Take the example of a grocery store. They are a business and want to be profitable.

Our local grocery store doesn’t want to pay for plastic bags. Sure, this is couched in an Earth-friendly message. However, in addition to saving the planet, the grocery store saves money when you bring your own bags.

So how can they get customers to bring their own shopping bags? Use incentives.

Our store gives customers a five cent refund for each reusable shopping bag they use to bag your groceries. You save. The store saves. The planet is happy.

When you positively reinforce the behavior that you want your customers to do, they will start to act how you would like.

What would you like your customers to do? How can you gently push them in the right direction?

One conference had the most comfortable chairs I’ve ever sat in. Typically, conference rooms have hard and uncomfortable chairs. Even though attendees must sit for hours on end, few facilities make that a pleasant experience.

Another conference I attended made special arrangements to have good wireless Internet. By the organizer’s own admission, they didn’t want the wifi to be horrible like most other conferences. This conference understood what attendees needed and wanted: really good Internet access.

In both these examples, the attendees’ expectations are typically low. However, because these two conferences made sure they took care of the details, it was a pleasant surprise for this attendee and made the overall experience that much better.

Your competition and industry peers are currently delivering poor experiences to their customers. They do it because that is how things have always been done.

In fact, you probably deliver similar sub-par experiences to your customers. What can you change to improve your customer’s experience?

Look for something that your customers always complain about. These complaints may even come in the form of jokes. The best jokes typically resonate with people because there is an element of truth in them. If your customers are joking about your product’s shortcomings, don’t laugh. You need to fix the problem.

When you do something poorly, it makes it easier for competition to come in and amaze the customer. Those that provide a better experience can easily come in and steal away your customers from under your nose.

Don’t let this happen to you. You need to differentiate your offerings to customers so that they notice the positive differences between you and the competition.

You want to stand out from the crowd because of your attention to detail.

Look for things you can improve. Eliminate those nagging annoyances your customers face everyday and they will notice.

Businesses that conduct most of their transactions in the field are the ones most likely to benefit from mobile payments. Companies such as landscapers and plumbers can use mobile processing to take customer payments when service is rendered as opposed to waiting for their customers to respond to mailed invoices.

Customer’s Perception

Another advantage to accepting payments by phone is the impact it has on the customer’s view of your business. Customers today are more likely to deal with a business that is ahead of the curve when it comes to technology. Not only is it more convenient to do business with a company like that but it is more likely that business will survive in the future if it is able to adapt to changing technology.

A business that accepts credit cards also comes off as more trustworthy to new customers than a business that insists its clients only pay in cash. This is mainly due to the fact that purchasing with credit allows a customer to dispute the charge if a problem arises.

Larger Purchases

Small companies that conduct business at events like craft fairs and farmer’s markets can really benefit from mobile payments. Research has shown that customers tend to spend more at a retailer when they are able to use a credit card. This makes it possible for a business to increase their sales without paying extra for marketing.

Many companies have found that they are able to sell larger and more expensive merchandise than what they were able to sell before accepting credit cards. Since many people do not like to carry a lot of cash in public places, businesses that operated in these areas were often stuck with small transactions. Once a business can accept credit cards, however, customers feel more comfortable spending a larger amount of money.

Branding

A final way that accepting mobile phone transactions can help your business deals with the marketing of your brand’s image. Many apps that businesses use to set up their payments, also include options where a business can advertise special sales and items via mobile phones to its customers. It provides just another way for a business to reach it’s customers and ensure that connection is maintained.

Accepting credit cards is a great way for a business to distinguish themselves, and the ability to process customer payments quickly and securely will ensure that customers have an enjoyable experience dealing with the business. This experience becomes a powerful marketing tool for any business as it will keep the customer coming back and will make them likely to refer the business to other customers. This will keep a business thriving well into the future.

About the Author
Jacob Thompson is a writer for Merchant Seek, a Savannah, Ga. based company that offers payment processing advice to small businesses.

