The review site Yelp.com is a great example of how your customers are giving feedback.

Are you listening?

The potential for good and bad is huge with a site like Yelp. A collection of negative reviews can scare away any potential customer that is looking for your local business.

Conversely, a Yelp listing with customers raving about your awesome service is a golden marketing and customer acquisition opportunity.

During my business travels, I’ve used Yelp to locate airport shuttles, restaurants, and shopping in cities across the country.

Being unfamiliar with several of the cities I visited, I trusted in the collective wisdom of positive reviewers and have not been disappointed. I also changed plans when I saw a massive amount of negative feedback.

If you run a local business, your customers are similarly checking you out on Yelp.

Do you know what they are saying?

Have you responded to comments, both good and bad? Not to rationalize your behavior, but to validate the customer’s feelings and apologize or thank them for their comments?

Is Yelp helping or killing your business?

If it is helping, odds are you’ve heard customers say they found you on Yelp.

If Yelp is killing your business, you may be none-the-wiser if you haven’t reviewed the site yourself. When customers get scared away, they rarely tell you that they even considered your business. They just walk away in silence.

Monitor your reputation and customer feedback on Yelp. It will serve your business well.

Unbeknownst to you, this is a classic research experiment by researchers at Columbia and Stanford (read original research here (PDF)) to determine how the number and complexity of choices we give to customers affects their purchasing behavior.

At a grocery store they set up a free sample table.

On the table they had a display of 24 jars of jam. They tracked how many people visited the table. They gave those folks a coupon for a discount off the purchase of the jam. Then they tracked how many people went on to purchase the jam.

They then repeated the experiment with a table of 6 jars of jam. Again tracking the numbers of people at each stage.

Which table do you think attracted the most visitors? It was the table with twenty four jars of jam.

That begs the question, which table lead to the most sales?

The table with six jars of jam.

In fact, the people that visited table with six jars of jam were ten times more likely to purchase than those that visited the table with twenty four jars of jam, even though both had been equally encouraged to make the purchase through a discount incentive.

The people that visited the table with twenty four jars of jam were just so overwhelmed with the number of choices that they simply walked away without making a purchase decision.

Likewise, your customers are overwhelmed by the amount of choices you are giving to them. How many of your customers are simply giving up and walking away?

Try experimenting with the number of options you give to customers at any one time. Reduce the number of choices and you’ll help more people arrive at the point of sale.

In the past, I’ve noticed that all the outward paintings on airplanes are so that people outside the plane can tell who is flying.

Southwest Airlines has colorful planes painted like the flags of their destinations or even a large Shamu killer whale plane.

Frontier Airlines has wildlife pictures on their planes’ tail fins.

Each of these decorations serve as visual reminders to those that see the planes.

However, on a recent American Airlines flight to Boston, I opened my shade to glance out the window. On the wing tip was a prominently lettered display: “AA.com” that was facing the passenger cabin.

The letters were too small and facing the wrong direction for those on the ground to see them.

These letters were put on the wing tip specifically for the passengers to see. They offered a subtle reminder of where you can go to buy your next tickets.

It seems that advertising is permeating and omnipresent. However, this ad was relevant and unavoidable. Clever and subtle.

Shipping Rates of Large Retailers

Large retail companies are always seeking to gain a competitive advantage over one another. Since products can be discounted by only a certain amount before the retailer loses profits, this edge often comes in the form of shipping costs to the buyer. This holiday season, Walmart offered free holiday shipping for people who bought from its website before Dec. 19, while Amazon.com maintained its free shipping on purchases over $25 but still promised holiday delivery at no extra cost. Many companies also offer free or reduced shipping if customers order online but pick up the items in a store.

Free Shipping

Customers tend to see free shipping as a better deal than an equal or greater savings offer on the item being purchased. As a result many customers will purchase more when there is a temporary discount such as free shipping, since they see it as a bargain even though they may be spending more money overall. Customers may behave like this because it is more like shopping at a physical store where there is no “fee” for shopping.

