Show Your Customers You Appreciate Them - Ziller Web Marketing Blog

How much do you appreciate your customers / clients and how much do you show them this? It’s a fact that people liked to be thanked. If you thank someone for doing something, there is a very good chance they will want to do more of what you thanked them for.

iContact have just shown me what we mean to them. Being a customer of iContact I was just sent a simple email to thank me for my loyal support of their product. While this email was very simple, it was the thought that counted.

Websites do not thank their customers enough for their support. If you run an ecommerce store, think about what it would cost you to dispatch an automatic email to every customer who made a purchase, a few weeks after the product was delivered. What it would cost you compared to what you would get in return would make it more then worth it.

Customers like to be thanked. So thank them.

Recently Ziller needed an upgrade of our office stationery, and so went to Corban & Blair (a client of ours) for assistance. We were able to obtain a range of professional designed stationery supplies for our office and would just like to thank Corban & Blair for the great service. We recommend Corban & Blair to anyone after lifestyle or corporate stationery supplies.

In recent times, Facebook has been at the centre of criticism when introducing new changes which included changes to the user interface as well as general changes to the core functionality. The criticism came from a large majority of their users, who really felt the new changes were not in their best interests – a Facebook group was even set-up to argue against the changes which attracted hundreds of thousands of users. I myself have liked all the changes Facebook have made to date however it was obvious the large majority of users, including some of my friends did not.

If you are a Facebook user you would of noticed recently that a new layout with a bunch of changes has been introduced, however this time I feel that there will not be so much fuss made about them as in the past few updates. This time Facebook have done something very smart, they have kept their users informed. When logging into your account for the first time since the changes have been introduced, right at the top in the prime position is a banner which explains that there have been changes along with why those changes are helpful.

If you click on the link in the banner, you are then taken to page which fully explains each of the different changes.

In any area of your business, keeping customers informed / updated should be one of your top priorities. This is no different to running a website – if people or users are kept informed they are going to be happy or at least happier then if you didn’t. I guarantee you if Facebook had of taken the same approach when rolling out their last few updates there would not of been such anger from users.

If you ask someone who has no web design experience / knowledge to review a website, the main thing they will base their review on is the appearance of the website. They won’t know much else about how well it is built behind the scenes but they will know if it looks good or not. This topic is often touched upon when Ziller provides initial screen designs of a new site to a client – the majority of their feedback comes in the way of look and design, not the more important factors of website usability, how well it is being built for search engines and if its designed to achieve the overall goal or purpose of the site.

Now if you speak with someone who has web design experience and knows about website usability, they will tell you that the design and or appearance of a website is the very least important part, which in some aspects Ziller agrees with. If you are running an online business, the bottom line is usually the money that the website generates so therefore those other more important factors really come into play. I can pick out a thousand websites that look great, but do not do one thing to help in achieving the goal of the website.

In saying all this, the point of this post is to point out why a well designed website is still so very important, even more important if you are selling online. If you have not heard of a value proposition before, it is a way of convincing your users why they should buy / trust / use your website, usually in the form of text or banners. What I am here to say is that a professionally designed website is one very strong value proposition. Users will subconsciously trust a website if its well designed, and the opposite if its poorly designed. I know myself if I go to a website that is asking for money for a product or service that has a terrible design I am most likely to leave without buying – if they can’t afford to pay someone to design a nice website they obviously are not making much money?

If you currently run a online store that is poorly designed, I think you will be amazed at the increase in your conversion rate with a simple redesign.