At the end of the day, customers want two things from you:

1. Customers want to be satisfied with your products and/or services.
2. Customers want to feel appreciated.

So, fulfilling your customers’ needs seems pretty simple, right? All you have to do is give them what they pay for, and develop a basic, friendly relationship with them. Unfortunately, you can’t always deliver what they want due to poor inventory management or order management on your part. Or customers may simply end up not being satisfied with what they paid for. Additionally, you won’t always have the time or resources to develop a relationship with each of your customers. Still, you obviously have to meet customer needs often enough to keep your company’s reputation in tact. Here are some tips to help you give customers what they want and to help you keep them coming back:

1. Develop new products and services with the help of customer feedback about older products and services. Select a few customers every month, and call or email them to ask about how they feel about their purchase from you. Read online reviews of your company on sites like Yelp. Take all constructive criticism to heart and adjust your new products and services based on all the customer feedback you can get.

2. Pay attention and listen. Sometimes customers won’t be able to verbalize exactly what they want from your company. However, they will be able to verbalize what kind of day they’re having and what they want in general from you. If you are able to glean that a customer is going through a hard time financially, you may not want to try to sell them your most expensive product or service. Stick with selling them what you know they’ll need, and they’ll be more likely be pleased with your company.

3. Communicate with your customers if you can’t deliver what’s expected. Mistakes happen, and some orders may need to be delivered late. Make sure you let customers know about the status of their orders if things go awry. Apologize, and take full responsibility. Making excuses for your company is a surefire way to upset a customer.

About the Author
Carolyn K writes about small business practices, inventory management, and startups for the Blog Content Guild.

As a business, what are you going to do to make the customer experience even better for those who come to your company looking to buy?

The first step to a positive experience for both you and your customers is successfully branding your product.

Do You Gamble or Play it Close to the Vest?

While many companies scaled back their marketing efforts when dollars got tight this year, others saw an opportunity to take advantage of the tough times and gain an edge on the competition.

When it comes to branding, it is more important than ever to make your product stand out. Differentiating your product from the competition is important in order to catch the eye of the consumer and lead them first to your business.

Secondly, keep in mind that even though the economy appears to be rebounding to a degree as we enter the New Year (small dip in unemployment, fewer jobless claims), many individuals are still only spending where necessary. With that being the case, what value can you provide the consumer?

When consumers are worried about their financial security as many have been in the last few years, they are in need of reassurance. Consumers are not likely to make binge purchases; many want the sense of making sensible purchases, control, security and simplicity, leading them to be more frugal when it comes to their buying habits.

Social Media and Customers

Businesses would also be wise to employ a social media presence if they have not already done so.

Social media, be it Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or another program, is a great way to engage the customer and find out what they like and what they don’t. You may or may not want to employ someone in your company on a full-time basis to oversee this area, but at the least it should be attended to on a part-time basis.

More and more companies are using the social media platforms to find out what their customers like and dislike about their products, answer customer questions, and provide informative details on their products.

Customer Experience

Customers have a lot of options with which to choose from, so how are you going to set yourself apart from your rivals?

The key here is making the customer experience worthwhile enough where they want to keep coming back time and time again. Among the things to ask and be able to answer are:

• Do your employees put your customers first or are they an after-thought?
• Do your employees who work the phones treat the customers like they’d want to be treated, or are they short and rude with them?
• Do your employees provide the necessary answer/s when a customer has a question about a product?
• Finally, what are you doing to reward your customers for their loyalty to your business?

A customer will continue to come back over and over again if they like the service and feel the prices are reasonable.

It is important as a business owner to treat returning customers properly and reward them for their continued patronage, be it through special rewards programs like discounts and the like. There is a reason this particular customer came back to you for purchases, so never forget that.

CRM is not brain surgery, so don’t make it harder than it has to be.

About the Author
Dave Thomas, who covers among other items starting a small business and business proposals, writes extensively for Business.com, an online resource destination for businesses of all sizes to research, find, and compare the products and services they need to run their businesses.

