With just about any business these days, how well you handle customers is crucial in defining your reputation and how fast your business spreads via word of mouth. One of the early problems that my wife and I faced with our online store was how to deal with incoming calls from customers. After all, it was just the two of us and we weren’t equipped to handle large volumes of calls nor did we have an easy way to manage the calls that we did receive.

Photo By Dan Brady

Especially if you have small customer support team or even just a single person manning the phone lines, it is important to have some sort of virtual phone system in place. By handling your phone calls via the web or through a computer virtually, you can make it appear as though you have a large customer support team even though you might have only one or two people.

Not only that, but you can easily correlate and track your online marketing efforts with the customers that call. Voice over IP technology has improved a lot over the years and there’s a lot of cool things that you can do with it. Here are just a few.

You Can Easily Track Conversions From Outside Marketing Campaigns Like Adwords

One of the main problems with Adwords or any other PPC marketing campaign for that matter is that if you end up taking an order over the phone, the conversion tracking that Google provides does not log the sale. This is problematic because it could completely throw off the way you evaluate your keywords. Certain keywords might only bring in phone customers which may make them seem less effective than they really are.

With a virtual phone service, it’s really easy to allocate different numbers to different marketing campaigns. As a result, you can assign a special phone number just for people that arrive at your online store through Adwords and display a completely different number for everyone else. That way when they call, you can easily log and correlate a sale to a specific Adwords customer. This method of tracking works for any marketing campaign that you might want to run. Adding and subtracting phone numbers is as easy as clicking on a tab on the virtual phone system’s website.

By tracking your customer calls through a specific number, it also makes it easier for you to pinpoint a particular customer using the live tracking features of your shopping cart. For example if an Adwords customer calls, I can usually narrow them down, pull up their statistics on the spot and see which products they were looking at as well as which keywords they used to arrive at our site. It’s very powerful.

You Can Route Calls To Different Departments

So what if you only have one or two people running the phone lines! By setting up a greeting with menu prompts to route calls to different departments, you can easily track the types of calls you get with your business. Are the majority of your calls about returns or delivery times? Are the questions mostly about a particular product line? By analyzing this data, you can easily observe trends and figure out ways to tweak your website to reduce these types of calls. Most importantly, separating your calls into departments allows you to prioritize your calls so that you know which ones to follow up with ASAP.

For example, you might want to address all angry customers in the “complaints” department first before calling back those customers with regular product inquiries. In any case, you get the picture. The other side benefit is that your small customer service department will appear larger than it really is.

You Can Easily Record Calls

It’s weird listening to yourself talk, but recording and replaying previous customer calls is a great way to improve you customer service skills. Did you handle that last irate customer the right way? Is one of your employees not treating customers that way you would like? At one touch of a button, you can easily record any call that you receive.

Keeping recorded calls comes in especially handy if there’s any dispute in regards to store policy or if there’s a discrepancy between what was promised and what was actually delivered.

You Can Manage All Calls, All Voicemails, And All Call Transcripts From A Single Interface

When you first open your online store, this might not seem like that big of a deal. But a virtual phone system allows you to manage all live customer interaction by logging into a single website. As soon as a customer calls, you can immediately pull up their entire call history. Did this customer order via phone before? Was this customer difficult to deal with in the past?

You can even jot down notes about a particular customer based on their phone number so that you can provide a more personal experience the next time they call. Good virtual phone services have easy integration to popular CRM software packages as well. After a conversation is over, you can log the customer’s details in a database for future reference. This is extremely powerful especially if you want to provide a customized experience for your customers.

A good example of this is with my dentist. Even though I see my dentist once every six months for my cleaning, she always seems to remember specific details about my life. “How’s your son doing? He should be 6 months old by now”. “The last time you were here, you mentioned it was your anniversary. How did that go?” I used to be completely flabbergasted that my dentist remembered our conversations so clearly until I accidentally peeked at her notebook and saw that she pulled this data from a printout. Even still, that personal touch really worked on me until I discovered the truth.

You Can Forward A Single Number To Any Phone That You Want

This feature is awesome. With a virtual phone system, you can give out one number to your customers but have it ring any phone that you want. You can even have it ring different phone numbers in a round robin fashion if you want to evenly distribute customer calls to several employees.

If you have two people in your customer support team, you can route all morning calls to one employee and then route all afternoon calls to the other employee. If you happen to be on the road or away from your desk, you can simply set the forwarding number to your cell phone at one click of a button. If you don’t have the answer to a customer’s question, you can simply forward the call live to someone else who can help.

Having full control over your phone calls saves a lot of time and headaches. One of the most important features of a virtual phone system is the ability to queue up calls. Every phone call matters and it’s always better to have a customer hold for a few minutes rather than turning them over to voice mail. There’s no way a regular phone line can do this.

You Can Track Your Calling Trends

By analyzing the patterns of when and where your calls are coming from, you can observe certain trends about your customers. Do you get more calls in the morning or at night? Are most of your callers from a specific region?

Our business for example gets most of its calls in the morning and the phone lines almost go completely silent after 1pm PST. In addition, most of the calls we get are from the Midwest. Why is this information useful? It means that we can optimize our efforts by skewing our support hours more heavily towards the morning. If my wife has to schedule an appointment, she’ll schedule it in the afternoon.

It’s Not That Expensive

After reading about all of the cool things that you can do with a virtual phone system, you might assume that the service is too expensive. Wrong! If all you want to do is forward calls from a single number to any number that you want, Google Voice will do that for you for free. But even if you want the fully featured phone system, a service like Ring Central only costs $10 dollars month. No what the size of your business is, it makes sense to have a virtual phone system. After all, your reputation is at stake.

Every now and then, an angry or dissatisfied customer will call us on our customer support line and it’s not a pleasant situation to deal with. No matter how good your products are or how good your quality control is, inevitably some customer won’t be happy with some part of your business. And the worst part is that the customer may not always be reasonable. No business is immune to this. If you run your business long enough, getting an angry or unreasonable customer will eventually happen. It’s inevitable.

