What’s your service like, after the sale?
Do your clients cringe at the thought of calling in to your service number? Sunday night, as I was pulling down our window shade, the right side string broke, and the weight of the unsupported slats brought the entire blind down. Fearing the worst, I called Levolor first thing Monday morning to inquire about repair costs. Fully prepared to go into battle with what I thought would be an overseas customer service department, I was pleasantly surprised when my call was answered by a real live human named Donna, within a ring or two of the phone.
Tip 1: Call your client or customer service number — how long does it take you to get through to a representative? If you grow impatient, imagine how your clients feel.
Donna then quickly looked up my account, all based off of a little tag on the inside of our window shade. She knew when it was made, when it was bought (by the previous homeowner) and based off of that little tag, which window it belonged to.
Tip 2: Do your systems work this fast? Or do you make clients go through hoops validating who they are?
I explained the problem to Donna, and she told me the repair charge was $25. All I had to do was mail in the blind, and they’d do the rest. Not bad – sounded like a fair price to me. While she was writing up the repair order, I chatted with Donna about her weekend. I must have made an impression as Donna informed me she’d waive the repair fee and the return mail charge — again, all I had to do was ship the blind.
Tip 3: Are your client services staff empowered to make impressionable decisions? $25 isn’t a lot, and I was fully prepared to pay it. But her change made my Monday. And we all know what Monday’s could be like…
Your “after the sale” service is often what makes or breaks your business. It also has a dramatic effect on the referrals you get.
Are you doing everything you can to get the sale, only to fall flat afterwards? Or are you like Levolor, which just made me a client for life?
Photo credit by iprole.
Five Things You Didn’t Know About LinkedIn
As readers of this blog will confirm, I’m a huge fan of LinkedIn for selling and consulting. I wanted to share a few additional features many casual users of LinkedIn probably are not aware of:
LinkedIn has a store, where you can buy branded merchandise. Up for sale include mugs, shirts, luggage tags and even reusable grocery shopping bags. For me, I’ve got my eye on the lapel pin for in-person networking.
The LinkedIn blog is frequently updated with all the new and cool enhancements on the network. Writers use the content here for their own blog posts. And for those of you who like to comment on blog posts, the structure here publishes your profile URL, which is a unique twist, and may help you with optimization.
A fairly new feature is the ability to reorder the elements on your profile. Via simple drag and drop, you can move the pieces of your profile around to best highlight your skills, expertise or experiences and stand out from the crowd.
I launched my first DirectAds campaign earlier this week, and the results seem promising. The targeting is robust, but the $10/day minimum is pretty high when compared to Google and Facebook ($1/day or so). More to come on the results of my campaign.
LinkedIn also makes it very easy for you to promote your profile with badges. When logged in to your account, the badges are automatically updated to include your profile URL.
I hope you find these features useful to your networking goals on Linked In, and I welcome your comments, and connection requests.
Photo credit by ilco.
How to write a good meta description tag
The meta description is a special tag placed within the source code of your webpages. It’s used by search engines and directories to help understand what your page is about.
Sometimes, they’re also used as your “snippet” on the search engine results page.
The tag, placed between the <head> and </head> section, looks like this:
<meta name=”description” content=”your content here”>
As suggested by Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, here are the best practices about using meta descriptions:
- Each page of your website should have a unique meta description
- It should contain a factual statement about the content on the page, not already mentioned in the page title
- The description should be easy to read
Here is the actual meta description from this article, which supports the promise made in the page’s title:
<title>How to write a good meta description tag | FIND the CLIENT</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Short article on how to write this important HTML code, and why writing good meta descriptions are worth the extra effort.”>
Well-written meta descriptions are preferred because they give users a clear idea of the page’s content. It’s important to note that while good meta descriptions can improve click through on the search engine results page, they don’t affect your natural rankings.
Your meta descriptions do not have to be solely in sentence format – it’s OK to follow a clearly defined formula listing data about the page. For example, a website about books could include the title of the book as the page title, and a description about the content of the book:
<title>Playing For Pizza: A Novel</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Author: John Grisham, Publisher: Doubleday, Category: Fiction, Price: $21.95, Pages: 272″>
Your meta descriptions need to be descriptive. Even though they’re not displayed to a user when viewing your webpage, they’re important enough to spend a few extra minutes on. They could help improve the quality of your snippet — leading to more and better user traffic to your webpage.
Photo credit by svilen001.
Have you hit a client development plateau?
