All posts tagged Business

Web Designers: How to get more Loyal Clients

Profit in business comes from repeat customers – W. Edwards Deming (one of the people responsible for Japan transformation during World War II)

Having loyal clients can bring you several benefits, including:

• Not having to persuade them to buy your services all over again, thus reducing costs and increasing profits
• Your loyal clients probably have friends who are also interested in using your service, so you’ll get new referrals as well.

The real question is, how to increase the probability your regular clients will become (or stay) loyal? There are several things you can do.

Before we start, let me say this is not another blah-blah “care about your clients” type of article. I will give you specific steps you can apply today and get real results.

Lower the Customer’s Effort

There was one recent article that appeared in Harvard Business Review named “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers“. The article argued that the conventional wisdom of “exceeding customer expectations” is not as important as people claim. Instead, what customers really want (but rarely get) is just a satisfactory solution to their issue.

Be careful, this applies only to customer service. We’ll discuss whether the same principle applies the product you deliver.

How can I take this and apply it to my own business?

The key point is: Reduce the effort your customers make when dealing with you. Help them solve their problems and concerns quickly and easily.

Examples:

• If most of your clients ask the same questions during the design process, offer them a short FAQ before you start working on their project. Something like: “I thought you might want to read this before I start working on this client, it will answer some of the questions you’ll probably have”.
• If you have a team and your client emails you a question you don’t know the answer to (but your team member does), don’t tell him to go and send an email AGAIN to your team member. Instead, redirect the question yourself. Lesson: One of the keys to reducing clients’ effort involves reducing the number of times they have to repeat a question.
• Try to predict the issues your clients might have (and then eliminate them). For example, after you make the deal, your client will probably want to know the status of the project (possible solution: give a short daily status report). After you deliver the prototype, give clear and easy steps on how the client can give you feedback on it because they’ll probably want to suggest a few changes.

The key point is to make the whole interaction as easy & effortless & fast (without sacrificing quality, of course) as possible for the client.

How to measure customer effort

If you want to see whether the ideas I proposed above will result in clients perceiving their interaction as not-so-effortful, ask them the following question: “How much effort did you personally have to put to handle this request/question/interaction” on a scale from 1 to 5 where 1 – very low effort and 5 – very high effort. You can then always ask WHY did they chose that rating and learn some lessons to decrease the further effort.

Remember: Solve their problems before exceeding their expectations.

The basics remain the same

The basics always remain the same. To have loyal clients you also need to:

• Fulfill your client’s expectations. They expect a decent website for the price
• Experiment with exceeding their expectations in the product. Educate yourself on usability/testing/writing for the web. Exceeding your client’s expectations in the product you deliver can work very well potentially.
• You can ask them this simple question after everything is finished: “Would you recommend us to a friend or colleague?” and offer yes/no as possible answers. You can then ask why and get some good insights. Asking this question on whether they’ll recommend you to a friend or a colleague can give you an overall view of how well your business satisfies their needs.

If you got some ‘aha’ moments while reading this article, please let us know in the comments below (it isn’t hard! ).

Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Propeller… I’ve tried them all. I’ve been a power user on all of these social networks and have gotten my websites on their frontpages as well.

While doing that, I found some surprising similarities. People there all seem to have used 1 principle to help each: reciprocity.

In his book Influence: Science and Practice, Robert Cialdini defines reciprocity as, put in simple terms, responding to a favor with a favor. Reciprocity can be negative as well. If you do something bad to a person, that person will probably do something bad to you as well.

Digg, StumbleUpon and Propeller operate on the same principle. Let’s start with Digg.

How Does Digg Work?

On Digg, people “trade” submissions. Here’s how it works:

• First, you add a particular “power user” as a friend. A power user is someone who has a good ‘popular ratio’ over 20%, that is, stories he submitted that went on the front page. The most important of all, he’s active every day. To give you an idea, here are the stats of a typical Digg power user:



• After you add them as a friend, you dig their submissions (Friend’s Activity > Submissions). After 2-4 weeks, a certain percentage of them will add you back as a friend so you’ll both become ‘mutual friends’. Now that you are mutual friends, they will start digging your submissions as well.

You might have noticed that 99% of the people who submit stories that get on the front page on Digg have a big ‘mutual friends’ list:

It should take you around 2-3 months to build a power profile on Digg (I recommend waiting for 2 weeks and if people don’t add you back as a mutual friend, remove them and move on with adding new power users).

Basic Principles

This same principle applies to Propeller. Just the process is a bit different. There you will need to have an established account (1-2 months old with a lot of ‘props’ and ‘comments’). Then you need to add a few other established users and wait for a percentage of them to add you back when they see you’re active. Then they’ll send you “shares” via PM (private messaging) so you ‘prop’ their submissions. You can do the same and send them PMs with your submissions.