Don’t Let Customers Leave Angry

Photo By Josh Janssen

Due to the rise of social media, blogging, twitter and other lightning fast means of communication, it’s crucial that you pacify angry customers quickly and efficiently. All it takes is just one tweet, blog post or facebook entry and your reputation could be permanently marred. The fact is, you never know who you are pissing off. With the ubiquitous rise of blogging, all it takes is one article written by an angry blogger and you’ll immediately see negative articles about your store alongside your search rankings in Google. And any negative press is bad for business.

Just take a look at the many companies that have taken reputation hits across the web. Chances are you’ve seen the video of the UPS guy who delivered packages by throwing them 20 ft from his truck. Surely, you’ve read at least some negative article or tweet about Best Buy and their sketchy business practices. Granted, these are both large companies but your little online store can be susceptible to bad press as well no matter how small you are.

Having great customer service is becoming increasingly important for all stores. Here’s how my wife and I deal with angry customers including those who make unreasonable requests. 99% of your customers will never complain but how you deal with that remaining 1% will define your reputation. No customer should be left fuming if you can help it. If you handle the situation correctly, you can even turn a dissatisfied customer into a walking billboard for your business.

We Mentally Prepare Ourselves To Take A Profit Hit

If you take away one thing from this article, it’s that your time, reputation and mental health is far more important than trying to save a few bucks of profit from the sale of your product. If you let it happen, dealing with angry customers can drain away your life force and piss the living hell out of you at the same time. In most cases, it’s not worth it.

Back in the early days, I used to get really worked up and expend a lot of mental energy with dissatisfied customers when I finally came to the realization that all of this mental anguish was over 50 bucks. Let’s see now….what’s worth more? 50 bucks or my sanity and the potential for a PR disaster? It may take some time, but you’ll come to realize that money isn’t the only factor.

Principles Shminciples

In maintaining a high level of customer service, we sometimes place our principles in the back seat. Whenever an angry customer calls, the first thing I determine within the first few minutes of the conversation is whether the customer is at fault in any way. If the customer is not at fault, then I take steps to rectify the situation even if we are not the ones responsible.

For example, I’d say 90% of the complaints we get are shipping related. Sometimes, the package is not delivered on time. Sometimes, a package gets lost. Even though technically it’s not our fault, we always take responsibility. If an order hasn’t arrived and there is still time to meet their deadline, we immediately ship them another order at no extra charge. If the order arrives too late and we are aware of their deadline, we give them a full refund including any return shipping fees. We NEVER just blame the shipping carrier and have the customer chase down their package themselves.

What If A Customer Doesn’t Like Our Products?

Most of the time, dealing with angry customers who don’t like our products is easy because we have a fairly flexible return policy. Within 30 days, a customer can make a return and we simply credit their card back with no questions asked. End of story.

But it’s much trickier when a customer orders a personalized product from us which are all final sales. If a customer is dissatisfied with a non returnable item, we usually do one of four things. Please note that how we behave is situational and depends on the customers behavior. If they are extremely rude and caustic, then we usually do nothing. But since we are in the wedding industry, we try to be understanding for every situation.

• We offer to reship another of the same item at no additional cost. This usually only applies to personalized items in which the stitching may not have been done cleanly.
• We discount the item. Sometimes the customer is on the borderline between perceived quality and cost so a discount can rectify the situation
• We offer up some sort of freebie. For example, if they have ordered a personalized towel, we might send them some blank matching ones for free.
• We offer them a different replacement item at a heavily discounted price.

The key to pacifying an enraged customer is to immediately disarm the anger by proactively taking action. The impact of the action doesn’t have to be big as long as you demonstrate that you are making an effort to rectify the situation. Angry customers are prepared for confrontation so if you give them some sort of nugget right away, they will calm down almost instantly. And once they are calm, it is much easier to both agree to a mutually beneficial outcome.

What If The Customer Is Completely Unreasonable?

Once in a blue moon, we get a customer who is completely insane and makes unreasonable demands. I think we’ve only had one or two of these cases, but in general we point them to our store policies which are clearly defined on our website. If you don’t have such a page on your online store website, make one.

Outside of that, we try to remain polite and amiable. If it can be helped, we try not to put the customer on the spot and commiserate with their situation. We also try to propose possible solutions to their problem and point them to people they can contact to get help. What’s an example of an unreasonable customer? Check out our customer story about The Overdraft Fee Fiasco. The other thing I forgot to mention is that we document all of our unreasonable and unusual customer interactions for our own records. Specifically, we make sure to archive any and all email correspondence. That way if something slanderous were ever to arise, we could produce documentation to dispute it.

We Factor In The Costs

Of course, catering to angry customers comes at a cost for the way we handle customer support. At the end of the year, we tally up all of the additional costs due to dissatisfied customers and raise prices if need be to compensate for it. So far, we haven’t had to drastically raise prices as dissatisfied customers have been extremely rare. The key is to anticipate these situations and set aside a budget for it so you can take a profit hit without worrying about it too much.

By handling customer service this way, we’ve turned profit losses into free advertising. When you go above and beyond to please a customer, they will talk to their friends about it and the word will spread. You just have to have faith.

If you are interested, I’ve documented many of our wacky customer interactions in our Customer Stories Section. If you need a good laugh, check them out.

How many of you check your Google Analytics stats religiously at least once a day? How many of you check your stats live using Woopra or some other real time stat tracking software? If you run an online store or sell goods online, do you actually go to your website as a customer on a regular basis to look around?

Photo By Gerlos

Informally, I asked a handful of my webmaster friends these exact questions and most of them said “yes” to the first two questions and “no” to the last. In fact, the webmasters I spoke to rarely visit their site at all unless they need to make a change. They rely mostly on analytics data to observe the health of their website.

