Customer engagement is all about engaging your customers with your company or brand and it can lead to increased order values, customer loyalty and word of mouth recommendation.

Given that a recession is around the corner or already upon us, keeping customers is something that any well minded company should be focusing a lot of attention on.

Yet, in a survey reported in Brand Republic last week it was revealed that just 51% of companies have placed greater emphasis on customer engagement as a result of the economic crisis. 

The survey uncovered that those planning investment in new customer engagement strategies planned to spend their organisations’ money on a range of techniques, including many so called ‘Web 2.0’ areas such as blogging, user generated content and feedback and review systems to name a few. 

These services offer great ways to engage your customers. Blogs give you the opportunity to share wisdom or advice with your audience. User generated content allows your customers to create value with your organisation. And feedback / reviews offer that word of mouth recommendation to your goods or services.

Implementing these types of strategies can vary in cost and other resources; however, the investment can be more than worth it if it results in better relationships with your customers.  

So where do you start?

Have a look around at what the competition are doing. Start with the market leaders and work your way down to your own level (presuming you’re not one of the market leaders). What do you see as innovative? What would your customers react well to? How can you see their ideas working for you? 

Once you have the basic research sit down and brainstorm some of your own ideas. Put it all together and look at the resources you have to hand; money, time, personnel and skills. 

Perform a basic cost to return analysis – run each customer engagement idea through this process, determining whether the benefits to be had, match or exceed the investment required. 

This may sound difficult to ascertain when looking at customer engagement but there are ways to get a basic idea. Here are some questions you should ask yourself when evaluating any potential changes:

What is the average order value? – Can you make changes that will lead to greater order values? How much greater would you expect order values to be after making any change?

How long do you usually retain a client for? How valuable is the average client over that period? If you retain a customer what value would you be retaining in the business? 

How many customers do you normally lose? What target would you set on retaining customers after any changes? How much value would the retained clients bring you?

What does it cost to gain each new client in the first place? How much is your marketing, advertising and PR spend compared to the number of customers acquired? What would the value of keeping clients be over acquiring new ones?

Armed with the information you can make informed choices on the customer engagement strategy that is best for your business. However, remember this is an evolutionary process and should not stop there. Record your progress and ensure that you tweak your strategy regularly to ensure the best results. 

If you would like help or advice on preparing your customer engagement strategy or implementing and integrating blogging, user content or feedback systems please call and speak to Aren on 01872 555933 or send an email using the contact form provided.

Sound familiar? Well if so, you need to get acquainted with goals and funnels within Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to your website. Aimed towards marketers, rather than geeks and techies, it generates a host of useful reports on the behaviour of visitors to your site.

Most important to many businesses is the goal and funnel elements included within the package. These detailed reporting systems allow you to track which pages result in lost conversions and where your would-be customers go.

However good your site, you will find that a percentage of would-be customers disappear during the buying process. Understanding where they go, and why, can be fundamentally important in making your site more successful.

Referred to as ‘Web Cart Abandonment’ on ecommerce websites, the average percentage of customers lost during 2007 was 52.1%. These customers leave for a variety of reasons ranging from matters completely out of your hands such as wrong credit card details to those well within your control, such as technical glitches or difficult processes.

So what are goals and funnels?

The term goal is used to refer to an outcome that you see as a positive result from your customer’s visit. This may be a successful purchase, viewing a particular page of your website or using the contact form. Whatever the goal you are looking to achieve, you can use the Google Analytics system to set the goal and track its success.

Monitoring the results is made easier through the Funnel Visualisation provided within the options. This visualisation shows how your would-be customers proceed down a particular path, predefined by yourself, towards the desired outcome or goal.

A typical Funnel Visualisation

This allows you to accurately monitor where and why your customers are leaving your site, abandoning their purchase or potential interest in your services.

Armed with this information, you and your sales or marketing team (in smaller businesses you and the cat) can look for reasons within the data and make changes or tweaks as necessary to reduce the losses and increase business.

If you would like to find out more about setting up goals and funnels you can visit the Google help pages here or speak to a member of our team about our range of support packages on 01872 555933 or by emailing info@uknetweb.com.

The whole guide can be viewed or downloaded here in pdf format which can be printed as required.

To ensure that our guide is available to the maximum number of people we have copied the content to this blog where it can be easily navigated through use of categories, tags and cross referencing links.

In this guide we have tried to look at a range of issues of relevance to businesses of all sizes; where possible suggesting routes to utilise technology in dealing with them. In each case we have tried to provide links to further information, research or tools that might be useful to you or your business.

At UKNetWeb we specialise in the technical and strategic aspects of working with the internet.

During the planning stages of website builds we have become accustomed to identifying technological routes to improve business efficiency, drive sales and improve marketing. Areas that are extremely important to the bottom line of any business.

With fears of a recession growing and a never ending deluge of stories about rising prices, the credit crunch and low consumer confidence we decided that we should share some of our in-house knowledge; identifying routes for businesses to use technology as a means to drive profitability.