Do you notice a pattern here? It’s all about you ‘digg’, ‘prop’ what I submit, I ‘digg’, ‘prop’ what you submit. It’s all reciprocity. There are no shiny new tricks or anything like that, it’s an old, proven principle humans used to survive over centuries.

Here is a simple way to find out how to become a power user on almost any social bookmarking site:

• Ask established members for help. If there’s a way to contact them, DO IT on a big scale. Contact 30+ active people asking them to explain to you how things work here and say you’re new. A certain percentage of them will help. Not all of them will respond but a decent percentage will take the time to explain to you how to get started.
• Look for the reciprocity principle. Figure out how people exchange value (in this case, submission votes) there. You now know how it’s being done on Digg and Propeller. I leave it to you to figure how it’s being done on Stumbleupon and Mixx
• Establish a good profile. When adding people on Mixx and Propeller, the key thing is to have a good profile with a decent amount of stories you’ve voted for and commented. This is important because on these sites, unlike Digg, it’s hard for people to track whether you regularly voted for their stories or not so they use the next best indicator which is how active you are (if this person is active, that means he votes regularly and he’ll probably vote for my stories as well).

Now go and take some massive ACTION!

Ever seen a car salesmen go from prospect pitching to baseball pitching in 5 seconds? Probably not. Have you seen a surgeon go from operating on a patient to operating a slot machine in 5 seconds? Definitely not. Yet web designers can go from designer to professional time waster in just 5 seconds. This is due to the fact that our work and our recreation exist only a click away from each other. While working for our clients or employers, we face a constant temptation to waste a few minutes here and a few minutes there. You must avoid these productivity killers in order to remain an efficient worker.

1) Stat checking

Do you randomly check your stats in the middle of billable hours? Stats that commonly fuel time wasting include:

• Google Analytics/StatCounter
• Search Engine Rankings
• Adwords PPC Snapshot

Checking these stats while billing hours for your client or employers equates to stealing. They’re paying for your hours of labor, not your hours of statistic obsession. Additionally, of these statistics, the only one worth checking daily is your PPC campaign.

Your site traffic statistics have much more meaning in larger quantities. Daily or hourly measurements of your traffic do not provide a large enough sample size for adequate trend analysis. By checking these stats religiously throughout your work day, you not only waste your clients time, you waste your own time as well. Besides, it’s much more satisfying to see that 200 people have visited your site since you last checked as opposed to 5 people.

As for search engines, rankings can fluctuate daily. Checking your sites’ search engine rankings every hour does not lead to good data. SEO is a long-term process and should be measured as such. Use tools such as SEOMoz’s Rank Tracker, which automatically emails you rankings of tracked sites every week.

Each time you check these stats you lose five minutes of effective productivity. How so? You lose at least 3 minutes actually checking the statistics, and it takes at least another 2 minutes to fully reacquire the level of focus you had before diverting your attention. Designers who compulsively check their stats can easily lose an hour of work in a workday.

2) Social Networking

Facebook and Twitter can easily consume your entire work day. Web designers are more susceptible to getting sucked in for 30 minutes at a time thanks to the link-bait posted by people we follow on Twitter or befriend on Facebook. Link-bait begets link-bait, and without even knowing it, half an hour can slip by as we move from article to article. A recent report suggests UK employees have stolen up to $22 billion dollars worth of labor by using social media on the clock.

Some argue that social media gives your mind a needed break which increases productivity in the long run. While I find the argument valid to an extent, you have to examine your personality to know if this principle applies to you. If you know you’ll be taken on a wild social media ride once you read a tweet, don’t deceive yourself into thinking you’ll only engage in social media activities for a few minutes. It will kill your focus.

3) Skipping out on sleep

When deadlines loom around the corner, sometimes you can’t avoid skipping out on sleep. However, be aware that depriving yourself of sleep severely hinders your ability to function. If you must resort to skipping out on sleep, do not make a habit out of it. Every portion of the web design industry involves creativity and problem solving: creative design, creative code, creative marketing solutions. Since creativity and sleep are directly related, as demonstrated by a Harvard Medical study, not getting the recommended amount of sleep each night could prevent you from coming up with the creative solutions required of you.

Also, keep in mind that in addition to coming up with creative solutions for clients, you must also deal with the business portion of web design: filing, invoice creating, customer calling, etc. These tedious but important jobs become almost impossible to undertake while sleep deprived.

In order to consistently create solutions that you and your clients can take pride in, these productivity killing habits must be eliminated from your work day.