The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing (and Keeping) the Hearts of Your Customers

1. Focus on first impressions.

Just like any first date, a prospect’s initial encounter with your brand is a make-it-or-break-it moment that will set the stage for your future relationship with them (or lack thereof).

Today, more likely than not, a potential customer’s first encounter with your brand will take place virtually, either via your website or your social media profiles, so it’s critical to examine the image you’re projecting through your online presence. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes, and ask key questions like, “Am I attractive?” , “Do I look current and trendy or passé and outdated?”, “What messages am I sending?” and “Do I leave them wanting to get to know me better?”

On the Web, as well as in life, making a good first impression relies heavily on the superficial, so aesthetics and visuals are important. Take a cue from clothing company Burberry, whose site presents a stylish, modern and sophisticated online persona that creates a strong appeal to its target audience.

2. Be yourself.

Although it’s vital to make a powerful positive first impression, the foundation of any long-term relationship is honesty and transparency. Make sure every representation of your brand – from your website to your social media profiles to your sales and marketing materials – clearly conveys your core values, and be straightforward about what your prospect can expect if they choose to work with you.

While you want to put your best foot forward, don’t let your quest for a polished presence turn into pretense. Ultimately, there’s no clever catchphrase or flashy gimmick that can keep a customer’s interest for the long-haul once they see through your guise.

Show your potential customers just what your company is made of, and if it’s truly a good match for their needs, they won't be able to resist your appeal.

3. Don't make promises you can’t keep.

The old adage "actions speak louder than words" is all too true when it comes to building a lasting long-term relationship with your customers.

A slick sales pitch might get you a first date, but if you fall short in delivering on the promises you make, you won’t likely get another chance to win them back. Worse yet, your disgruntled customer will tell all their friends about their bad experience, getting you blacklisted all around.

If you want your customers to commit to you, you must commit to them with integrity and consistency. Exceed their every expectation, deliver a positive experience with every encounter and provide added value at every turn, and they’ll happily stand by you.

4. Don’t be needy.

Healthy relationships are all about balance. You want your customers to know that you’re there for them when they need you, and you want to stay at the forefront of their awareness. But just because your world revolves around them, it doesn’t mean theirs revolves around you.

When customers give you access to their inbox or their social media feed, it’s paramount that you respect the sanctity of that permission and don’t betray their trust by inundating them with unwanted marketing messages. Keep the frequency of your communication within reason, and ensure that every time you send an email or create a social media post, you’re providing content that’s of value to your customer, whether that takes the form of a special offer, an interesting article or even an entertaining video. By doing so, you’ll ensure that you maintain a consistent level of engagement without becoming an overwhelming presence that alienates their affections.

5. Don’t be afraid to say, “It’s not you; it’s me.”

Take a page from George Costanza’s book on dating and know when it’s time to walk away.

No matter how much you want to hear cash register ring, trying to force a relationship to work when it’s clearly not the right fit is detrimental to all involved.

If your product or service isn’t what your customer really needs, they’re going to be unhappy, and they’re going to point the finger at you. They’ll either assume that your product is subpar or, far worse, that your company is dishonest in its claims. That sale will end up costing your company and your brand’s reputation dearly.

Don’t waste your time chasing after Mr. Wrong, no matter how attractive he (or his wallet) may be. Instead, stay focused on serving the niche of customers whose needs are perfectly aligned with your strengths, and you’ll find your happily ever after.

Insider Secrets to Killer Website Content: Goodbye Testimonials. Hello Success Stories.

On the Web, content is king. Visitors don’t come to your site to marvel at its visual design; they come for its content. And the burden therefore is on that content to compel them to take action, whether that’s making a purchase, completing a registration form or even just picking up the phone to contact you for more information.

These actions are the “win” for your site – conversion points that transform visitors from statistical blips in your website’s analytics into real live prospects that can become customers and clients. It all starts with powerful content.

Why content must come first

A website redesign is an exciting project, but all too often the primary focus is on the visual aspects of the redesign while content is addressed only as an afterthought. The visual aesthetics are undoubtedly very important, and your new site certainly needs to feature an attractive design and provide an exceptional user experience.

However, the most important function of any website design is supporting content, making it easy to scan and pleasurable to read. So why then, when we redesign a website, do we often just dump old, stale content into a shiny new design? We may make some edits to ensure the content is accurate, but accurate content is not the same as effective content.

Accurate content is factually correct, but effective content is that which your audience is actively seeking and can use to make an informed decision to take the next step in their engagement with your brand.

