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Connecting With Your Customers Online
Green Is Gold
& 10 technologies to watch in 2008
Web-based Ad Pricing - PPV, PPC?
Shortcuts - MS Word
Demographic Information Resources & Business Planning/Research Resources
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January / February 2008
Connecting With Your Customers Online
Speak Their Language
Absent the personality of your best salesperson, how do you make a case to potential customers that you understand their needs and challenges? How do you make a case that you have the information they need, and more importantly, how do you help them find the information?
Speak Their Language – Address Their Pain
The words your customers use to refer to your products and services may be different than the way you refer to the same. When talking to customers – especially on your website – you must look at the world from their point of view. Your internal divisions, hierarchies, systems, etc are of little interest or value to a potential customer looking for a solution to a problem. Example: a telecommunications company refers to call accounting while the customer is looking for a way to track the number of outbound calls. In this case, a link to "outbound call tracking" will get the customer where they want to go a lot faster than a link to “call accounting.”
Speaking their language, organizing your content from the customers point of view, shows that you understand, that you have the solution and offers the shortest path to that solution.
Call To Action – Engage Your Visitors
Getting a potential customer to the relevant information should be the start of a dialogue. Depending on the nature of your product or service there are a variety of ways to facilitate a continuing dialogue including polls, surveys, online demos or product tours, newsletter subscriptions, etc. At the very least, contact information including phone, fax, email and physical address should be readily available. When the customer is ready to talk, you want to make it easy.
For more on this subject, see "Turn website visitors into qualified leads qualified leads," Media Brains Newsletter, October 2007.
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