Watching what your competition does for client development is a basic principle for your marketing activities. It’s usually OK to borrow, copy and steal their ideas. For example, if your competition is another law firm, and they’re listed on Lawyers.com, then you better be there too. If they have a professional looking website, nice office, thoughtful logo or other impressionable, you should have the same. But, if you only borrow, copy and steal, you’ll quickly run out of ideas. At some point, you’ll reach a plateau, where you’re constantly playing catch-up. What’s worse, if you’re constantly changing gears and trying the next new shiny thing you risk forgetting what’s unique about your firm!
The solution? Stop and regroup.
Don’t worry about what your competition is doing. Instead, plan out your own client development strategies and work your plan. You’ll sleep better, and your competition will worry about you instead.
Related Posts
Pay-Per-Click vs. Search Engine Optimization
There are few websites online today that don’t crave more attention from search engines, more views and purchases from customers, and more inbound links from other sites. However, getting to the point of online rock stardom takes more than simply wishing your way to the top. It often takes a ton of work optimizing pages, a few dollars spent on advertising, and an ounce of good luck to seal the deal. Two very different approaches – Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising and organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO), have been known to produce favorable results in increasing a website’s visibility, but the key to success online is in understanding and taking advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of both.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of following best practices in order to gain better position in a search engine for one or more keywords or phrases. With SEO, visitors use a search engine to find sites that are relevant to the keywords and phases they provide. The most common search engines used today (Yahoo!, Google and MSN) are relied on by over 90% of web users to find what they are looking for online, but most only view the top 30 results produced by search engines. These factors make getting to the top of a search engine’s results for specific keywords an absolute online necessity for websites.
Search Engine Optimization has several advantages which make it appealing to those looking to be online for the long run. Its most noted advantage is that, when using sound practices, its results are realized for the long term. Another major advantage of organic SEO comes in its cost, which ranges from free to minimal as the only costs incurred, if any, are those paid to make website changes. SEO methods that focus its keywords on the products, service and information provided by the website also have a better chance of delivering repeat visitors and customers that are ready to act.
Organic search engine optimization has two clear disadvantages, which are always outweighed by the advantages SEO methods provide. The first disadvantage is that SEO takes time – time in constructing pages to appeal to search engines; time for the search engines to find, index and “trust” the pages; and time to realize the positive ROI between customers and efforts spent. This disadvantage is usually minimal to those looking to be online for the long term. The final disadvantage with organic search engine optimization is that it does not deliver guarantees, especially for websites with lots of competition online. Keeping in mind that each website has the opportunity to “optimize” their pages as well should put the chances of success through SEO in perspective.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Both new websites and those finding it difficult to get their fair shake in the top of the search engines, may opt for Pay-Per-Click advertising to increase their visibility online. In short, Pay-Per-Click advertising allows you to select, bid, and pay for keywords that are relevant to your website’s offerings. In exchange, the Pay-Per-Click program offers a website guaranteed visibility when a searcher enters in the chosen keyword and when the searcher is on a website that is related to the keyword.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising guarantees that websites are put in the eyes of their chosen target audiences. When properly managed, the pay-per-click advertising costs can often times be recouped through the increase in sales that are driven to the website. In addition, the flexibility in keyword selection, the precise management of campaigns, the instant feedback provided, and the ability to budget spending make PPC appealing to most companies that do not appear in top search results.
There are several disadvantages to pay-per-click advertising which can be reduced or even eliminated with proactive PPC campaign management. One major disadvantage results from the bidding nature of PPC programs, which tend to list the highest bidder for a keyword ahead of lower bidders. This “bidding war” forces the lower bidder to increase their bid in order to regain position, and can squeeze out companies with smaller marketing budgets. Another disadvantage to PPC advertising comes in the improper selection of keywords which results in bidders paying for visitors that are simply “window shopping”, and have no intention of buying products. The final disadvantage to PPC advertising is the most obvious and the most painful – once the payments for keywords stop, so does the website’s visibility.
Which Method Is Best?
Websites with little or no visibility can easily change their circumstances by using Pay-Per-Click advertising to instantly gain web presence. And although the guaranteed visibility comes at a cost, those just starting out on the web can often time recoup their expenses through the building of repeat customers, word of mouth referrals and increased traffic flow. Also, keep in mind that paying to be in front of visitors has major disadvantages that good SEO should eliminate over time. So, our suggestion is to always use Pay-Per-Click advertising to get into the face of web surfers in the early stages of a website’s growth, but to also implement the techniques of Search Engine Optimization which will provide the website with long-term staying power. Used in conjunction with each other, your website will realize both immediate and long-term success on the web.
Photo credit by svilen001.
FIND the CLIENT helps talented and passionate professional service providers – attorneys, lawyers, architects, cosmetic dentists, chiropractors, accountants and the like – find and attract more clients, and win more new business.
If you have found the information on this blog useful, and are serious about profitably growing and improving your practice, please visit our client development consulting page and contact us today.
