The online marketplace provides sea of opportunities for businesses all around the globe. However, ever-increasing competition in the online space have created a lot of hurdles for budding entrepreneurs. There are many tips available online on how to make your business successful, yet these 3 strategies work like magic to gain a competitive advantage for your business.
Quality of Product
There should be no compromise on quality. This is what makes your business or breaks it. Amateur entrepreneurs make this mistake all the time, they offer their products including bugs. Either your business is online or related to brick or mortar industry, quality comes first. While buying something online, skepticism plays a major role because customer is conscious of the product or service available online. Transparency is very important in online business and ensures credibility of the organization.
We run online tutoring business. Through leveraging a network of highly qualified academics, we never compromise on capability and provide high-ranking instructors for our customers. All the profiles are available on our website in order to show our users that who we work with and what we offer.
The quality shouldn’t only applicable to product but also the whole user interface matters. As there is no face-to-face interaction and the only way your customer will know about you is through the interface or a website. First impressions matter a lot! It differentiates you from your competitors.
Creating a Friendly Platform
A seamless and easy to use platform is a must. Customer engagement and retention is only possible when particular importance has been given to user engagement. At our company, we have seen amazing spike of users spending time on website and user-engagement on peak when we tweaked it to enhance the user experience. A great online platform provides an opportunity to prospective customer to spend more time in knowing the company and remove doubts if any. Not only there is high probability of buying products from the website but also customer retention is increased through such efforts. If there is a clear roadmap for the user on the website, it makes him feel at ease and comfortable navigating your website and your call to action (CTA) becomes visible at first glance. One specific CTA should be provided to each landing page in order to make it easy for user to identify.
Understand if there are any possible troubles your customers will go through while navigating your website. Once you identify them, address them accordingly. Initiate a blueprint of your website and mark down all pain points and interests of consumers in your target audience. Thoroughly inspect your website and check every piece to make sure that it is easy to navigate and interests the users. Without a good user engagement, it is really hard to sell your products.
Exceptional Customer Engagement
One of the crucial elements which lead you to success is your customer support. It is important to ensure high level of commitment in order to meet your customers’ needs and satisfy them. Our team members go an extra mile to support our customers. Whether it is 5 in the morning or 4 in the afternoon, we have made it a priority to help our worthy customers around the clock. When you work on an online platform serving worldwide, there are no off-hours.
It is imperative to take your customers’ feedback and hear their complains to get an overall view about your product or service. This will also help you to identify loopholes and provide an opportunity to improve accordingly. On a personal level, I have learnt a lot from my customers in designing the platform and its usability. Similarly, my other cofounder who specialized in branding and marketing learnt that what customer expects while buying the product. Founders of the organizations should take time to talk to customers directly rather than outsourcing your work to a third-party who is not related to your business at all.
Providing excellent customer support, implementing quality and providing seamless user interface, is a recipe for success. No matter what stage your business is in,if you focus on customers first, it will lead you to create a dream business.
Daniel Zhao is founder of StudyGate, an online tutoring service.