To be truly successful, a website redesign process must address not only the visual look of the site, but also the quality of the content.

In this series of articles – Insider Secrets to Killer Website Content – we will take a look at types of content that are common to many websites and explore ways that they can be redesigned and improved, beginning with a staple of most business websites – the testimonials page.

The harsh truth about testimonials

Almost every client wants to include a testimonials page on their website, but if you look at the analytics, these pages are by far one of the least often visited.

The reason these pages are relatively unpopular with visitors is one that companies are hesitant to acknowledge: many online testimonials are bogus, and as a result, people have become very skeptical of their validity.

While it’s certainly true that some unscrupulous companies fabricate the testimonials on their sites, other well-meaning companies will post legitimate comments that for one reason or another (usually privacy concerns), can’t be publicly attributed to the person or company who said them.

Unfortunately, these anonymous testimonials hold as little weight with prospects as fictitious ones. If you can’t put a name and a company with a positive review, visitors will naturally regard the validity of these words as suspect, and the very presence of these faceless testimonials on your site will ultimately do more harm than good in the process of building trust with potential clients.

Are your testimonials crippled by lack of context?

Another issue with the typical client testimonial is that these comments are often presented without any context. Glowing words of praise are nice, but they tend to fall flat in the absence of any information about the engagement that warranted them.

What prospects really want to see is reinforcement that other clients who have like business needs have had a good experience working with you on projects that are similar in nature to their own. Therefore, without some insight into the project itself, the resulting testimonial doesn’t carry the same weight or value that it could.

Was this a quick, one‐off project or part of a long‐term engagement?

What challenges did the project present, and how were they met?

What tangible business results did the company gain from working with you?

These are just a few of the questions that, when answered, can provide the critical context needed to add real value to those positive comments.

Goodbye testimonials. Hello success stories.

To develop more effective customer testimonials, we need to rethink our approach in order to address these problem areas. How can we provide context and also eliminate potential doubts as to whether or not the comments are genuine? The answer: success stories.

A success story is a short description of a project, engagement or interaction that elicited the customer’s testimonial. It does not need to be an in‐depth case study that examines every aspect of the project; it just needs to provide that aforementioned context.

When preparing to write a customer success story, start by answering these questions:

• Who is the client (name, industry, basic background information)?
• What were we initially hired to do?
• What were the client’s objectives? What problems were they facing that they needed our help to solve?
• Did we do anything innovative or go above and beyond in a tangible way to meet the needs of this client?
• What measurable business benefits did the client realize from this project?
• What’s next for this client and this engagement?
• Was there anything else noteworthy about this particular project?

Not every one of these questions will apply to every engagement, but the answers can help you put together a short narrative about the project. It will also give you a great reason to reach out to the client to approve the success story and ask for a testimonial to accompany the piece.

Testimonials + success stories: an unbeatable team

Testimonials that come directly from clients do have value, so when you can add one alongside one of these success stories, their comments go from being anonymous praise that, right or wrong, is often perceived as fake, to very valuable content that prospective buyers can use to evaluate your products or services.

A good success story accompanied by a strong client testimonial takes a negative perception of testimonials and flips it on its head because now there is both context and attribution. The testimonial reinforces the success story, and the impact it makes on your visitors is stronger because of it.

This process can work in reverse as well. If a customer sends you an unsolicited email or letter praising your company and the experience they had with you, they are a perfect candidate for a success story. Reach out to them and ask if you can use their comments and their overall experience as part of a success story on your website. If they took the time to extend their kind words in the first place, then they are very likely to be willing to participate in this process as well.

Once the success story goes live, send them a link and thank them again for their help and their business. They will likely pass this link along to their friends and connections via social media or even just through word of mouth, thereby raising greater awareness of your company and driving business to your site.

Hard work pays off.

When I speak with businesses about the value of rethinking their client testimonials and moving to a success story model, a common reaction is that it “sounds like hard work.” That is absolutely correct. It is hard work.

It is far easier to create a laundry list of comments that you have received over the years than it is to author success stories to accompany those comments, but the fact that this is hard work is to your advantage. If this process was easy, everyone would be doing it, but since it’s not, your site and your business can stand out if you take the time and effort to augment typical testimonials by transforming them into informative success stories.

Don’t stop there!

Finding ways to improve client testimonials is just one example of how rethinking content can make your website a more powerful conversion engine. Subsequent entries in this series will explore other common elements of website content that can be improved to bring more value to your visitors and greater returns for your business.