Whether you are branding yourself or your company online, it is important to make sure that your reputation is being well managed. Your prospective customers turn to Google to learn more about you and your business. Regardless of the facts or if the links on the first page of Google are accurate for those researching your brand, it is important to thoroughly manage your online reputation.

How do you know what people are saying about you? Look no further than Google. Search for your company or product name. What results do you see? Is the first page of listings favorable? Are your web properties showing up? It is imperative that you create a schedule to monitor the results from your Google search so you can react accordingly to any negative content online about you or your company.

You’ll never show up in searches for your company unless you produce that content and those sites in the first place. A helpful recommendation would be to get to work on building out your website with quality content that is helpful to your customers.

While your website should be your hub of activity, you can also produce content on other sites. The easiest to get going are often social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. When you establish a page on Facebook, for example, those are likely to show up in search results when people search for your company.

What happens when you search for “[your company] sucks” or “[your company] reviews”? Yes, people are talking about you! These are great opportunities to respond to customers in a public forum. Reach out and help them. Fix the problem and make the customers’ day.

Sometimes you may suffer a significant setback from negative publicity. This can overshadow all the positive news about you or your company on the web with just a single negative story. There is a growing industry of companies dedicated to helping you improve your online reputation. Sites like Reputation.com or Integrity Defenders will help you erase your negative reputation by promoting the good news and items about you or your company.

Even if you don’t have any blemishes in your online history, you shouldn’t ignore your online reputation. You need to be proactively establishing your good brand in many venues across the web. This, of course, includes your own site, social media properties, forums, and review sites.

One of the best ways for retailers to avoid this is to combine loyalty programs with Groupon and LivingSocial vouchers. Developing a great program, however, takes a systematic dedication from retailers and a deeper program than 10-punches-gets-you-a-free-sandwich. It takes creating a program that drives loyalty, developing a strong program membership and collecting spending behavior to analyze and improve the customer experience.

Create Programs that Drive Loyal Behavior

These programs need to be easy for new members to join, but provide a feeling that the program is exclusive and has benefits that everyday customers cannot receive. For this reason, many discounts should be for members only. One large, national pharmaceutical store comes to mind that constantly breaks this rule – I can’t tell you the number of times I have reiterated that I am not a loyalty member, yet been scanned as such by an apathetic checker.

Additionally, if a program provides rewards and incentives, make those goals worthwhile. For example, a great way to implore customers to earn rewards is to have the price be a discount for future shopping. This encourages customers to continually spend – not just shop until they hit their perceived reward ceiling.

Build a Strong Customer Membership Group

Oftentimes, great programs sell themselves. An example is Amazon’s Prime program. Ingeniously, the program provides reduced and expedited shipping rates for its products, encouraging shoppers to spend impulsively – and frequently. They offer it free for a year to students, and then for a discount after the first year.

But other programs require a bigger effort from retailers to get the program snowballing. Because loyal customers are some of a business’ strongest brand ambassadors, “bring a friend” promotions are great at getting new members to join your program – and become new loyal shoppers.

Collect, Analyze, and Act Upon Loyalty Member Spending

Finally, one of the greatest benefits to running a loyalty program is being able to closely analyze spending behavior. Looking at this data provides a number of new ways to make effective promotional and sales decisions.

For example, retailers can look at what some of the most popular items are, and allow loyalty members a discount on these items or the first chance to purchase them. This further increases the allure of a loyalty program. Alternatively, retailers can find which items are some of the slowest moving among all inventory, and offer these items at a discount to push them out.

About the Author
Michael Koploy is an ERP Analyst at Software Advice, a point of sale software review website. Michael also helps manage the company blog, where he commonly writes about retail, supply chain and general ERP software. He can be reached at michael@softwareadvice.com or 512-364-0129.

Reward Loyalty

One of the most powerful and effective ways that companies can use to let customers know their loyalty and continued patronage is valued is by rewarding that ongoing business relationship. This applies whether it’s a business to business (B2B) relationship or one that is business to consumer (B2C).

