It’s time once again to pull out your list of spring cleaning items for your business online marketing strategy.
By Megan Totka
Why bother, you may ask? The reason is that sometimes you just have to shake the dust out and take a second look at your schedule and what you do each day – most likely tasks have evolved into habits. Once you reexamine the different areas of your business, you may find that some need improvement. Take a look at these seven areas where you can do some spring cleaning that may lead to some big changes in your business.
E-commerce
Change up email acquisition. Did you spend the last several months working to grow your subscriber base? If so, try to extend some customer loyalty, but make sure you follow email marketing best practices for small businesses. If you focus on deals and sales, maybe you need to add those to your social scene. These tactics may hold your customers interest instead of inadvertently forcing them to start giving automatic responses to your marketing campaigns that might be putting them to sleep.
Evaluate cross-selling and ad-on tactics. Recommend additional products when your customer is ready to check out. Think alone the lines of products that are linked to or complement what they are buying. This is an extremely important part of sales – a Forrester Research analyst found that product recommendations are responsible for around 10-30% of ecommerce site revenues.
Test your links. It’s time to check your links on your main site, your emails, newsletters, and all marketing collateral. Shifts in URLs can take people to page-not-found messages. It is crucial to double check all of your links – you want to find the errors before your customers.
Customer Relations
Send a customer survey. Encourage your customers for feedback, because if they aren’t satisfied, they are more likely to disappear than tell you that they are unhappy. This gives you a chance to find out how you are doing and make changes to strengthen areas of weakness – perhaps areas you didn’t realize needed a boost.
Verify your customer lists. Customer information can promptly expire when people move to a new home or change their email address. It’s a good idea to take a look at the National Change of Address database to verify that the address you have is still where your customers live. Try to make sure the email addresses you have a still good too.
Operations
Ask employees how they really feel. This is one way of many ways to encourage loyalty and keep a talented team together in a competitive industry. You know your business from your point of view, but those working the grindstone day in and out are likely to come across different issues. Make sure your employees realize you want to know the good, the bad, and the ugly – and that you won’t shoot the messenger.
Competitive comparison. It all boils down to how your products and service fare compared to your competitors. Revisit this question regularly – your rivals could have changed the way they are running their business. Make sure you are objective – it’s the only way you should be in this situation and the way that can lead to more sales.
When it comes to spring cleaning your business, pick some of the points and figure out which will make the biggest difference to the success of your organization. It’s never too late to make improvements, so take the time to make some adjustments and improvements to boost your sales.
What tops your business spring cleaning list?
Megan Totka is the Chief Editor for ChamberofCommerce.com. ChamberofCommerce.com helps small businesses grow their business on the web and facilitates connectivity between local businesses and more than 7,000 Chambers of Commerce worldwide. She specializes on the topic of small business tips and resources and business news. Megan has several years of experience on the topics of small business marketing, copywriting, SEO, online conversions and social media. Megan spends much of her time establishing new relationships for ChamberofCommerce.com, publishing weekly newsletters educating small business on the importance of web presence, and contributing to a number of publications on the web. Megan can be reached at megan@chamberofcommerce.com.
