When a business is growing, there are plenty of areas that require a lot of attention to keep them organized – and, most importantly, ready to expand at short notice. However, there are some areas that will need more attention than others. These are areas such as shipping, which can greatly affect what your customer thinks of your business, as your choice of freight trucker will affect how your package will look when it is handed over to your customer.
There are also areas such as customer loyalty, as you will need to make sure that you keep your customers satisfied and coming back for more. Just because you are increasing the number of customers that you have, does not mean to say that you do not want the older ones coming back as well.
You will also need to focus on your business’s website and social media accounts. This is incredibly important if you are hoping to expand your market internationally and make sure that you keep your customers satisfied all over the world, as well as selling to new customers and making your website and social media visible online.
The list might seem quite long, so you need to look at each one, in turn, to see what can be improved and how.
Shipping
Shipping is a massively important area that every business which wants to broaden its market must invest in to a substantial degree. The whole point of selling a product is to meet all of the customers’ requirements and come back for more, so the delivery of that product is just as important as every other part of the buying/selling process if not the most important if your business is entirely online.
However, getting the freight trucking part of the plan right can be a little intimidating. You will need people who know what they are doing, highly professional service, and do things efficiently with a minimum of fuss. By using services such as Truckstop.com, you can find the correct brokers, carriers, and shippers to help your product get to your customer on time and undamaged. As mentioned before, the delivery process is just as important as the rest of the interaction. If the package is even a little later than its ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival), it will give the customer the wrong idea about your business, even if it is completely out of your hands.
Therefore, you need to do whatever you make sure that the delivery is on time. You also need to know that your package will be handled with the utmost care, as a damaged product can also look bad to customers, even if it left the warehouse in excellent condition. This can be a pain to sort out with a refund, especially if the same thing happens again and you have to keep giving refunds. This is a depressing cycle to get into for many business owners, which is why when your customer market grows, you need to make sure that your chosen distribution network can keep up.
Keeping customer loyalty
Getting the right shipping company to take care of your deliveries is important to keeping customer loyalty, too. But there are other factors when it comes to keeping your customers happy that many business owners do not tend to think about. For example, company swag can be an excellent way to getting your business in a customer’s good books. Not only will they get the emotional reward for ‘unboxing’ something that they ordered, but they will also get an added extra freebie.
This works especially well if you are thinking about giving swag that ties in with the customer’s needs. For example, if you own a sports business, you might put in your package some free hair scrunchies or a water bottle with your company logo on it. This not only helps your customer enjoy opening your product more as they got an added extra, but you will also get free publicity whenever they use it out in public. This can be amazingly important to help your business, and if the person who you sold to returns, you can give them another bit of swag to keep them coming back for more, as they will know they get something a little extra each time they shop with you, meaning that they are more likely to purchase your brand over others.
Your business’s website and social media presence
When it comes to organizing your business’s website and its social media presence, you need to make sure that you get it right too. You want to make sure that both your website and your social media accounts are easily accessible and clearly state what your business does to people of all backgrounds. There is no point in trying to sound hugely pretentious if many people do not understand what you are talking about, whether that be through the language that you use or through the information that you provide on your front page.
Do not dump all of the available information on your readers in one go; feed it to them in bite-size chunks with easy-to-remember statistics and plain, jargon-free language. Then, once your audience knows what you do in simple terms, you can crank up the amount of text you have on the page.
By being accessible to your prospective customers, you will not get any of the problems you might get if they had to go from page to page to find the information they need. This is also important for your various social media profiles because if you try to swamp that with masses of information, you are going to give a mixed message to hundreds of thousands of potential followers. Remember that with social media, it isn’t just your business that people will follow for, but also the content of your site and how you decide to display that, so they both need to be congruent and provide value with every single post.
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