There’s Just Too Much Data

Have you looked at your analytics data recently? Of course you have. The fact is, there’s just too much data. Sure, you might have detailed statistics on how customers enter and exit the various pages on your site. You might have conversion data that outlines your ROI and which pages generate the most traffic.

But the #1 problem is that your web analytics tools only provide you with the numbers. Then it’s up to you. Somehow, you have to take these vast databases of data and create quantifiable action items to improve your website. And this can be extremely hard to do especially if you only look at the raw data. Since you face a deluge of data every single day, it’s really easy to miss out on simple things that could easily be found by actually going to your own website.

Eat Your Own Dog Food. Be Your Own Customer.

Imagine that! Visit your own website! Surprisingly enough, we all don’t do this enough. The truth is that the best ways to identify and fix problems with your site is if you actually immerse yourself and understand how a customer feels when they enter your website.

I’ll be the first one to admit that I’ve been guilty of this for quite a while now. Below is an example of what I found just a few months ago when I thoroughly browsed my site and tried to buy something online.

• I noticed several subtle typos in my product descriptions where I copy/pasted from other products. For example, we carry several of our products in 2 colors, white and ivory. In going through the product descriptions, I noticed that a few of the ivory items had “ivory” in the title, but the product description indicated that it was white. So which is it? White or ivory? No doubt this has confused our customers.
• One of our personalized items was missing a user input field for personalization. No wonder no one has ever purchased this product before!! Imagine buying a personalized product that can’t be personalized! And I thought this whole time that it was just an unpopular product.
• One of our craft pages was extremely slow to load because I accidentally included a full size version of a photo that was shrunk down using HTML instead of using a lower resolution photo. As a result, this page was trying to download a 3 MB file every time.
• I noticed during checkout that the address fields were a bit out of order when entering a separate billing vs shipping address. For example, the field order should be name, address, city, state, zipcode. However, the actual field order on the separate shipping address page was name, address, zip code, city, state. What ended up happening was that I accidentally typed in the city in the zip code field which was quite annoying. And the sad thing is that this problem had been on our site for quite a long time because I never bothered to checkout with a different shipping address.

Numbers Are Worthless Without Context

When was the last time you looked at your analytics numbers and actually did something about it? Having all of the data in front of you is nice. But in most cases, they will do nothing for you or your website because they are just meaningless numbers until they are correlated.

Would I have caught the problems I described with my website above by looking at analytics data? Maybe, but highly unlikely. I’d have to have noticed fairly minute trends amongst months and years of data. I’d have to have a general idea about the problem I was looking for.

99% of the time, the numbers won’t be nearly as helpful as a simple trip to your website.

When was the last time you typed in your company name in Google and looked at how your company comes up in the search results? Would you visit your own site based on your meta descriptions?

When was the last time you looked at how your Adwords ads come up compared to your competitors. Would you click on your own ads? Are they compelling?

When was the last time you actually tried to find a specific product in your online store? How good is your search? Are your products organized in a logical fashion?

When was the last time you contacted your own customer service department? Are your employees representing your company the way you want them to be? Is it a pain in the ass to make a return?

When was the last time you reviewed your email marketing campaigns?

Type In Your URL

Go ahead. You can do it. Type in your URL right now and take a look around. Go shopping. Only through putting on your customer’s shoes will you come to terms with how bad your site really is and how you can improve. Take a page out of my neurotic customer feedback techniques and get out there and ask/beg for some feedback.

Call or email people who have received their orders already and see how you can improve. We never hear from 99% of our customers after they have made a purchase. I used to think that this was a good thing but who knows? Maybe they were secretly dissatisfied and are now telling their friends about it. It’s best to know the truth and the best way is to dig down deep within the trenches. Don’t get me wrong. Analytics and numbers have their place, but going down to ground zero is the best way to go.

I received a question from a reader the other day in regards to whether product liability insurance is necessary for a business even if one is protected by limited liability via an LLC or corporation. Specifically, he wanted to know whether it was worth paying for insurance for a pass through entity like an LLC or S Corp which carries no profits within the business. Whenever someone asks me this question, I always say yes no matter the nature of the business but it largely depends on your risk tolerance.

Photo By IXQUICK

Especially if you are running a business in the United States, the chances of getting sued are higher than you think and it really doesn’t take much for someone to take you to court.

There’s also a common misconception when it comes to limited liability with an LLC or corporation that most people may not be aware of. For one thing, limited liability doesn’t apply in the following circumstances.

• You have acted in a negligent or irresponsible manner.
• You have done something illegal with your business whether you are aware of it or not
• You have signed a personal guarantee for a loan
• You have mixed your personal expenses with your business expenses. In other words, you are not treating your business as a separate entity

What Do You Stand To Lose?

Let’s say that you don’t fall into any of the categories above and you run your LLC or corporation by the book. What do you stand to lose? With a pass through entity, you might not think that you have much at stake but think about it this way.

If you lose a lawsuit, your entire business is at risk. The plaintiff can take away your website, your business and all of your business assets. Even worse, you will lose a piece of your mental health. After all, you worked hard to get your business up and running and insurance will help prevent it from being taken away from you.

What Else Isn’t Covered With An LLC Or Corporation?

The other thing that is often overlooked is the major hassle involved if you do in fact get sued. If you don’t have insurance, you have to go through the trouble of responding to the complaint, possibly hiring a lawyer and handling everything yourself.

If you have business insurance however, you just let your insurance company know about the complaint and they will take it from there. Often times, they have lawyers in house that will respond and handle the paperwork for you similar to how a car insurance policy works. Having this peace of mind is absolutely worth it.

In general, business liability insurance protects your small business in the event of a lawsuit for personal injury and/or property damages. It will cover the damages from the lawsuit in addition to any legal costs involved.

What Are The Different Types Of Insurance?

