Customer Loyalty: The Backbone of Any Successful Business

The truth about making money from home

Anyone that has ever owned a business can attest that customer loyalty is the back bone of it. There are many other benefits that are essential to a thriving business that can emerge from high customer loyalty. The question becomes how do you increase customer loyalty? Customer loyalty isn't built out of one practice, but rather a multitude of them that can help increase it. A book that includes details on many of the facets of customer loyalty and how to employ them has been released by the Harvard Business Review.

Harvard Business Review on Increasing Customer Loyalty.

Making sure your customers are coming back and bringing new customers with them is the main ideas behind customer loyalty. The idea itself is rather easy to understand but executing it is another story. To start on the path towards this kind of success make sure that your employees enjoy their jobs. Spreading their happiness to your customer will be much easier if your employees are happy at work. This will result in all of your customers feeling that your business is a great place to buy from.

Making sure that any negative situation that a customer initiates is turned positive is the next important step. Your happy employees will need to be trained in this skill, but should be willing to learn. Deepening a relationship is something that can be done easily when a customer brings a problem to you. Start with the idea of never saying no to a customer, make sure that they know you are making an exception just for them, and then exceed their expectations for a solution. Not only will this type of interaction will result in loyal customers, but also customers who refer.

Extensive research has been done by the Harvard Business Review and they have discovered certain steps that business owners can use to improve loyalty of their customers. The book goes into much more detail on the subject, much further than the ideas briefly listed above. Many of their suggestions are based on customer service, but customer loyalty is rooted in other arenas as well. All the topics concerning customer loyalty are reviewed to help you build a well rounded plan.

Running Promotions That Work

The truth about making money from home

When you are running a business, one of the most important things involved will be that you figure out ways to get customers into your store; of course, there are many ways by which you can go about doing this, but one of the best things you can do in order to get customers into your stores is to run promotions - and of course, if you are running promotions, you will need to make sure you know how to run promotions that actually work.

One mistake many companies make when running promotions is that they give customers things that they will not actually want - that is, giving them “throwaway items” - but you must realize that you will need to make sure you are giving your customers something they will actually want if you want to get them into your store with your promotion; think of yourself when you are running a promotion, and make sure you are only giving away something that you yourself would actually want to receive from a store!

Another thing you should realize is that the things you give away in a promotion do not necessarily have to be from you or your store; one of the best ways to make a promotion work is to give away a large gift card to a website lots of people use, such as Amazon or iTunes, as this will give everyone a product they are familiar with, and will in turn give them the drive they need to take part in the promotion.

And one of the big things when you are running a promotion for your business will be paying attention to what is working and what is not working; as the promotion moves along, be willing to always tweak your approach - enhancing the things that are working well, and getting rid of the aspects of the promotion that are not working at all.

The more often you run promotions with your business, the better you will become at knowing how to run promotions that work - but as you get started with these tips in mind, you will be well on your way to having a successful promotion!

How To Convert Your Website Visitors Into Customers

The truth about making money from home

When people start working on a website of their own, a lot of them focus on the things they will need to do in order to get people to come their way, but while this is certainly an important component of running a website, all the work you have done to get people to come to your site will be for nothing if you fail to convert these visitors into customers.

One of the best ways for you to convert casual visitors into serious customers is to get them to become part of your social media circle; when you get people to add you on facebook, or to start following you on Twitter, you will be a whole lot closer to getting them to take that next step of purchasing products or services from you!

Cultivating a "members" section of your site, through which members will be able to receive special discounts and deals is another valuable thing you can do in aiming to create loyal customers; when you simply take the time and effort to craft an appealing members pitch, and to feature this aspect of your business prominently on your site, you will find that you are building a lot more loyal followers for your business.

And quite frankly, "relationships" are one of the main things that will make a customer choose one company over another, and even though you will not be able to use your online presence to create face-to-face connections like you could with a physical location, you can use your online presence to interact directly with those who visit your site, and in this way, you will create a lot of relationships, and will find that a lot of your visitors are becoming customers.

As you build your website, make sure you are keeping in mind how absolutely important it is that you convert visitors into customers - and pay attention to these ideas, as well as any other creative ideas you can come up with for converting visitors, so that you can further build your customer base!