Customer service – Page 4 – Loyalty Apps – A New Way Of Doing Business

It’s hard to run a business. You know that. And most entrepreneurs gleefully embrace this fact. The reality of it, however, can still give you goose bumps.

Think about this: Amazon has been in business more than two decades now and it still doesn’t make much in terms of profit.

While investors have undying love for the company, it barely scratches the surface of net gains. Meanwhile, it expands, offers free shipping, buys new businesses, and adds more products to its seemingly endless shelves. According to an article by Meagan Clark and Angelo Young on ibtimes.com, the online retailing behemoth recently reported $17 billion in sales but with a $41 million loss.

Meanwhile, Twitter is something everyone uses and its future is still uncertain (waiting for its advertising model to work). In the year 2011, Sprint Nextel, AMR, Sears, and MGM resorts were all losing money as Rick Aristotle Munarriz noted on Daily Finance.

Why are we discussing businesses losing money here? What has this got to do with blogging and landing pages? Now, these are large businesses. They have attractive stock prices and investors love them. Yet, these companies barely make money. What can a small business do? How does a small business hope to make a sustainable profit given a situation like this?

While there is no magic formula, a great piece of advice is “keep your expenses down and go smart”. Make use of resources best suited to lean businesses. The giants cannot adapt fast. But you can! Use content and digital marketing to your advantage; use blogging in combination with landing pages.

Here’s why it’s a lethal combination that holds its own over other free and paid options.

PPC + Landing Pages Works but it’s Expensive

Phil Frost of MainStreet ROI explains why AdWords could prove to be expensive for your business.

Don’t get me wrong. PPC is easy, quick, and gets you results. It’s highly targeted advertising and with much lower risk than other paid channels or traditional advertising. It is just that you would have to know how to do it right.

Phil points out that the default settings on AdWords are built to make you lose money. Second, not all businesses fully understand how AdWords works and they don’t go much beyond pointing simple ads to their homepages. Third, most firms do not have a framework or a checklist to work with Adwords. Finally, organizations don not always track clicks from campaigns to see if this works in tandem with their business goals (if at all they have them clearly defined).

There is a lot at stake here. If you have the budget, you can certainly do PPC with landing pages. It is just not as straightforward as you might think, though. For one, putting up ads on Google or Bing and then waiting for traffic to come in only to convert is not a one-time process. You would start with segmentation, move on to geographic targeting, adding and removing keywords, creating ad copy, assets, and message matching. You would then have to optimize your landing pages, test frequently, and then go back to work on your ads again.

It does not end. So even with a budget, you still need to have the expertise and embrace learning curve.

Blog Posts Provide Content, Landing Pages Trigger Action

If you have to spend resources, why not do it with blog posts and landing pages instead of PPC? Your budget spend is reduced, and you have more room to experiment.

That’s not the only thing in favor of blog posts and landing pages. Blog posts are informational. They provide context to your readers. When you make a relevant offer with a blog post, your chances of conversion are a lot higher than an ad with a few characters and a landing page that shows up from nowhere and only has a hope of matching the ad message.

For instance, see this WordPress Handbook for first time users. This is an excellent collection of resources for WordPress beginners, but you can’t expect users to access it in a browser all the time. As a result, it can be forgotten after a while. Giving it away an eBook or in a PDF format could get WPKube an email subscription while the PDF stays longer on the subscribers’ devices.

Some companies go even further to create landing pages, which are themselves doorways to more information instead of making any direct offers. Shopify, for instance, has a resource doorway to starting a retail business, leading potential customers to take action, with all options taken care of:

More Toom To Explain

How many times have you heard the phrase “Let me explain…”? You have heard it because it is common, and it often works. Salespeople use it all the time. People who have vested interested in your vote use it relentlessly. If you are a marketer or a business owner, so should you.

But when ads and updates have character limits, how much convincing can you possibly do? What if the prospect wants to know more? Your ad cannot explain so much to a prospect. If a prospect had to click on an ad, go to a landing page, figure out further details about your services or products, and then come back to signup as a lead, your paid advertising is not really doing justice to your budget, is it?

Meanwhile, a blog post can already be a pre-emptive explanation. A landing page with an offer directly related to the blog post can boost your conversions sky high.

Knowledge + Trust = Better Conversions

When you blog, you are letting your heart out with a voice. Your customers get to know the real you. Names have faces and your writing has a voice. This is as personal as it can get. Customers feel that there are real people behind a business.