• Product Liability Insurance: This is the category that our wedding linens business falls into. If you sell or manufacture products, product liability insurance will protect you in the event that a customer becomes injured while using your stuff. For our wedding linens business, you might think that it would be difficult for someone to get injured using our napkins or handkerchiefs. But for example, someone could sue us if they weren’t happy with the quality of our product which in turn might have ruined their wedding and caused them mental anguish. It’s ridiculous I know, but it could happen. The amount of coverage and the level of risk depends on your business type. For us, we don’t have to pay as much for insurance because our business is considered fairly safe.
• General Liability Insurance: General liability insurance is the main coverage that protects your business from injury claims, property damage, and advertising claims. As the name implies, this is an all encompassing policy for your business and might be the only thing you need depending on what your business sells.
• Professional Liability Insurance: If you provide business services of any kind, you should probably get professional liability insurance. This coverage protects your business against malpractice, errors, negligence and omissions. Depending on what you do, you might be legally obligated to purchase this insurance. For example, all doctors are required to carry malpractice insurance.

Don’t Risk It

There is more at stake than you think when you don’t purchase insurance. If anything, you should consider your mental health. Are you willing to risk losing all the hard work you put into your business? Are you willing to deal with all of the hassle involved if you do in fact get sued?

Think of your LLC or corporation as bankruptcy insurance. Sure, you can’t lose it all but you sure can lose enough for it to be extremely painful. Check with your local insurance company to see if the costs are worth it.

Marketing your online business and attracting customers to your ecommerce store or sales page is much harder than marketing a blog or any other type of website. Why? It’s because no one really cares about your business. Nobody really wants to know what you have to sell and no one likes being led to a sales page. Even if you think you’re offering the most magnificent products ever, by default people are going to ignore you unless they know who you are.

Photo by RBarney.com

People Hate Sales Pages On Social Media

Marketing your business on social media is all the rage right now but simply posting your online store URL on Twitter or Facebook is not going to get you customers. For one thing, most people are extremely suspicious of any type of sales page they encounter. Anything that even resembles a product page is just going to get passed on.

For example, whenever I click on my stumbleupon button or a twitter link and am taken to page full of products, I get pissed off and immediately leave. 99.9% of the time, I’m using social media to do research, to read about what others are up to or to just relax. My marketing and BS sensors are on full alert and I hate being led to a random store or ecommerce site.

Similarly, I hate it when I’m on the forums and I notice that someone has randomly dropped a link to their ecommerce website. Simply blasting your website URL to uninterested parties is not going to work because no one is paying attention!

You Need To Create A Connection

The other thing you need to realize is that customers don’t necessarily shop at your store because of your products per se. They are shopping at your store because you have created a connection somehow. They want to buy from you because of the personality your store projects.

The best way to illustrate this point is to tell a story about an experience I had at a company I used to work for. At the time, I was a hardware engineer designing circuit boards and I had to select a device to use in my design from 2 competing manufacturers.

Company #1 was the leader in their field. They produced devices that were technologically superior to every one else. Feature wise, their product was the device of choice among developers. Company #2 was not as well known but had a decent product. However from a technical standpoint, their product was not as powerful as Company #1 but adequate for most applications.

In any case, it should have been a no brainer to go with Company #1, but ultimately I went with Company #2 and a lesser known product. Why? It’s because Company #2 projected this aura of really caring for their customers and providing superior customer support.

Because Company #1 was already the leader, they didn’t dedicate as many resources in trying to help me integrate their device into my design. Finding literature and documentation was more difficult as well because I had to manually request access to each document, a process which often took several days.

Meanwhile, Company #2 had a very open philosophy with their documentation and it really showed on their website. All of their content was freely available and as a result I got to know their products better and felt more comfortable using their devices. Whenever I had any questions, they immediately sent an engineer over to help even for the most minor of problems. Over time, I even became friends with the sales guy and FAE.

I continued to use Company #2’s devices throughout my entire stint at my job and never even considered switching, ever. I was a loyal customer for life.

The key takeaway here is that the superior product isn’t always the one that sells and the decision to buy is not always about the product itself. If you can establish some sort of connection to your customers through your website or customer service, then you will have the upper hand. In fact, that is one of the main ways that a small niche store or boutique can take on a larger business. The key is to make people want to buy from you and no one else. And to do that you need to make your store standout. Company #2 snagged me as a customer because their emphasis on good customer service was plastered all over their website.

The Secret To Marketing A Niche Online Store

So what is the secret to marketing your store? **Drum roll** The secret to marketing your online store is to keep your customer engaged with your website by showing them your personality. The secret is to keep your customer so interested in what you have to say that they don’t even realize that you are selling to them. And to accomplish this feat, you need to have engaging content.

In fact, I would argue that you shouldn’t think of your online store as a store at all. You should think of your ecommerce site as a content site that happens to sell products. Similar to a blog, if you have good content, the word will eventually spread, people will link to your website and you’ll get tons of organic traffic without having to spend much on advertising.

For our store, my wife and I engage customers by providing useful craft tutorials and other projects that can be created with our products for free. 70% of our web traffic comes directly through our content pages and a good portion of this traffic eventually goes on to purchase from us. I would say that initially, many of our customers don’t even visit our website to shop. Instead, they read about some of our cool DIY wedding projects and want to make it themselves. In the future, we also plan on adding video tutorials to our store as well.

Bottom line, the more you can engage with customers, the more you’ll be able to sell. Instead of a direct sales pitch, show them that you are a real person and that you are passionate and care about your products.

If you want to see a great example of this, take a look at what Jessica Kim does with her ecommerce site at Babbaco.com. To understand what I mean, take a few minutes and check out her blog and watch a few videos. In order to be successful, simply listing your products online is just not going to cut it especially when you are just a small niche store with no reputation. Strive to make your business stand out! Let customers know what you are good at and pound that idea home.

This is a guest post by Alban who is a personal finance writer. He offers information on how to effectively use a credit card and helps people to compare credit cards online.