Flat Rate Shipping

One common retailer trick for shipping is to offer a flat rate for all shipping orders, regardless of size, amount, or weight. While this sounds like a wonderful offer to someone making a large purchase, it may actually end up being more expensive for someone purchasing a smaller item. Most consumers will not do the actual math on their own, but when the item being purchased costs less than the shipping they may seek other retailers with cheaper shipping or wait for a free shipping promotion.

Customer Reception to Shipping Rates

Many customers do not want to pay for shipping and seek to pay as little as possible in shipping costs, but they may not be aware of the real price of shipping. Shipping costs have started to change the way businesses operate and even where they operate. Shipping costs of parts and materials for assembly are often passed on to the customer as part of the item price, and when shipping costs from around the country or world rise, so do product costs. Customers tend to respond positively to companies and sales that offer discounted or cheap shipping, because they see it as customer service instead of being charged for shopping from online retailers.

Customers do not like paying for shipping fees on top of paying for the actual product. They will likely spend more on products than they would on shipping if they believe the shipping is free. Taking customer attitudes into account when figuring the cost of shipping can go a long way toward helping a business succeed and thrive in a difficult economy.

About the Author
Elaine Hirsch is kind of a jack-of-all-interests, from education and history to medicine and videogames. This makes it difficult to choose just one life path, so she is currently working as a writer for various education-related sites and writing about all these things instead.

What is customer-centric selling?

Simply put, customer-centric selling is selling with the customer in mind. Here are some tips to do this effectively:

What Customers Want

Your customers don’t care about what you want. They don’t care about your revenue goals, profit margins, or inventory problems. Customers care about their problems and what they want.

Always position your product or offering in terms of what the customer wants and how your product solves their problem.

The more you can use “you” and “your” instead of “our” and “we”, the better off you’ll be in your communications with customers.

What Customers Need

Help customers uncover their needs through probing questions. When you can draw out what the customer actually needs instead of just a stated want, you can better serve them and tailor your selling and offering accordingly.

Customer’s Language

Customers don’t speak your language. Your company-centric jargon and industry-speak is confusing to them.

Frame your selling in terms of what problems you are solving for the customer. Customer-centric selling avoids generic and useless language like “easy to use,” “simple,” “fast,” etc. These phrases mean nothing to customers.

This will require that you forget the acronyms and industry language you use everyday.

Customer’s Fears

Deep down inside, your customers have some fears. They are afraid of something. Your product may very well help alleviate those fears. Customer-centric selling means that you speak to those underlining concerns and fears and how your product makes those fears disappear.

Practice customer-centric selling and you’ll notice the difference. Your customers will be more willing to listen to you, buy from you, and refer their friends to your business.

This tendancy to follow others relies on the powerful psychological trick of social proof.

Social proof becomes extremely powerful when it is personally very close to us.

Think about how you take recommendations. An anonymous review on a website has a certain influence on your purchase decision.

Contrast that with a recommendation from a coworker or neighbor. Or a recommendation from a trusted friend, partner, or spouse.

Each recommendation has more influence and power the closer it is to you personally.

Personally Localized Social Proof

When social proof is centered around you, or localized to you, it is extremely influencial in your decisions.

Imagine that you are an engineer browsing the Acme Company website. You start to see references to your company. You are intrigued and click on a link with your company name. From there you see a testimonial of someone at your company telling you how great Acme Company is and that they already use Acme’s products successfully.

Immediately, you start to trust Acme Company because someone you trust already trusts them. This is the power of social proof on steroids.

Localized social proof hits so close to home that customers can’t help but notice.

Geographically Localized Social Proof

The same principle applies with geographically-based social proof.

If you think Acme Company is a huge global company but start to see references to your hometown, you may give them a try because you think they are local.

The New York Times had a geographically-based social proof ad at the bottom of one of their articles I read recently:

Notice how they used my state (Texas) to catch my eye and try to influence me.

When you use localized social proof, customers start to trust you because someone they trust (at your company, in your industry, from your hometown) already trusts you. This borrowed trust is a great foundation upon which to build a relationship with a potential customer. It opens the doors for opportunities you didn’t previously have.

Consider how you can sprinkle some localized social proof into your marketing messaging. How can you leverage targeted, specific social proof messages to help grab your customer’s attention and gain credibility in their eyes?