From an advertising perspective, this beats any ad served by technology. It beats anything automated. It also beats any hard-sell tactic.

Landing pages, of course, are a means to an end, leading your potential customers from “reading and knowing and trusting” mode to a more active “take action now” mode.

That is why a combination of landing pages with offers highly relevant to the topic of a blog post makes tremendous sense. It is no accident that companies like HubSpot, QuickSprout and Unbounce use it all the time. For example, HubSpot includes a free resource with a CTA at the end of every blog post:

Wrapping it Up

We always believe that no one method or channel is a permanent bet. The best kind of digital marketing is usually a mix of strategies, tactics, and marketing channels. It is also about tweaking, experimenting, testing, and picking what works.

It is not just PPC, SEO, social media, or email marketing. The best marketing strategy is a combination of all of these. This is why we call it the “Marketing Mix.”

Are you using blog posts to drive traffic to your landing pages? Are you making offers your readers cannot refuse? Please share your content marketing tactics with us, and let us know what is working for you and what is not.

July 20, 2015

Survey Shows Millennials Willing To Pay For Loyalty Programs

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Free shipping and special discounts were top reasons for joining.

A recent survey by LoyaltyOne has found that 62 percent of respondents overall – and 75 percent of Millennials between 18-24 and 77 percent aged 25-34 — would join a fee-based rewards program if their favorite retailer offered one. Almost half (47%) of all respondents said paid programs have better rewards, and 61% of those 18 to 24 and 54% of those 25 to 34 said so.

The survey also found that free shipping (69 percent) and special discounts (67 percent) made the loyalty programs valuable to respondents.

Consumers reported that they gave high marks to paid loyalty programs like Amazon Prime or even membership-based warehouse retailers like Costco. The explanation is obvious: when loyalty programs require an upfront fee, it means that customers have already invested in the retailer and therefore is more likely to make purchases from them to recoup their investment.

A recent study from Millward Brown Digital found that Amazon Prime members convert 74 percent of the time on Amazon.com, according to, compared to 13 percent for non-prime members.

The LoyaltyOne study also found:

Nearly half (47%) said that fee-based programs offer better rewards than free programs, with a significantly larger number of millennials – 61% of 18-24 year-olds and 54% of 25-34 year-olds – reporting that fee-based rewards are better.
Slight more women (67 percent) than men (64 percent) reported that rewards are worth paying for.
Ranked by category, respondents ranked Grocery and Mass merchandise highest (35 percent), followed by Credit Card rewards (26 percent), Specialty Retail (13 percent), Travel (18 percent) and Restaurants (9 percent).
Meanwhile, roughly one-third of 18-24 year-olds (32 percent) and of 25-34 year-olds (34 percent) reported that they have never been offered membership in a fee-based program, compared to one-quarter for the general population. This would suggest a ripe opportunity for brands and retailers to target their loyalty programs.

“These results should attract the attention of brands considering a shift to fee-based loyalty programs as marketers look for ways to create competitive differences and lock in customer spend against a backdrop of waning program effectiveness and engagement challenges,” LoyaltyOne Consulting associate partner Lance Du Chateau said. “The traditional spend-earn-redeem reward program doesn’t make sense for all companies and customers, and fee-based value propositions increasingly are a topic of conversation. More marketers should explore this approach.”

July 18, 2015

Millennials Prefer Native Apps For Mobile Shopping

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Millennials Prefer Native Apps For Mobile Shopping

Native apps provided better experiences than companies’ mobile sites

A recent survey from Forbes and Stanford that polled more than 1,600 millennial consumers has found that native apps are the preferred tool for mobile shopping.

According to the results, almost half (47 percent) have downloaded at least one mobile shopping app to their smartphone, with Amazon, Etsy, Forever21, and Wanelo ranking as the most popular native app downloads. Millennials also favored apps from Forever 21, Starbucks, JackThreads, and Modcloth.

When asked why they downloaded native apps, 54 percent of the millennials said it was because they offer a better experience than the company’s mobile site, followed by discounts or lower prices (27 percent). Just 2 percent said it was to shop while not on their computer, and 4 percent said using a native app was mandatory to purchase a particular product. This seems counter to prevailing wisdom that states that native apps provide a more personalized shopping experience.

According to Retail Dive, native shopping apps are the latest tools to help retailers cash in as sales executed on mobile devices are expected to nearly double to $280 billion worldwide in 2015. This is particularly true in relation to attracting the millennial customers.