Owning a small business is a big responsibility as you have to take care of your clients, provide them with the best service and manage your business success for the sake of your employees as well. However, having a small business credit card is an even bigger responsibility because business credit card spending can quickly get out of control, and instead of making your bookkeeping easier to manage, your business credit card could turn your business dream into a nightmare.

Instead, maximize the use of your small business credit card by understanding when and when not to use it, and follow these top three tips for small business owners using credit cards in their business.

How to use your small business credit card

While there are similarities in the behaviours you will need to exercise when using your small business credit card compared to your personal card, there are also important things you will need to keep in mind:

Editor’s Note: Many business credit cards offer an interest free period even if you delay your payment as long as you pay off your balance in full.

• Use your interest free days for cash flow. In a small business you can often be waiting on your customers to pay you, before you can pay your own bills. Unfortunately this waiting can often lead to your business running costs such as the phone and the power going unpaid, and can see you having to put off paying for new equipment, advertising or repairs until you can afford it. Well, if you have already invoiced your customers and they’re simply taking their time in paying, you can utilise the interest free days on your small business credit card to keep your business running. The interest free period on most credit cards will run to as many as 55 days which is often plenty of time to wait for your invoices to be paid. In the meantime you can be spending on your credit card to keep your cash flow flowing and your business running smoothly.
• Pay off your balance in full before the end of the interest free period. It is important to avoid accruing interest on your small business credit card because interest charges can easily get out of control, especially on large balances. Therefore, when your customers do finally pay, make sure you pay off your credit card balance in full.
• Keep personal transactions off your business credit card. Just because you are the owner of the small business to which the credit card has been issued, it doesn’t make the card your personal spending tool. Your small business credit card is issued in your business name and should never be used for personal use as it is unprofessional, and makes your purchases harder to separate and track.
• Make all business payments on your credit card. In order to make your business transaction truly easy to manage, make them all in one place – on your business credit card. This will mean one statement for your expenses and a list of all your purchases for the business in a month all in one place so you can review your business spending and provide a comprehensive overview of your expenses to your accountant at tax time.

How to maximise the benefit of having a small business credit card

Your small business can benefit from credit card use by freeing up cash flow and making more purchasing opportunities available, not to mention streamlining your expenses tracking. So how can your small business get the most benefit from a credit card? Your small business can maximize its credit card use by:

• Keeping transactions all in one place. The last thing any small business owner wants to face is more paperwork and if you make all your business purchases on your business credit card, you can actually reduce the amount of paperwork you have to do. You can track your spending online at anytime using internet banking, and if you want to reference a purchase you need only look in one place – the credit card statements. When it comes time to visit the accountant many business credit card providers will even send you a report for the last financial year of your spending and interest and fees.
• Allocating a business credit card to your employees. Instead of spending time reconciling petty cash or verifying staff reimbursements, allow your staff to make business purchases on the business credit card. You can often have additional card holders added for free and you can choose a different credit limit for the different levels of employee. Plus, all purchases on additional cards will appear on the one statement.
• Collect rewards points. You should never spend on your business credit card just for the rewards, but business cards often have very comprehensive programs and you can accumulate rewards if you are smart with the use of your card. Check you points balance regularly and check to see if any points are going to expire and need to be used. Then choose rewards which will truly save your business money such as a discount office supply voucher or free flights, rather than an upgraded flight which is rewarding, but is it worth the annual fee and possible interest charges on your card?
• Boost your business credit rating. Using a business credit card responsibly can help build a strong credit history for your business. If you are a small business and just starting out then you may not have had much opportunity to build a credit score, but by maintaining responsible credit card use, you can place your business in a positive light for future business financing options.

3 Things to avoid with small business credit cards

You can only truly maximise the benefits of a small business credit card if you avoid the pitfalls. So when using your small business credit card always try to avoid:

• Accruing a balance which is charged interest. If you fail to repay your credit card balance within the interest free days you will start being charged interest on your purchases. However, in keeping a balance on your business credit card and not paying it down to zero each month also means that you won’t benefit from any further interest free days – interest free days are only applied once your balance has been paid to zero and if you maintain a balance then all purchases you make in the future will accrue interest too.
• Using your business card for personal use means more paperwork. As soon as you make a personal purchase on your business credit card there is an exception to your streamlined bookkeeping. You now have to remember when and where you made that personal purchase and point it out to your accountant so it doesn’t get included in the business expenses. Plus, if you don’t pay your balance down to zero and start accruing interest on that personal purchase, you are creating a whole world of complicated personal interest payments.
• Spending for the sake of spending. Just because you have a business credit limit available to you, it doesn’t mean that you should buy everything you have ever wanted for your office, your staff and your business. Always remember to keep a business budget and limit your business expenses in line with your business growth because at the end of the month, you have to be able to afford your business card balance.

Maximising your small business credit card use is all about remaining in control, staying organised and keeping your expenses in perspective – all the skills you have been exercising to grow your small business to this point can help you grow your business even further through responsible credit card use.

This is part 2 of a guest post by Xurxo Vidal. Xurxo is a co-founder and search marketing strategist at Bloom Search Marketing – an agency specialized in paid search campaigns, SEO, Google Analytics and conversion improvement. We are lucky to have him here today to talk about optimizing Adwords campaigns. You can find more of Xurxo’s writings on his company’s blog.

This article is part 2 of a 2 part article on adwords reports that can increase conversions and save you money. If you haven’t done so already, please check out part 1 here

In part 1 , we covered the keyword performance report, the ad performance report and the geographic performance report.

The remaining reports I’ll cover in this post are:

• Search Query Performance Report
• Placement Performance Report

Search Query Report

The search query report can be your best friend in finding those pesky unrelated keywords that you’re paying for – especially if you’re using broad match keywords. This report will show you what keywords were actually typed into Google that caused your ads to appear. When you use broad or even phrase match keywords in your campaigns you’ll often find that Google takes some liberties on what search queries they allow your ads to show up for. With this report you’ll be able to find some of those variations and add them in to your campaign as negative keywords.