Traditional ways in which companies reward such loyalty include end of year gifts, redeeming points for purchases and offering discounts on future purchases.

New vs. Loyal Customers

Increasingly, however, there are those companies that fail to reward customer loyalty and choose instead to focus on getting even more sales from existing customers. Examples of what not to do can be found among some Internet providers and telephone companies. The common mistake made by some of these service providers is requesting – nay, demanding – that existing customers sign up to a new contract for at least a year at the same price as the existing contract. New subscribers to the service are offered more attractive rates for the first year. Loyal customers, therefore, are made to pay indirectly for discounts offered to new customers.

What can be done instead to avoid this mistake? How can service businesses communicate that they are rewarding loyalty and not just cashing in on sales or upselling? One way of doing this is to offer customers discounts on their existing service. For example, offer the customer one month free for a one-year service contract or a free session after every four to six sessions.

In many countries, the beauty industry is well known for this approach. For example, after every four appointments, my hair dresser offers clients a voucher that covers 50 percent of the cost of the next appointment. This encourages return business next time around knowing that it will cost less than usual. The salon also rewards customers for successful referrals (introducing a relative or friend to the salon who then becomes a customer).

Introductory Prices

Another way of avoiding the potentially costly mistake of selling instead of rewarding loyal customers is through offering introductory prices on additional products or services the customer does not use at present.

When businesses keep track of services that customers do not purchase, communicating with customers will allow sellers to understand the needs of customers for another product or service, rather than forcing a sale on loyal customers.

Building Loyalty

Rewarding customer loyalty is unconditional. Loyalty is based on past actions and rewards should be offered without any conditions. Providing incentives to loyal customers is an effective way of encouraging them to use your services or buy your products in the future.

By recognizing and rewarding loyal customers, businesses can be on their way to ensuring not only high levels of customer satisfaction but even greater levels of customer retention and referrals.

About the Author
V Broomes is author of: 52 Tips for Communicating with Customers and can be found at Executive Solutions Training Ltd.

Your Stand’s Location

As with property, the most important part of your trade show stand is location; choosing the right floor space at the venue can make all the difference. If you have the opportunity it is always a good idea to attend the venue for a show prior to your own, this will give you the chance to scout any potential “dead” areas that are less likely to get passing visitors. During larger shows visitors will completely miss some booths so you must consider your placement very seriously.

Promote Your Attendance

Spread word that you will be exhibiting to as wider and relevant audience as possible; if visitors know of your attendance in the run up to the event they will be much more likely to actively seek you out. Perhaps you could even customize a variety of promotional products from Quality Logo Products to help with your promtion endeavor. In the last few years with the growth of online social media sites such as Twitter times have really changed, a business used to be limited to simply sending out letters and emails; now with a single tweet you have the ability to reach potentially thousands of people.

Attracting Visitors

The key to attracting visitors is creating an impressive and inviting exhibit space; choosing the right exhibition stands and graphics will go a long way towards this and should be one of your main priorities when planning for an event. Exhibition stands are a fantastic marketing tool but far too often exhibitors succumb to basic human nature and simply go for the cheapest option; this will put you at a massive disadvantage against your competition as your displays will be an ambassador for your company, if your booth looks unprofessional, your company will look unprofessional.

Another great way of gathering interest is by putting on a product demonstration; this will highlight the total belief in your product and help gather a crowd. To maximize the benefit of capturing a large audience a staff member could be handing out promotional materials to interested spectators.

Any promotional materials you give out should have clear contact information on including your phone number, website, email and social media accounts; you want to make it as easy as possible for people to get in touch with you after the show.

Event Staff

Your staff and how they interact with visitors can make a massive difference is how successful an exhibition will be for your business; they need to be both friendly and approachable. Before the event it is prudent to put your staff through a rigorous training crash course to buff up on their knowledge of your business and its products, this way they will be fully prepared to answer any and all questions interested parties may have.