If you would like direct assistance in following any of the advice given within this presentation we can provide consultancy or support in setting up, managing or integration of any of the services listed.
Our unparalleled knowledge of technical programming and emerging digital media means that we are well positioned to maximise your return from these activities.

Our guide is a working document and we envisage that you and other businesses will have your own tips and ideas on how to beat the crunch. If you think we have missed something please leave a comment or contact us directly through the contact form here.

Thank you for reading, we hope you find this guide helpful.

Even if you haven’t noticed any effect on your business just yet, it is clear that all the talk is having an affect on consumer confidence and eventually the results will be felt by many businesses.

Now is the time to take stock of your business and implement changes to your processes that will lead to increased revenue and higher profitability. After all, the worst that can happen from taking action now will be better profits at the end of the year.

So, assuming that we are heading into rockier times, who will be the first businesses to feel the effects?

Go to the next page to find out some of the areas that can expect a downturn.

It isn’t just the estate agents feeling the pinch. There are a number of trades which rely on house sales and each is beginning to feel the problem already. Trades suffering include: Removals, Conveyancing Departments, Property Developers, Building and Construction companies and even garden centres. Take a look at ‘House Drop Should Be Alarm Call’ for Cornish accountancy firm ‘Bishop Fleming’s’ view on it.

High Street Retail

Although May saw record sales growth in the retail sector there is no getting away from the fact that high inflation will eventually drive consumers to cut their spending on non-essential items such as impulse buys, retail therapy purchases, gadgets and beauty treatments. Industries likely to feel the hit include: phone shops, electrical retailers, independent beauty product retailers, clothing stores and accessory stores. Check out this report from the BBC to find out more: ‘Sales Remain Flat on High Street’.

Nights Out and Nights In

In a survey conducted by leading financial gurus, Motley Fool, they found that 89% people were looking at making cutbacks on ‘non-essential items’ with 67% of those people listing ‘Nights Out and Takeaways’ as the top thing on their list of non-essentials. Bad news for businesses in the pub or food trade including takeaways, night clubs, restaurants, cinemas and coffee shops . Check out the Motley Fool guide to ‘Cracking the Credit Crunch’ for more information on how consumers are dealing with the credit crunch.

Holidays and Travel

Although the big travel companies are telling us everything is all right in the travel industry, key analysts are already saying that the big impact won’t be felt until 2009. Whatever side you’re on you can’t fail to ignore that in the same Motley Fool survey we quoted for ‘Nights Out and Nights In’ 49% of those looking to cut back on their non-essential spend included ‘Cheaper or Fewer Holidays’ on their list coming in at number 4 overall. To read one business analyst’s view on this check out – ‘Is Holiday Travel Recession-Proof?’ .

Well there a number of different areas that the use of good technology can bring about benefits to your business and it’s bottom line. To make it simple we have broken down the areas into the following list or sections to be covered within this guide:

• Improving Efficiency
• Marketing Effectively
• Cutting the Costs of Communication

Each section provides you with our take on how technology could aide your business during troubled times. Where possible we have provided links to more information, advice and tools.

Over the coming days, weeks and months we will continue to build on these areas with information on how to set up any systems referenced, as well as any additional uses for the tools available.

Alternatively, you can subscribe to our RSS Feed or go to www.uknetweb.com/keepmeposted and sign up for email updates.

The first stage in solving this imbalance is to sit down and evaluate your internal processes, time spent on various areas and the income generated from each activity. Once you have undertaken these evaluations of your efficiency, consider some of the following as means to further improve efficiency

• Have a Plan
• Automate Processes
• Stock Management
• Time Management

Take time to sit down and evaluate where you are, where you want to get to and what you are going to do to get there. During the process try and establish firm goals for your business such as; increase customer base by 10% or cut costs by 20%.

By having a plan you can ensure that you are on track at any stage of the process. You can set down at the beginning exactly what you are going to do and then ensure that you stick to it, making minor tweaks as appropriate.

If you don’t know where to start consider the ISO 9001 process as a possibility. The process of acquiring ISO 9001 accredited status forces a business to take stock of internal processes, setting down on paper each process for use by anyone in the organisation.

Once you have your processes on paper look at how you could go about automating them. It may be that you could put in place technology to handle the process or processes for you, freeing up valuable time spent doing routine tasks.

At the most simplest end this could be using a mail merge to send out customer invoices, and at the other, it could involve bespoke programming added to the back of your website, handling all supplier and customer relationships.

As an example, one client of UKNetWeb had an e-commerce store with over 25,000 products from 150 different suppliers. They regularly spent six days a week on processing orders and dealing with suppliers. After analysing the processes and developing a custom back-end system we were able to reduce the six days down to one.

These applications can vary in quality with some offering higher levels of integration with other business systems than others. Ensuring that your package can work hand in hand with your website or accounting system can drive efficiency and cut costs.

These systems will alleviate many of the associated costs of carrying out manual stock counts, dealing with administrative errors and time lost from stock outs.

Whether your business is online or not, a good stock management system is an investment for your business that will continue to show a return for many years after its original implementation.