The search query report also helps you discover relevant keywords you don’t already have in your campaigns that perform well for you. You can add these in to your campaign so you can bid on them directly. Just be sure to add them to the most relevant adgroups or create new ones if necessary so you can improve the CTR and conversion rates.

Some ways to find problem keywords are to:

• Sort by the most costly keywords and look for those that don’t make sense to keep paying for – add these as negatives.
• Sort by the most impressions and look for keywords that have a low CTR – these might be unrelated to what you’re offering and may need to be added as negatives. If some of these are relevant, you may need to create new adgroups and write ads that relate more closely to these keywords in order to improve the CTR and give them a better chance of driving more conversions.

Some ways to find performing keywords you don’t already have in your campaign(s):

• Sort by the most costly keywords and look for those that generate a low cost per conversion. These keywords are worth including in your campaign and maybe even bidding higher for them depending on how well they are converting traffic to customers for you.
• Sort by the most conversions and look for keywords that convert but at a higher cost per conversion than you’re prepared to pay.
  
  1. Place these in the most relevant adgroup – create new ones if necessary with better written ads that relate to them. You should be looking to clarify what you’re offering to make sure you’re only attracting the right kind of visitor to click on your ads.
  2. Check to see which pages the traffic from these keywords is being sent to. If there’s a better/more relevant page, try sending traffic there to see if you can improve the conversion rate – this will help bring down the cost per conversion.
• Look for keywords with a higher than average CTR and include them in your campaign if they are relevant. Assuming your goal is not just traffic, but also conversions, you’ll want to make sure they are performing on that basis as well. Nonetheless, keywords with a high CTR help your quality score which in turn helps keep your CPC (Cost per Click) lower.


In addition I recommend you check out the post Adwords And PPC – The Biggest Money Wasting Mistake That New Users Make Steve published a little while ago about how you can setup an advanced filter in Google Analytics to reveal the exact search query that someone typed in which was triggered by your broad and phrase match keywords. This will give you additional keywords that the Search Query Performance report may not reveal since Google doesn’t share all the data for privacy reasons.


Placement Performance Report

For those of you advertising on the content network this report can offer you a wealth of information. It shows you the websites and individual URLs where your ads have been displayed. More importantly, you’ll be able to see which sites or specific pages on the sites are converting better for you and you can target them individually and bid higher on them.

This report will also reveal which sites you should exclude from your content network campaign. Just like with keywords and ads, you’ll want to pay attention to sites that drive a large number of impressions and few clicks as well as sites that bring you traffic, but that don’t convert at a ratio that meets your business goals.

When you find sites that are costing you money but not converting well enough for you, you can exclude these from your campaign to prevent them from showing your ads in the future. Likewise when you find sites that perform well, you can manage these separately and increase your bids on those sites or even specific pages on those sites.


Scheduling Your Reports

To help automate the process of running these reports Google allows you to schedule them to run and be emailed to you automatically on a daily, weekly (every Monday) or monthly (1st of every month) schedule.

Once you’re comfortable with the different date ranges you’ll need to use for each report to get enough actionable data, then I recommend that you schedule them to be emailed to you at a frequency you’re comfortable with. Don’t choose to run and email them “every day” if you don’t have the time to review the reports on a daily basis and take action on them. You’ll just get frustrated and have too much information to go over. The point is to find those hidden gems and problems lurking in your account so you can take action on them and get better results from your investment in AdWords in a continuous basis.

Final Words

Feel free to leave comments if you have any questions for Xurxo. Seriously folks, Xurxo does this for a living so you should take advantage of him as a resource while you can. Don’t be shy!

]]> http://mywifequitherjob.com/adwords-reports-that-can-increase-conversions-and-save-you-money-part-2/feed/ 3 http://mywifequitherjob.com/adwords-reports-that-can-increase-your-conversions-and-save-you-money-part-1/ http://mywifequitherjob.com/adwords-reports-that-can-increase-your-conversions-and-save-you-money-part-1/#comments Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:55:01 +0000 Steve http://mywifequitherjob.com/?p=8718

This is a guest post by Xurxo Vidal. Xurxo is a co-founder and search marketing strategist at Bloom Search Marketing – an agency specialized in paid search campaigns, SEO, Google Analytics and conversion improvement. We are lucky to have him here today to talk about optimizing Adwords campaigns. You can find more of Xurxo’s writings on his company’s blog.

This is part 1 of a 2 part post on adwords reports that can increase conversions and save you money. When you are ready, you can find find part 2 here

You’re spending your hard earned cash to advertise your products and services on Google, so finding out how well your campaigns are working is critical to your success with AdWords. Today I’m going to cover some of the key reports available to you to track your campaign’s performance and identify problems and opportunities so you can maximize your ROI. You’ll find these by clicking on the “Reports” link under the Reporting tab in your AdWords account.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of data that’s available to you in the reports so it helps to first define your business goals (Sales, leads, downloads, branding/visibility, etc.). Once you’ve done this you can figure out what metrics you need to look at that will give you insights into reaching those goals more quickly. Also you may want to exclude keywords and ads that have zero impressions (meaning that they’ve haven’t been displayed yet and have no actionable data).

The reports I’ll cover in this two part post are:

• Keyword Performance Report
• Ad Performance Report
• Geographic Performance Report
• Search Query Performance Report
• Placement Performance Report

Keyword Performance Report

In this report you’ll be able to drill down to the keyword level and see which keywords are generating the most impressions, clicks and conversions (provided you installed the AdWords conversion tracking code – You can find the instructions to do so here:) as well as other key campaign metrics you can use to make improvements. You can filter to only see keywords that match specific criteria like keywords with a cost of greater than $50 or with greater than 200 impressions. This way you get to critical information faster so you can take action.