These days, it is impossible to turn on the TV, open a magazine or check your e-mail without getting bombarded with advertisements. In an age of increasingly short attention spans, many businesses may feel that creating massive advertising campaigns is the only way to get their message heard.

However, the fact of the matter is that splashy ads often just overload many consumers, causing them to do anything in their power to block them out. Yet many large advertising agencies continue to charge extravagant fees to develop ads and subsequently flood the market with them. Clearly it doesn’t take having an online finance degree to see that while traditional methods advertising remain costly, they are becoming gradually less effective. Thus when it comes to advertising, more is not always better.

While blanketing the market in ads may seem like a good way to disseminate information to a lot of people, this approach usually ends up adversely affecting the profitability of the company. Many start-ups often make this mistake, thinking more advertising will create more sales, and ultimately result in the company becoming more profitable. However, this method is not as effective as many business owners believe: most advertising focuses on gaining a small part of consumer mind-share with an expensive advertising market strategy. For instance, an advertisement may take several hours or days to create, which can costs hundreds of dollars, only to be viewed in a matter of seconds and may reach only a limited segment of the population.

Luckily, small businesses can reduce advertising costs by using consumer centric marketing tactics. This type of advertising reaches customers one at a time at the point of sale and is promoted by word of mouth from satisfied customer to potential customer at nominal cost to the business owner. In fact, successful businesses have proven that four marketing tools (frequent shopper, customer loyalty, pre-sale, and referral marketing tactics) are extremely effective for building sales, decreasing advertising expenses and improving profitability.

Frequent Shopper

Frequent shopper or frequent customer programs reward consumers who make purchases at the same store on a regular basis. This strategy increases customer retention, which in turn increases per-customer profitability. When utilizing this approach, businesses reward loyal customers with either a discount on future purchases or free merchandise based on past expenditures. These rewards are distributed regularly to encourage consumers to return to the store frequently. This method is most effective for service-oriented businesses such as car washers, barbers and yard mowers who have invested in tools and goods to provide a service. With more customers, the return on the company’s investment is greater, ensuring the success of the business.

Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is a variant of the frequent shopper concept, which encourages shoppers to return to the same business. Business that use customer loyalty programs reward shoppers with an increasing amount of discounts as the number of their purchases increase, and then ultimately reward the buyer with a gift of a free item.

For example, one model businesses often use is to give buyers a five percent discount on purchases of two to five items, a 10 percent discount for purchasing six to nine items and then give the 10th item away for free. Not only does this approach please the consumer, but word of mouth passes the good news to future customers. This concept is most readily adaptable to video and game rental stores, restaurants and convenience stores.

Pre-sale Programs

Small businesses can also pass savings and benefits to customers by giving them a discount when they pay for goods or services in advance. Pre-sale items range from ten video rentals for the price of eight, four haircuts for the price of three and lifetime alignment service with purchase of tires.

Rewarding customers for paying for services in advance encourages buyers to continue to visit the store, which in turn benefits the business by developing a base of lifelong customers. This concept works well for auto parts dealers, mechanic services, video rentals, and hair stylists.

Referral Program

This program is geared to bring in new customers based on the referral of current customers. A personal referral is more effective than any high-priced, high-pressure advertising ever devised. The current customer is rewarded when a new customer informs the business that they received a referral from Mr./Ms. Current Customer. The business owner may even offer a free gift bearing the company logo to the current customer, while also supplying it to the new customer at nominal cost. The gift, which is often a coffee cup, magnetic calendar or chip clip bearing the business’s logo (location and contact information), will serve as a reminder and witness to others of the goodwill the business has built.

While advertising can be beneficial if it serves its purpose by reaching a large consumer base, businesses often spend more revenue on creating an ad campaign than the campaign actually generates, causing the company to get little return on their investment. However, if a business owner integrates customer-centric marketing strategies into their start-up business or struggling company, the bottom line will rapidly become more profitable. Thus, when it comes to developing a marketing plan, customer-centric marketing is clearly the right choice to make.

• I’m confused: why isn’t my website generating qualified leads for me?
• I’m so frustrated! We’ve spent all this money with an SEO firm and we’re not even on page three of search results!
• My boss has just asked me to formulate an outline to fix up our internet marketing strategy but I have no idea where to start finding solutions….I feel stuck!