And as Integrated Solutions for Retailers reported, sales via mobile devices are driving revenue. For example,Amazon has announced that sellers on Amazon sold more than 2 billion items worldwide in 2014, setting a new record for sales. In 2014, Amazon also introduced the Amazon Seller App to facilitate the management of sellers’ business on Amazon via their mobile devices. And sellers from more than 100 different countries were able to fulfill orders on Amazon to customers in 185 countries by using Fulfillment by Amazon services.

Coming Soon: Innovative Retail Technologies

We’re rebranding! In time for the Sept/Oct issue, Integrated Solutions For Retailers will become Innovative Retail Technologies. Renew your subscription or subscribe today.

July 1, 2015

5 Subtle But Effective Digital Marketing Strategies

Image credit: Entrepreneur Media Inc.

JUNE 29, 2015

The buzz phrase in digital marketing has been “content is king” over the past few years. As entrepreneurs, we all know the only constant in our world is change. And with that, content marketing is evolving. Most content is creating noise and assaulting our senses as consumers. It is time to maximize our efforts, simplify and build content that engages, acquires and converts.

Welcome to the age of the “sales trailer,” the creative pieces of content that get you to go to the movie that took millions of dollars, teams of talented people and years to create. The same is happening to our businesses: We have the drive and ambition to build incredible products or services and we want to tell everyone everything about it. We need to realize that it’s not about us but about entertaining them — the customers that buy the tickets to our movies.

But it’s no longer how much. Below are the trends I see influencing less-is-more in digital marketing.

1. Precedent set: Apple’s minimalism movement wins

The standard has been set in terms of design, product and messaging. The marriage of boldness and simplicity has changed the digital marketing game forever. The most successful and iconic brands of the day — Apple, Uber, Nike, Google — all market using bold strategies that say very little. Their success is due to creating massive channels of advocates. As well as their ability to brand an instantly recognizable image or slogan that instills particular values and warrants a calculable response.

2. No one really reads, they digitally skim

You are probably skimming this article. I was once told, paper is for the heart, the screen is for the head. The way people consume information has evolved – folks want information quick and easy; infographics, videos, pictures, you name it. Multimodality and omni-channel is the name of the game; people simply don’t have the time (or the desire) to consume information that requires a hefty time investment. Quick bursts that effectively summarize a topic get a message across far more effectively than a lengthy document.

3. Get to the info fast — like right now!

We want our information fast: a picture is worth a thousand words, a video could very well be worth a thousand sales. When I look at new client’s sites or marketing, 90 percent of what I see is endless noise. We fall into a habit of throwing so many words at the audience, very little of which make a genuine impact. Poorly marketed information nets minimal attention. Marketers must get to the point as soon as humanly possible through highly relevant and deliberate diction. Spread through the right channels, the right content is the difference maker and can create an astounding impact, even with just a few words.

4. Get advocates to spread your message.

In the current world of shares, follows and likes, build content I want to send to my friends, post to my followers and connect with emotionally.

Say it quickly and say it well. Content has to be exciting and it has to stand on its own legs so it can essentially market itself. Remarkable content speaks for itself and creates peer-to-peer endorsements.

Make your message something meaningful so people feel the urge to spread it. From there, sit back and watch as the digital marketing ecosystem works itself.

5. Sales trailers, no more books

So many tell their story around a product feature, advantage or benefit. The core of your digital brand is in your story. Craft a message that resonates, engages and impacts your audience emotionally. Take that story and whiteboard a piece of creative with your team only about that message and belief. Let everything else follow from there. Your team will start sharing it and then others will follow. Eventually, you will sell tickets to your movie and consumers will get the whole story, but start with the trailer.

May 25, 2015

How to Use a Mobile App to Increase Repeat Business

Studies show that it is more cost effective to market to existing customers, than it is to acquire new ones. With that being said, a Custom Mobile App is the PERFECT tool to help you do just that! Mostly people these days spend a good number of their time on their mobile phones. From playing games, surfing, shopping, paying bills to contacting their friends and family members, everything is now so simple, time efficient and straightforward.

Today almost all businesses have websites, and the mobile app is also becoming a staple in most business’ marketing repertoire. For a business to not only survive but thrive, it is imperative that all avenues to connect and engage with perspective clients be embraced.