If you export the report to excel, you can sort and filter the data further. Often you’ll need to look at two or more metrics at the same time to really see how a keyword is performing.

For example you might see that one keyword is generating sales at a profitable cost per sale ratio, but the impressions are high, CTR is low (Note: A high number of impressions is relative, but usually we’re talking about at least a few hundred impressions and a low CTR generally is anything less than 2% but varies from sector to sector). What this means is that over time this keyword will drag down your quality score and become increasingly expensive to maintain your ad positions on.

Here are some additional ways to slice the data in the keyword performance report so you can find problems and opportunities:

• Sort by cost (largest to smallest) first and look at conversions, conversion rate, cost per conversion. These metrics will reveal what your most costly keywords are doing for you. Are you getting sales or just clicks? You may not have the right keywords in your campaigns or you may not be sending the traffic to the most relevant pages on your website.
• Sort by impressions and look at your CTR (Click Through Rate). What you’re looking for here is keywords with a high number of impressions in your campaign and a low CTR. A low CTR on high impression keywords over time will lower your quality score and force you to pay more for your traffic overall. Here’s why: Bid x Quality Score = Ad Rank, so to maintain your ads in the same position, the lower your quality score, the more you’ll have to pay relative to your competition and CTR is the single most important factor Google uses to calculate your quality score.

Fixing A Low Click Through Rate

There are several things you can do to fix a low CTR:

• Review your negative keyword list and make sure you include keywords you don’t want traffic for. A good way to find these is by using the Adwords Keyword tool to see what people are searching for and if these are relevant to what you’re offering. Also the Search Query Performance Report which I’ll cover in a bit can reveal untargeted traffic to exclude from your campaigns.
• Do you have too many loosely related keywords in one adgroup? For example: “dress shoes”, “running shoes”, “women’s shoes”, “men’s shoes”. These belong in separate adgroups where you can write compelling ads for each keyword variation that potential customers will find more relevant.
• Split test two ads per adgroup. You’ll want to have two ads running against each other all the time so you can find a clear winner – one that delivers a higher CTR and conversion rate so you continuously work to get more traffic and conversions at a lower cost. Once you identify the winning ad, pause or delete the losing ad and test a new variation. (Just remember to rotate your ads evenly when doing this so Google doesn’t skew the results – here’s some info on how to do that:)

Ad Performance Report

This report shows you performance metrics on your text ads. It comes in handy when you’re running ad text split tests as I described above. Here are a few ways to use this report:

• Look for ads that get a high number of impressions and a low number of clicks yielding a low CTR. You may have some opportunities to write better ads to get more people to click and visit your site.
• Sort your ads by conversions from largest to smallest to spot winners – in other words ads that are driving sales, leads, downloads, etc. for you. You should do this monthly or weekly depending on the amount of data you have.
• Test new variations based on the winning ad. You can try testing one variable at a time such as changing the headline or one of the two lines of text.
• Now do the opposite – sort your ads by conversions from smallest to largest. If you spot ads that have high CTRs and low conversion rates or a high cost per conversion, then your landing page may need some work to convince people to take the desired action more often.

Geographic Performance Report

The Geographic Performance report shows you where your ads are being shown and how they are performing in specific geographic areas. You can see this information at three different levels: The Account, Campaign and Adgroup levels. If you’re advertising nationally or globally you’ll find this report very useful. It can even offer insights if you’re advertising more locally, but actionable data is highly dependent on the amount of traffic you receive so you may have to run the report using a longer date range so you have enough data to spot any clear opportunities or problems.

How to use this report to your advantage:
When you first run the report, you might want to do so at the account or campaign level to see at the highest level in which geographical regions your ads are performing the best.

Once you’ve run the report you may discover that some of your campaigns are clearly performing better in some countries, states or cities. With this information you could do a few things:


• Build out new campaigns targeting higher performing geographical areas and bid more aggressively in those markets. Since your conversion rates are stronger in those markets you can afford to pay more per click. Conversely once you split up your campaigns by geography, you can also reduce your bids in your original campaign(s) if the conversion rate(s) drop.
• You can use the AdWords Editor, a free tool from Google, to quickly duplicate your original campaign by copying and pasting it and then change the targeting to the new area you want to target. Just remember to exclude the areas that you build new campaigns for from your original campaign to avoid any overlap.
• Write ads for those specific geographic areas to increase the CTR and conversion rates once you’ve built out new campaigns targeting stronger performing areas. Even if you are a national advertiser, you might find it lucrative to write ads that cater to smaller local markets that generate a proportionately higher demand for your product or service.
• Google’s quality score is being calculated in different markets by how well or poorly your ads perform in them (CTR-wise), so targeting markets individually and writing ads directed at those markets help you keep your costs down while giving you and edge over your competition. Start with the larger markets where your performance is stronger and work your way down.


Disclaimer: Be careful not to spread yourself too thin by over segmenting your markets. You’ll want to make sure there is enough search volume in a market to justify targeting it on its own and writing ads specifically for it.


Up Next

Use these reports wisely and you’ll be well on your way to increasing your ROI with AdWords. Don’t miss part 2 coming up next where Xurxo talks about the

• Search Query Performance Report
• Placement Performance Report
]]> http://mywifequitherjob.com/adwords-reports-that-can-increase-your-conversions-and-save-you-money-part-1/feed/ 8 http://mywifequitherjob.com/how-to-prevent-credit-card-chargebacks-to-your-online-store/ http://mywifequitherjob.com/how-to-prevent-credit-card-chargebacks-to-your-online-store/#comments Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:19:13 +0000 Steve http://mywifequitherjob.com/?p=8428

It’s rare for me to get the exact same question in the same week but I had 2 people email me last week about how I deal with credit card chargebacks with our online business.





Photo By Squeaky Marmot

Before I begin, I just want to explain what a chargeback is. As you know, whenever you buy anything with a credit card, the credit card company protects you from any sort of fraud that a merchant might commit.