When I sit down with them, there are a few common mistakes that the majority of the clients have made on their website. Here are the top five:

1. the home page doesn’t identify what problem the company solves
2. there is little or no urgency in the copy on the home page
3. there is no suggestion made within the content of what the reader must do next to solve the problem
4. there is no visible or obvious contact information
5. the copy is written in one font style, size and color throughout the copy, and the copy is written in essay-style

Are you thinking that you have some of the same problems or have made some of the same mistakes? That’s okay. There are so many misconceptions among entrepreneurs and small businesses about what constitutes good marketing. Good marketing format – no matter what the marketing method is – includes:

1. asking questions to find out if the reader has the problem you solve
2. giving reassurance that your prior and current clients face the same problem
3. explaining how you or your business have helped others facing similar problems
4. offering assistance in a non-threatening, low-risk way

About the Author
Alison Silbert is the CEO of Passionate Web Creations, author of the books “Winning Websites” and “Boost your Revenues by Turning People Away” and has assisted hundreds of clients to generate more qualified leads from their website- and online-marketing initiatives. For more information, contact Alison at alison@idealvisitor.com.

This promotion on an IKEA catalog highlights how this year’s prices are lower than last year.

By calling out how this year’s prices are lower than last year, IKEA alienates everyone that bought the item last year.

Granted, the number of people who bought this bookshelf last year are small compared to all the people that haven’t bought it yet. So IKEA sacrifices past customers for potential future customer aquisition.

This is a dangerous game that can easily offend current customers or even persuade customers to delay their purchase in hopes of a future price drop.

How can you make sure your current marketing campaign speaks to both new and existing customers?

Branding yourself as an expert is no easy feat.

You need to be secure in your abilities to deliver what you promise, create an interface for prospective clients to take advantage of your services, and offer some proof that you are what you say you are. However, if you can manage to do all of this, it will prove invaluable not only for your potential to bring in business, but to ensure that your clientele comes back again and again.

There are many things to consider when setting out to brand yourself as an expert. If you are, in fact, an expert (you hold the proper credentials in your field or have relevant work experience) you are in a better position to start. If, however, you cannot rightfully claim the title, you may have a harder time.

You really don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot and risk losing long-term clients by making claims you can’t possibly uphold, so perhaps it’s better to label yourself an enthusiast or entrepreneur until you can justify a more prestigious moniker. That said, if you feel that you excel in your field and can contend with your competitors at the highest level, you will need a ringing endorsement to convince the community at large that you are what you say you are.

From there, you have to bring in some business. Here’s where you can get into some trouble. Most people feel that a flashy website and a lot of traffic equals dollar signs. Not so.

First of all, you need to tailor your website to your clients. That means figuring out who they are (because in case you didn’t know, not every housewife with a laptop is in need of your services). If you’re selling life insurance, for example, you don’t want a website that features testimonials from Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, which will not appeal to the middle-aged demographic you’re shooting for. So make an effort to know your customers (they will appreciate it and it will reflect on your sales).

In addition, you need to target your marketing efforts. Would you rather host a thousand random visitors or ten that are specifically seeking your service?

You can’t effectively deal with your real customers if you spend all day fending off inquiries from parties that aren’t really interested. To that end, there are many ways to ensure that when a prospective customer comes looking for you, you can be found.

Continued education is a great way to stay abreast of the latest trends in internet marketing and use them to reach out to future clients.

However, the most important aspect of branding yourself as an expert is follow-through.

Potential customers want assurance that the product or service they’re paying for is real. Branding yourself as an expert is no good at all if you can’t deliver the goods. And if your service is specialized (as is necessary when starting out), you’re going to need repeat business to stay afloat. So do not disappoint your clients! It’s going to be hard enough bringing business in without alienating those who do use your service.

Remember that word of mouth can make you or break you more surely than any technical SNAFU. So make the needs of your customers your first priority, provide excellent service, and do whatever you have to in order to ensure repeat business. This, more than anything, will take your brand to the next level.

Thomas Warren is a content writer for GoCollege, one of the oldest and most trusted resources to guide students on how to finance and succeed in college.