Some Recent Mobile Apps Success Stories

Denim Industries, Back to Cali, Organico Vitamins and Natural Touch Rehab, are all Small Business Success Stories. Each of the apps developed by these savvy businesses helps in different ways. Some of them aid in driving traffic to their bricks & mortar locations, some keep clients informed of appointments and policies while all give the business owner the ability to enhance their companies perception with their clients. Many of the apps also have full scale loyalty programs built in, as well as a plethora of marketing tools, add that to the not too subtle ability to have your logo on a device that is used by your customer constantly.

Benefits

Companies need to build an app that boost up its repeat business using mobile coupons, loyalty programs, real-time deals and much more. A company can drive customer engagement when and where it counts with push notifications and location-based messaging. These apps help a lot in promoting brands plus the spread awareness among your customers about your business. You can provide social sharing tools and options so that not only the purchases will be made but customers will be able to share their experiences too, thus giving your content the ability to go viral.

These apps help company in sending news alerts, information about new products, coupons and deals to their customers. No longer does a business have to rely on marketing efforts that are not able to reach a customer effectively. Today a business that has their customers download their apps, have the ability to reach them 24/7, and not only reach them, but know that they are receiving their messages. Traditional paper advertisements or other media channels, are pretty expensive and are less likely to be noticed by most of the customers. Mobile apps help you boosting your repeat business by targeting people that want to receive your content.

March 25, 2015

App Install Addiction Shows No Signs of Stopping

By: Simon Khalaf

It has been just over four years since Apple was awarded a trademark for “There’s an App for That.” Since then, mobile apps have multiplied at an accelerated pace and have even surpassed the weband TV in total time spent. Lately, however, many industry analysts cautioned that in mature markets such as the US and South Korea the rate of app downloads is decelerating and the app market is reaching a saturation point. For example, in August of this year, CNN Money ran a segment on app overload and the slowdown of app downloads. This fall, Paul Adams of Intercom, wrote a thoughtful and provocative post on the future of apps, predicting that apps will become more of a service layer, replaced by enhanced notifications as the consumer interface. At Flurry, we were curious to see whether our Analytics data validated these theories, so we took a look. We found that consumers are still downloading apps at very nearly the same rate since 2011.

Deceleration? What Deceleration?

For our research, we focused on the US, one of the most mature app markets. We found that in the US, consumers are downloading apps at the same rate over the past four years. The chart below shows the number of apps an average US consumer downloads per month from 2011 till now. On average, US consumers are downloading 8.8 apps per month in 2014, compared to 8.8 apps in 2013, 8.6 apps in 2012 and 8.9 apps in 2011. This is both iOS apps downloaded from the Apple AppStore and Android Apps downloaded from Google Play or any other Android App store operating in the US. That is a lot of apps downloaded by a single consumer.

This means that there is actually very little change in the rate of downloads since 2011. It doesn’t mean that consumers are continuously using all the apps they’ve downloaded over the years. In fact, they are not. You can look at previous research we’ve published where we shared the half life of apps and their rate of decay.

In our research, we also looked at the percentage of apps downloaded as a result of app marketing (or app install ads) by dividing the estimated yearly app install ads market in the US by the average Cost Per Install (CPI) in the same year. Despite the fascinating growth of app install ads, the vast majority of app downloads are still organic. In fact in 2014, 93% of all app downloads in the US were organic, compared to 95% in 2011. The only thing on a slight decline here is organic downloads. This is a very small change and a further validation of the growth opportunities in app marketing in general and app install ads in particular.

“Install Addicts” Are Keeping up the Pace

We dug a little deeper into our data to gain better insight into the US consumers responsible for these steady download numbers. The distribution is shown in the chart below. The majority of consumers (54%) are actually downloading less than eight apps per month. What is keeping the average up is a new segment of mobile consumers that we are calling “Install Addicts.” These are US consumers that download more than 17 apps a month. This includes apps downloaded on all smart devices such consumer owns. This segment represents 20% of the US mobile consumer base or an estimated 32 million people.

The Profile of “Install Addicts”

We were intrigued by the large number of Install Addicts, so we dug a little deeper in our data to better understand the audience behind these 32 million US consumers.

First we looked at gender. Install Addicts are 53% female and 47% male, compared to 48% female and 52% male for the average mobile consumer. That means that females over-index by 10% compared to the average mobile consumer.

We then looked at age groups. Install Addicts over-indexed in the 13-17 (Teens), 18-24 (College Students) and 35-54 (Middle Aged) age groups and under indexed in the 25-34 (Adults) and 55+ (Seniors) age groups.

