll never know if you can do better than you are today.

The book Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer by authors Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar focuses on how you can improve your website.

Website Optimizer?

While the book does have some step-by-step on how to use Google’s free tool, Website Optimizer, the majority of this book is focused on why it is important to test and what you should be testing.

Even if you decide to use Google’s tool, the principles in this book will help you refine your online efforts to better meet your customer and business needs.

Examples

Always Be Testing offers multiple examples of before and after websites and the results that came through testing different website elements.

If you’ve read the essential Call to Action book from the Eisenberg brothers, many of the concepts in this book will be familiar.

This book will help you better understand the mindset of online visitors to your website and how you can effectively persuade them to take the action you need.

What to Test

A large part of this book is dedicated to giving you ideas of what exactly you should test on your website. This includes exercises and questions you can go through in evaluating your own website. If you ever wondered what you should experiment with on your site, this book will give you plenty of ideas.

Recommendation: Use This Book

If you have a website and hope to get anything out of it, you need to read and apply the principles in this book. By continually testing your site, you can refine and optimize it to get the results you want.

This book will not only show you how to test your website but give you specific areas that you should evaluate. It is a great guide to improving your site and reaching your company’s goals.

You can buy the Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer on Amazon.com

This is a guest post from sales educator Dave Kahle:

“Ready, shoot, aim.”

Unfortunately, that’s the approach many salespeople take to task of determining how to best invest their sales time.

It leads to squandered sales time, unproductive days, and results which are far less than they could be.

The best salespeople, the top guns, take a different approach. They engage in certain planning disciplines which help them make good decisions about the investment of their sales time and help them to stay focused on the most important use of their time.

One of those key planning disciplines is the annual planning retreat. The best companies build this into their routines as a standard part of how they do sales, and the best salespeople dedicate time to this process annually.

Here’s how they do it:

1. Set aside two or three days to immerse yourself in the planning process. That means that you block off a dedicated chunk of time. You limit interruptions; don’t schedule any sales calls during this time, avoid phone calls, and don’t make commitments for things to be done other than this. Then, gather all your files and seclude yourself some place where you can focus on thinking deeply about these issues.

2. Start with a review of the previous year. On a page or two, record the major victories you enjoyed, the successes you engineered, and the lessons you learned.

3. Then, move on to creating personal goals for yourself. Think deeply about all the things you could accomplish this year, and then identify the three to five things that are most important. Describe them as specifically as possible.

4. Now, focus on your job, and create goals for the results you want. What do you want to achieve this year? How much in sales, new customers, etc? Once again, describe them as specifically as possible.

5. Next, work on your customers and prospects. Methodically analyze each one for the potential this year, and rank them into A, B and C categories. Be objective and methodical. Use your files to carefully analyze each.

6. Rework your travel routines, building loops around the A customers, and limiting your time with the C’s.

7. Finally, revamp your file system both electronic and hard copy. Throw out or delete all the old and irrelevant information. Re-organize your files so that you have useful information readily at hand. Focus on information for your customers, your products, and your internal resources.

If you methodically and objectively attend to each of these issues, you’ll find that it takes you a couple of days. That’s OK. This is time well spent.

You’ll emerge from this time energized and focused. You’ll know exactly what you want to accomplish this year and how you are going to do it. You’ll be organized, focused and eager to get at it.

That’s why this is a best practice of the best salespeople.

About Dave Kahle:

Dave Kahle is one of the world’s premier sales training educators. Since 1988, Dave has worked with over 400 companies, helping them to increase their sales and develop their sales people. He’s been published over 1,000 times, writes a weekly Ezine, and has authored seven books. He has a gift for creating powerful training events and sales workshops that get audiences thinking differently about sales.

If customers purchase from you online, you need to send immediate order confirmations via email.

Think about when you go to the grocery store. You hand over your cash or credit card and immediately are given your products and a receipt. These are physical reassurances that your transaction is complete and you can go home happy.

In the online world, there are no such physical assurances. Often customers have to wait for a product to ship and fall into a limbo state of waiting for some confirmation that all is well.

During this waiting period, customers can be unsure of what happened or is happening with their order. This doubt and fear leads to an unpleasant buying experience that customers won’t be fond of repeating.

Your site may show an “Order Successful” type page after the checkout process is completed. However, this is not enough.

Let’s look at two examples.

When I place an order on amazon.com, usually by the time I’m done reading the summary page of my completed order, I’ve got an email from them confirming my purchase. By confirming my order in two places, on the original screen and via email, the retailer reassures customers that everything is fine.

Contrast this with when I place an order from Lego’s online store. It takes several hours after my order is submitted for me to get an email confirmation.

If your website has the technology to handle online orders, it can handle sending immediate emails to customers after the sale.

Reassure customers that the order went through and ease their anxiety by immediately confirming their purchases. If your company has slower, legacy systems that process orders coming from your website, send a confirmation that the order was received.

The key is to keep the customers in the loop of what is happening so buyer’s remorse doesn’t set in and lead to future problems.

Whenever a customer is about to do something necessary but that they don’t like, you need to be at your most cheerful and helpful.

The last time I got my flu shot I had a very friendly nurse. She was cheerful, made a joke to set me at ease, and made the otherwise dreadful “I’m getting a shot” experience a rather pleasant one.

Flu shots are one of those things that people have to get that they don’t necessarily like.

Your business may likewise sell products that are necessary, yet painful, for customers. Or perhaps you have business processes that customers have to go through but that they hate (think product returns).

You, as a business, can make these experiences more pleasant and in so doing turn the tide of consumer sentiment.

Here are some steps you can take to ease customer pain when they are expecting the worst:

• Explain what exactly the end result will be
• Tell the customer what you will be doing
• Explain what the customer will need to do
• Outline anything the customer will experience (wait, discomfort, etc.)
• Call the customer by name to personalize the experience
• If tension is high, break the ice with some humor or a distraction that takes the customer’s mind off of the negatives
• If the pain is caused by your mistake – fix it

By helping your customer through painful transactions with you, they will recognize that you care and that will help build your relationship with them.