This includes incorrect amounts charged to your card, failure to deliver the goods as promised or shipping faulty or damaged products. When any of these things happen, you can call your credit card company and they will issue you a refund if certain conditions are met. This protection is one of the primary reasons why I always use my credit card to make any large purchase.

However as with everything in life, credit card chargebacks can be abused by your customer at your expense if you own an online store. First off,I want to say that our online store has never experienced a chargeback ever (knock on wood). The only time I had to fight a chargeback was with one of my Ebay auctions and I won the dispute handily. In any case, here’s how to arm yourself against fraudulent chargebacks.

Common Claims

Some chargeback claims are legit but there will always be customers who abuse the system. The amount of sleazy customers that you have really depends on your clientele and what you sell. My buddy who sells electronics has had many more problems than I’ve had because there are many more ways to complain about non functional electronic merchandise. That is why I always stress that it’s important to sell something that isn’t fragile or easily damaged during shipment.

Most chargebacks usually involve one of the following situations.

• A customer claims you never delivered the product. Incidentally, this is the easiest one to dispute.
• A customer claims you shipped them something broken
• A customer claims that they never ordered the product
• A customer claims that they issued a return but you never refunded their money.

Fighting the Chargeback

Fortunately, when a customer files for a chargeback, the credit card company doesn’t just randomly issue the refund. It conducts a thorough investigation and you need to be prepared. In addition, having been on both ends of a chargeback in the past, the credit card company always wants to see a customer try and work things out with the vendor directly prior to issuing a chargeback so you almost always have a chance to make things right beforehand. Here’s how I would combat each of the items above.

• To prevent undelivered product claims, the solution is simple. Use a delivery service that offers delivery confirmation. FedEx and UPS offer it for free and USPS offers a notification service at a minimal cost. This is required!! Don’t go cheap and not pay for it because you will definitely be asked for this information.
• To prevent broken merchandise claims during shipping, always purchase shipping insurance if your items are fragile. If the goods arrive at their destination with visible damage to the packaging, have the customer refuse shipment or have the carrier return to sender so you can file a claim. Make sure you clearly document the timeframe with which to handle these claims and make sure that the customer doesn’t throw away the packaging. Usually, the insurance process takes a long time so you need to file a claim asap.
• To handle claims of broken merchandise not caused by shipping, you can do one of two things. You can have the customer contact the manufacturer directly if the item is under warranty or you can have them ship the item back to you. Once again, make sure your return policy is very clear about the timeframe and the RMA process.
• If the customer claims that they never ordered the product, make sure you have clear documentation of their order. Never ship any merchandise to an address other than the billing address for the credit card.
• Finally if a customer claims to have made a return, ask for a confirmation number. If they can’t produce one, then the credit card company will likely not issue a chargeback.

Keep Good Records

In general, your chances of winning a credit card dispute are greatly improved if you maintain good documentation. Always handle all correspondence via email if possible so you have a precise record of all conversations.

One other thing that I suggest is to make sure that your store name is what appears on a customer’s credit card monthly statement. When I first set up our credit card merchant account, I set it to a shorthand version of our store name. This caused some confusion for certain customers because they didn’t recognize our store name in their monthly statement.

I would also go as far as to document the shipping and returns policy on every single document that a customer sees. This includes the invoice and at least a mention during the checkout process.

Overall, I don’t worry about chargebacks. There are checks and balances on both ends to prevent fraud.

]]> http://mywifequitherjob.com/how-to-prevent-credit-card-chargebacks-to-your-online-store/feed/ 6 http://mywifequitherjob.com/follow-up-when-coupon-codes-are-bad-for-business/ http://mywifequitherjob.com/follow-up-when-coupon-codes-are-bad-for-business/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:44:50 +0000 Steve http://mywifequitherjob.com/?p=8523

This is a short follow up post to my article on Are Coupon Code Searches Costing Our Online Store Money?. I got a lot of good responses and just wanted to summarize some of the main points. Ultimately, I decided to make a small change to our store based on one particular reader’s input and I wanted to talk about the effect this change had after just 2 days of operation. Usually, two days of testing means absolutely nothing but in this case, it firmly cemented in my head what I needed to do.

From the comments, pretty much everyone agreed that as a customer, seeing a coupon code field and not actually having a coupon code carries a negative psychological effect on the whole shopping experience.

For one thing, most of you that responded stated that seeing an empty coupon field is an instant signal to go off and search online for a coupon code which usually means either putting off the purchase or leaving the ecommerce site altogether. The other camp of people never ever look for coupon codes, complete the purchase anyways but feel ripped off because they could have gotten a better deal with a coupon. Both of these cases are bad for business.

A Possible Solution

As discussed in my last article, I don’t really want to remove the coupon code field altogether because we do offer coupons to some of our biggest customers. Yet we don’t want the negative effects associated with offering coupons.

Mike King of Learn This offered up a possible solution which I liked.

I too don’t like the idea of online coupons actually. You’ve be way better off to simply offer a limited time sale price for an extra deal or bundle price for a sale instead of the coupons. I see what you mean for preferred customers, but then you should call it that so people don’t go searching for coupons. Change the field name to say, preferred customer code, and no one will go searching for a coupon.

Mike’s solution sounded like a good one so I gave it a try.

The Outcome

The outcome wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. Instead of people ignoring the field and checking out, we received several inquiries on how to become a preferred customer and how to get a preferred customer code. Some customers that we responded to either didn’t complete checkout and one customer even left a rather negative note after making a purchase. We were kind of shocked. Here’s the note below.

If you would like me to come back please put whatever promotional code for free shipping or 10% discount is out there for preferred customers. It is in the best interest of future business – obviously you have one. Thank you in advance

In any case, I have temporarily removed the coupon field altogether for now until I can come up with a better solution. I may just end up using cookies and a special link to implement my discounts.


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