The analysis gets a lot more interesting when we looked at the differences in Flurry Personas. On the female side, the following Personas over-indexed as Install Addicts: Gamers, Mothers and Social Enthusiasts. For males, the following Personas over-indexed as Install Addicts: Gamers, Social Enthusiasts and Parenting and Education.

The “over-index” is shown in the chart below. It refers to the division of the percentage reach of that Persona in the Install Addict segment compared to the percentage reach of that Persona for the average mobile consumer. For example, in the female Install Addicts segment, Mothers are 32% of the total, compared to 4% of the average female mobile consumers. In other words, female Install Addicts are much more likely to be Mothers than non-Addicts.

Looking at the three charts above and comparing this Install Addicts audience to the mobile addict audience we highlighted earlier this year, it is becoming clearer to us that what we call family devices (or shared devices, or hand-me-down devices) make up a good chunk of the Install Addicts audience. Such devices are for the mother or the father, but the children (teens) have access (and most likely passwords) to them and routinely visit the App Stores and download their new favorite app.

It is also hard for us to ignore the over-indexing of the Social Enthusiast persona. This is the Flurry Persona of consumers that heavily use social apps, including messaging apps and photo and video sharing apps. It could be a mere coincidence that Install Addicts are also messaging and social networking addicts, but it could also indicate that consumers are discovering apps through social and messaging applications. In the United States, both Facebook and Twitter have solid app install businesses. In Japan and China, LINE and Tencent, respectively, have bet big on game and app distribution, organic and paid, as lines of business. While it is still hard to measure the true impact of social discovery on app downloads, the chart above seems to indicate a big one.

We are a week away from the height of the holiday season, one that traditionally accelerates app downloads and brings app developers in general and game developers in particular more consumers to their apps. But as the data above suggests and as the past four years have demonstrated, app developers don’t need to wait for Saint Nick. They simply need to keep hoping for app install addiction to keep going strong.

March 16, 2015

What our Customers Have to Say!

We have recently received a great testimonial video from one of our customers. Danny, the owner of Denim Industries has been with us for approximately 1 year, and has received a great response to his “Denim” app from his customers. According to Danny ” it took a while to grow my user base, but now we have customers coming in for our ‘App Only’ promotions, and all of our regulars have really enjoyed the fact that they now earn rewards. I even had one customer bring her friends from out of town to the store, and encouraged her to purchase a thousand dollar jacket and she took the points.”

Danny From Denim Industries

Sunshine Greer from Cuppa Sunshine Coffee & Tea had this to say:

“OMG!!! Love the new feature that asks # of punches so we don’t have to punch it in so many times for multiple drinks!! awesome!! If you want to market this to coffee houses on the west coast (Seattle area), I can write you a coffee house specific review. You guys (maybe you are just a one man team?) are the best!! Thanks,

Sunshine=) ”

Ahmad from Organico Vitamins :

“That is even more AWESOME. I am running out of adjectives. Now I have to start thinking about putting together rewards format. What great news to start our day. Everyone is excited and cannot wait. Actually you may get some referrals from other merchants also. They had asked me who did my APP. This is my top priority so everything is secondary. We need to have this off the launching pad as quickly as possible!”

Sam from Back to Cali:

“Having our very own app on the app stores gives us that extra credibility, that has not only helped with customers, but with our suppliers. Before this, my emailed newsletters, were getting absolutely NO attention from my customers, any promotion taking place in store would have to be repeated because they weren’t opening my emails. NOW, however, I have customers visiting weekly with phone in hand asking me to point out the newest items (in store) showing on their app!

-Sam

Ben from Audio Basics:

My only regret when purchasing my custom app is NOT DOING IT SOONER! It’s given my business to a whole new level of sophistication. So visually & aesthetically pleasing, has my clients thinking we are an industry giant with multiple locations!!! -Ben

Oral from Natural Touch Rehab:

At first look, I felt the idea of the app didn’t really fit for our clinic, but it’s actually much more than i envisioned!! The “notification’ feature has really helped us stay connected to our patients. Our patient response times have never been quicker! Every time a new update is available, me and my staff can’t wait to see what feature have been added! Good Job guys!

-Oral

February 2, 2015

Costs of Custom App Development

Figuring the costs of custom mobile business app development

How much are custom mobile business apps going to cost you? Here are some estimates, analyses and offers we’ve found that should help set some reasonable expectations.