How your staff is dressed may seem like a minor issue, but at very least it’s a good idea to organize company branded t-shirts for them to wear making it easier for visitors to know who to direct question too.

After The Show

When the doors finally close at the end of the day it’s a good time to reflect, review your performance and consider anything you may want to improve on for the future. The main points to consider are

• Was your budget correct?
• Did you attract enough interest?
• What was your visitors’ reaction to your booth?
• Did you interact with interested parties in the right manner?
• Did you gather enough leads?
• Was your business and product shown off in the most professional and stylish manner possible?

About the Author
Murphy Lapland has over two decades of experience in the events industry supplying exhibitors with displays such as exhibition stands and modular systems.

I’ve been attending trade shows off and on for a number of years; and I can tell you that an attention-grabbing presentation is essential. How this presentation manifests is largely up to you. You can choose to invest in banner display stands, advanced audio equipment, even an exceptionally well-designed booth with multiple rooms. Whatever you do, make sure that you look like you are at the top of your game. Don’t shirk on investing in high quality products.

Even though you’re going to be doing a tremendous amount of talking and hand shaking, the vast majority of what people will remember has to do with your overall presentation. If you had a stain on your tie or a drooping canopy on your stand, people are more likely to classify you as an amateur than a professional. Similarly, if you hand out shoddy materials with typos, poorly printed graphics, or other mediocre craftsmanship, you’ll be remembered unkindly. Presentation is one of the easiest areas to prepare, and one of the most important. Always have a set of business cards handy, and make sure they represent you accurately! Business cards with crossed out numbers or other hand written information look tacky. People expect you to be professional; any materials that you hand them should be produced at the highest possible level.

Before you attend a trade show, you need to do your research. As an exhibitor, people expect you to be fluent in your own product line. If you appear hesitant, uncertain, or wilfully unprepared, no one will bother to purchase your product. You are acting as the representative of the company. A bad attitude or an unprofessional look will act against not just you, but the company as a whole. If you are feeling overwhelmed about the amount of information you have to know, the best thing to do is develop a natural-sounding yet brief talk that summarizes the main points of your product. In the past, I’ve prepared note cards with talking points written on them and rehearsed them until I had developed and memorized a fluid, natural-sounding speech. If anyone asked me something I didn’t know, I would simply say, “Let me research that and get back to you.” This allowed me not only to keep from panicking, but also helped me to make connections with people and exchange contact information.

People who have not been to a trade show before are always astonished by the energy and intensity of the crowd. The sheer numbers of people who attend and correspondingly want a minute of your time can be overwhelming. Although this may sound impossible, it’s important to prepare yourself to be overwhelmed. Even veterans of the trade show circuit must mentally prepare themselves for the onslaught. Whether you’re a pro or a first-timer, make sure you build in some breaks to your day to give yourself some mental relief. Try to choose off-peak times. Taking a lunch break at the conventional lunch hour is not advised because you’ll miss out on a lot of potential business from other exhibitors who may be wandering the event on their breaks. Take an early or late lunch, but be sure to give yourself at least one 30-minute window in the middle of the day. Otherwise, you will be completely exhausted and hoarse.

Having some clear marketing materials, like banner display stands that explain who you are and what your company does, can reduce some of the overwhelming volume and help you attract people you genuinely want to talk to. Although most trade show attendees try to visit stands that are related to their business, in the crush of the event it can be difficult to find stands if they are not clearly marked.

In some cases, the most effective marketing principle is simply to make yourself easily visible. Whether you choose to add lights to your stand, a booming musical interlude, or an exceptionally vivid graphic display, people will be drawn to you. Whatever you do, try to remember to enjoy yourself. People enjoy talking to other seemingly upbeat people, and frequently want to buy what they are selling.

About the Author – An online business writer who works on behalf of Marler Haley, Thomas O’Rourke has extensive experience in writing about the promotional aspects of exhibitions – including banner display stands, business cards and more. Please comment or get in touch if you’d like to find out more.