Tag Archive for Customer Loyalty

Five ways to add value to retain your customers

Originally written by aileenallkins on Small Business
As a business owner, your customers are your most important asset. These customers can be your biggest champions or harshest critics, with both sides of the coin equally important for business development and long-term success. Knowing how to retain customers is crucial. Ultimately, your customer base will drive financial revenue, making customer service a crucial investment for any company: a massive 96 per cent of customers state they would avoid a business as a result of bad customer service.
Attracting new customers is often seen as the key to helping a business thrive. Yet while keeping the customer pipeline healthy is of course important, there is a flip side to this: understanding the value of the customers you already have. Retention is far cheaper than acquisition, with a recent study showing that converting and onboarding new customers can cost up to seven times more than maintaining those already on your books.
Whilst the excitement of new customers might bring a buzz to your business, a high churn rate fails to recognise the long-term value of loyalty. Refining your customer service offering to improve retention will result in a highly engaged customer base, who are more likely

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The best free online survey platforms for small businesses

Originally written by Anna Jordan on Small Business
An online survey can be a useful way to connect with your customers while learning more about their likes and interests.
They go way beyond SurveyMonkey, with plenty of platforms offering creative, fun and interesting poll building services. Use them to assist in product development, measure customer satisfaction, establish market trends or test a campaign.
Key survey features which can help your business
If you’re new to survey tools, you may not know which features to look out for – but some of these might swing your decision.
Common features include:

Question types
Options to skip
Data export
Customisation
Reporting and analytics
Automatic data collection
Embedding
Surveys in different languages
App integration – Salesforce, Google Sheets, Google Docs, HubSpot, MailChimp
Email marketing
Branching/skip logic – the ability to move respondents to a different question or page based on their response to a certain question
Customisable company branding

What to be aware of
The only real limitations to be aware of are the features that you can’t get in the free version. On some platforms there’s little difference between the free and premium versions whereas others are stingy in their free offering.
We’ve included some of the features in the paid-for versions to give you an idea of how generous the free versions

Read more...

The best free online survey platforms for small businesses

Originally written by Anna Jordan on Small Business
An online survey can be a useful way to connect with your customers while learning more about their likes and interests.
They go way beyond SurveyMonkey, with plenty of platforms offering creative, fun and interesting poll building services. Use them to assist in product development, measure customer satisfaction, establish market trends or test a campaign.
Key survey features which can help your business
If you’re new to survey tools, you may not know which features to look out for – but some of these might swing your decision.
Common features include:

Question types
Options to skip
Data export
Customisation
Reporting and analytics
Automatic data collection
Embedding
Surveys in different languages
App integration – Salesforce, Google Sheets, Google Docs, HubSpot, MailChimp
Email marketing
Branching/skip logic – the ability to move respondents to a different question or page based on their response to a certain question
Customisable company branding

What to be aware of
The only real limitations to be aware of are the features that you can’t get in the free version. On some platforms there’s little difference between the free and premium versions whereas others are stingy in their free offering.
We’ve included some of the features in the paid-for versions to give you an idea of how generous the free versions

Read more...