General app development costs

This post is primarily about apps for for mobilizing business processes, but if you are interested in the more general topic of app development costs here are some pointers:

Business app development costs

Surveys

Update: A November 2014 Kinvey report based on a survey of CIOs and Mobile Leaders found that mobile application development is “costly, slow and frustrating.” According to this survey:

56 percent of mobile leaders surveyed say it takes from 7 months to more than one year to build one app. 18 percent say they spend from $500,000 to over $1,000,000 per app, with an average of $270,000 per app.

Source: Kinvey Survey

A survey of IT professionals conducted in 2013 by AnyPresence, a backend-as-a-service company, asked about the initial cost of developing a typical mobile application. Over half reported spending more than three months and over $50,000 developing a typical app. Very nearly a quarter reported spending over $100,000.

Analyses

App development company Propelics specializes in iPad apps and posted a very informative blog post in December 2011 with a breakdown of iPad app development costs. This is recommended reading on the difference between consumer and enterprise apps. In a nutshell, Propelics describes three levels of complexity in enterprise apps corresponding to three price ranges:

Simple Enterprise iPad App Development Cost: $50,000 (+/- 20%)
Medium Enterprise iPad App Development Cost: $100,000 (+/- 20%)
Complex Enterprise iPad App Development Cost: $150,000 (and up)

Features that bump an app into the $100,000 range include a branded and highly tuned user experience, and integration that leverages your existing enterprise capabilities. For real-time integration, mobile device management (MDM) and mobile application management (MAM) infrastructure, you enter the $150,000+ category.

In a late 2012 webinar Propelics reiterated these figures in the context of mobile budget planning for 2013.

An October 2012 post provided some very detailed estimates by the CTO of 5App and his conclusion:

It’s safe to assume that using traditional development techniques to create a cross-platform enterprise app won’t come in under £100K.

He lays out a grid splitting out costs for design, development and testing on one, two or three platforms for four app categories. Here are some example estimates (converted from GBP to USD for comparison to other estimates here):

An app that extracts data from a database and displays it in a simple list can be expected to take 4-8 weeks to create at a cost of $26,000 on a single platform.
An app with more complex server-side integration and offline data caching will probably take 8-12 weeks and cost $71,000 to develop for two platforms.
A full-scale enterprise automation app with integration to business processes will take anything from 3-6 months and may cost over $150,000 to develop on three platforms.
Assorted Quotes
An October 2012 analysis of why enterprise apps fail begins with this rather revealing anecdote:
The head of digital for a major UK interactive agency shut the door and slid the iPad across the table with a pained smile. Her team had developed an app for a major financial services firm. $140,000 and six months later they were about to start again. The client was, unsurprisingly, unhappy.
Kevin Benedict:
Companies are under tremendous pressure to develop and deploy mobile apps for their business systems, yet the traditional approach to mobile app development typically costs $250K+ and takes 6+ months for a single app.
StarMobile:
Based upon complexity, the initial costs to develop a native enterprise application for one mobile device platform can range from $50,000 to $250,000. Those costs grow exponentially if you need that app to support multiple mobile device platforms.

December 22, 2014

Mobile App vs Mobile Website

November 21, 2014

A Mobile App – A gift that keeps on Giving!

No longer hold the belief that building loyalty is through discounting, but rather by building a strong bond between brand and customer. The connections that customers attach to a brand must also be considered as being added value. Businesses that have already made their brand mobile and sociable have risen to the top by prioritizing loyalty and by developing emotional connections with their customer.

The customer is the heart of a business, and a good way to increase customer satisfaction is to keep the customers needs central to all business operations, from the top down. Furthermore, by incorporating current technology to ensure a business provides the customer service that consumers expect, business owners can expect to turn that loyalty into increased revenue and a healthier bottom line.

The most anticipated holiday season of the year is only 30 days away businesses must be prepared to leverage this technology to increase customer retention which will translate into a successful Christmas season!

Here are a few steps you can take to ensure that your Holiday Season is the best one yet!

1. Content Marketing – Keep it fun and reflective of the season, special promos and themes

2. Discounted Shipping – Offer special rates for delivery

3. Social Media – Make regular updates, especially during the holidays when usage is at its peak!

4. Customer Service – OVER DELIVER!

5. Support a Local Charity – Tis the season for giving…setup a promotion with a local charity

6. Appify – Get a gift that keeps on giving – to your customers! Mobile apps can update customers on current events and offers that your business has, and with features like push notifications, you will have access to your customers 24/7!