Articles on business start-ups, entrepreneurship, and general business practices
Want to get more people to pull the trigger on a purchase?
Give them a push with perfectly placed coupons! Coupons have a built-in visual appeal and an innate call to action. A coupon with a limited time offer adds a sense of urgency in a customer’s mind for two reasons:
Are you capitalizing on those opportunities, too?
While methods have evolved over the years, traditionally lions were subdued by three tools: a whip, a stool, and a handful of tasty snacks. While the whip or snacks make sense, perhaps you wonder why a stool was used (instead of a sword or a flame, for example)?
How can a small piece of furniture intimidate the king of all cats?
The truth is, the lion is not afraid of the chair, he’s confused by the multiple points on its legs. Cats are single-minded creatures, and the bobbing points of the chair legs confuse the lion into a less focused state. When the lion loses its train of thought, it is distracted from the instinct to pounce on a weaker opponent.
Ever try to rush your kids through breakfast and get stuck at the cereal cupboard?
As they browse a shelf of eight boxes, they slump and groan: “There’s nothing to eat!” What started as a hurry-up turns into a traffic jam. You vow that next time, you’ll only offer toast and Cheerios.
When we don’t give customers a simple, singular call to action, they may also fall into decision fatigue.
Does your website or your print materials overwhelm customers with possibilities?
Psychologist Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School, co-authored a study that showed significantly more conversions happened when shoppers had fewer options. In her example, shoppers had to choose from a display with six different flavors of jam versus a display with 24 different flavors of jam. How did they compare? The conversion rate for the six-flavor table was 30%, while the 24-flavor table was only 3%.
Analysis can lead to paralysis!
What about your method for calling prospects to action? Does your advertisement ask them to commit to a 30-day trial AND use a customer discount code DURING a selected 14-day window? Does your podcast ask people to share with a friend, AND subscribe, AND download previous episodes (all in one breath)?
Perhaps you need to take a step back and use these three evaluation tools:
When you ask people to do several tasks at once (like visiting your website and joining your e-mail list), you’ve probably overshadowed your main goal with several smaller goals.
Focus on one main goal for customer conversion, and use customer loyalty programs down the road to call customers to greater steps of engagement or loyalty.
If your communication is a mist in the office, it’s probably a fog on the streets. To determine which CTAs are crystal clear, run some A/B tests with sample customers and find out which ones are generating momentum.
Start call to action statements with a strong command verb, like buy, shop, order, subscribe, or win. Use concise phrases that build enthusiasm.
Which of these CTA statements excites you more? “Consider many of our 200 exciting destination possibilities,” or “Plan your dream vacation today!”
Keep things sweet, simple, and customer-focused. Once they take the bait you can always present them with more!
It’s usually the very first encounter that most customers will have with your business.
And when trying to establish a solid relationship with those people, your brand is your main connection to them.
However,
We get it, changing your brand is a hard decision to make when you think about how much time, money, and effort goes into the process.
But it could be your best chance to re-organize, re-group, and start fresh.
Chances are you have already thought about rebranding otherwise this article wouldn’t be of interest to you.
So here are some signs to perhaps prove yourself right and confirm that it may be time to change your brand.
Obviously a lot can happen in a decade.
In the past 10 years, the world has seen incredible advancement with the smartphone, social media, e-commerce, and so much more!
If you are unable to say to yourself “Yes, I have updated by brand at least once during this period of time,” then there’s your first sign.
You don’t want an out-of-date and old brand!
Relying on the same logo and marketing approach from Bush’s second term will most likely land you right back there anyway.
The inevitable fact is that at some point in time, a business that has been operating for years will need to deal with a target market that, in a sense, “ages out” of what first attracted them to their business.
Even some of the most successful brands in history like Pepsi or Microsoft have had to deal with the same problem.
If your sales are starting to stagnate despite your best efforts or your audience is no longer excited about your business the way they used it be, it may be time to rethink your brand and who your target audience is.
If your main audience has gone away, a change to your brand is a great way to attract the attention of a new market of people in one bold and striking move.
When updating or changing your brand, you should adherence to the values you once established and maintain.
It’s important to remember that
It’s an opportunity!
It’s a chance to throw out the old and make room for the new, ready to market to a new target audience and impact their lives with your products or services in a much more organic and dynamic way.
As days turn into weeks and weeks into months, you often feel exhausted, but have no real accomplishments to show for your efforts.
This may be the moment to re-evaluate your time management.
Unfortunately, in this day and age, people treat time as if it is an infinite resource.
We think “tomorrow is another day” and promise ourselves we’ll keep track of our time and use it wisely then.
But this mindset is the best way to never accomplish what you want in life.
, but the actual mechanism through which that conversation is unfolding has changed dramatically in a short period of time.
When it comes to customer engagement and social media, there are a number of important things to keep in mind.
Perhaps the biggest factor to understand when it comes to social media and customer engagement is the idea that a conversation between a business and its customers is both more intimate and more public than it has ever been.
If a customer has a positive experience with a representative of your brand on their Twitter page, they’re never more than a mouse-click away from telling all of their friends about it.
The reverse is also true – a negative experience on a site like Facebook can have huge potential ramifications due to the public nature of that conversation in the first place.
Helpful Hint: If you search for your brand’s name on Twitter and see users talking about an issue they’re having, you can easily interject with some troubleshooting tips to help them get the most from their product or service.
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