Even if you sell chocolate-covered gourmet pickles, books about being bored or diamond tiaras for cats online, you do have competition. They may not be visible and they may not have gotten their operation off the ground yet but you still need to treat all of your customers like they are your last customers.
Saying Thank You
If you have PayPal or other e-merchant to process your payments, leave a note on the e-receipt thanking them for their purchase, even it’s a digital and not physical item. When sending a physical item, it adds a personal touch to sign the invoice/receipt with a short thank you note.
Giving Away Freebies
Hopefully, you have enough promotional materials to spare for networking events and other occasions where the opportunity may lie to generate business. Many people this may stop at business cards but with the use of any office suite or publishing application you can easily create the following –
• Bookmarks
• Calendars
• Magnets (or better, business card magnets which can be found at most office supply stores)
• Newsletter
Or, if you’re not confident about your skills in this area, do a mock-up of what you want to reflect your business and give to a local printer to duplicate. Both way, these promotional materials cost little and you can have the finished product in your hands in a matter of hours or a couple of days. This way, if you hear about an event on Monday that is taking place on Thursday, you will be prepared.
Rewarding the Loyal Customers
Even if you work with an e-merchant like eBay or Etsy to sell your wares, they both have marketing tools that will let you create coupons. While you may have one coupon for half-off a future purchase, you can create one that gives a better reward to those who buy consistently. Or just give away an item to the persons that have brought you the best sales.
This method, however, should be done with caution. While everyone loves the convenience of digital documents, physical items can be a challenge. For one, you don’t want to spend profits or a lot of time in packing and shipping, which can get expensive for fragile or heavy items. By gauging items that can handle being shipped via the U.S. Post Office by media, parcel or the least expensive method, you can save yourself some headache.
Using Buying Habits to Your Advantage
If you are not doing a simple research of your customers’ buying habits, now is the time to start. Many brands love SurveyMonkey for creating and submitting questionnaires to customers, you can create a data sheet that records what items your customers buy the most often. Not only will this help in choosing a free gift they can use but it will help in creating an effective online marketing campaign.
While many online business uncomfortable inundating their customers with excessive communication, you want to make sure that 1) It’s something they can use; and 2)That your communication does not contain verbiage and gets to the point.
April 27, 2012
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