Customer reviews play a huge part in helping to promote your favorite businesses. So how can you take advantage of Small Business Saturday®, and make an impact buying small and supporting local?
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Did you know that 97% of people read reviews of local businesses? And that 90% of buyers read reviews online to help them make a decision about a purchase?
Customer reviews play a huge part in helping to promote your favorite businesses. So how can you take advantage of Small Business Saturday®, and make an impact buying small and supporting local?
During How To Leave A Customer Review, you will:
About your event host:
Chris Guillot is a retail expert, teaching independent retailers and makers how to improve profit in simple, achievable steps. With over 23 years of experience, Chris has taught thousands of retail merchants how to combine industry strategies with emotional intelligence in order to remain compelling in an ever-changing market. She’s the Founder and CEO of Merchant Method, and host of Retail Charm School, a live video show that helps small business owners master the art and science of merchandising. Chris has been featured by Business Insider, Shopify, Vend, Big Commerce, and Total Retail.
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Confession time: I’m a planner through and through. How about you?
Whether you like to plan like I do, prefer to keep your schedule loose and flexible, or anywhere in between, I’m sure you’ve also felt the driving need to work “on” your business more so you can take it further, faster. Enter the practice of time blocking, which organizes your day into time slots. This works really, really well until it doesn’t.
Look, if you want to sell more this holiday season, then stop scrolling and pay attention.
What I’m about to teach can help you transform an uncontrollable, busy, and blur of a holiday selling season into 13 weeks of profits. Listen, everyone knows that when you have an uptick in customer traffic you have the potential to sell more, and when you sell more you make more. But what most small businesses don’t know is that you don't have to wait for the holidays to make the most out of the Golden Quarter.
What catches a customer’s attention — and hopefully a share of their wallet — changes constantly and the tides of merchandising, marketing, and selling quickly follow suit.
What was once a clever idea to drive customer traffic to a store is now the starting price to get a customer’s attention. Hopefully you hold it long enough for them to really look at what you’ve got to sell.
Before you opened your doors, your soon-to-be customers inspired and motivated you. Regardless of whether you debuted as a confident or uncertain seller, your customer’s happiness — measured in sales — was hitched like a wagon to your happiness.
For merchants it’s always been this way and will always continue to be. As you’ve worked to grow your revenue, you’ve worked proportionally to connect with your customer-base, driven by the adage that more customers means more sales. Yet, many business owners struggle in the relentless pursuit of understanding the profitable relationship between sales and customer-base. Entrepreneurs intellectually know the quantifiable and qualifiable benefits of narrowing the focus, niching down, and clearly differentiating the ideal customer from the impostor customer. However, with more tangible things to focus on, many owners sweep these branding basics under the rug. Therein lies the actual barrier to selling more — the absence of brand positioning. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of my creative time thinking about relationships — all kinds of relationships, in fact — to better understand the most precious, prized, and valued relationships we merchants have:
Our relationship with our customers. The hard truth is that how we relate to customers and, more importantly, how they relate to us is directly reflected by our cash flow. Our cash flow is the score card of the dynamic, responsive, and empathetic way we act in relation with our customers. So I ask you this — “Are you playing the long game or playing the field?” That’s a big question, and one way you can start self-assessment is by focusing on your special events:
You know me, I like to make things attainable, actionable, and aligned with my own mission. Naturally I was thrilled when Storefront, an online marketplace for renting pop-up retail space, asked me to share my insights on pop-up events. I was ready to share a plan for playing the long game, building brand loyalty, and nurturing valuable customer relationships. You can read the feature here — I hope it will help you plan for the long game. Being well-connected can mean different things. For some, it means having influential and powerful friends. For others, it might mean having a large number of casual contacts. As independent retailers, our focus should be on finding our tribe and doing what we can to connect with them authentically.
However you choose to connect with others, when you can create and nurture your community, you will build more loyal personal and professional connections. This is the fundamental value of customer relationship management (CRM), which is focused on automation and software tools for enterprise businesses. Unfortunately, those tools are cost prohibitive for many small businesses. So, in the absence of a robust CRM system, how do small businesses create community, loyalty, and repeat customers?
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Listen in and learn about this foundational resource that can support, facilitate, and inspire your customer service interactions. By following our guidance, you will come away with a powerful training tool to improve your brand experience for all of your customers. Consistent and Compelling Customer Service: Part 1 — Dissecting your current customer service3/21/2017
From avoiding costly employee errors at the cash wrap to encouraging deeper customer-employee connections, achieving consistent and compelling customer service starts with understanding your current level of service, including what your employees provide and what you’ve fostered in the business.
This week’s trend report, Consistent and Compelling Customer Service: Part 1, teaches you how to better understand customer service archetypes in your business so that you can create the service experience you want for your customers.
Make the most out of helping last minute holiday shoppers. These merchant tips help you take a different approach to selling as the holiday quickly approaches.
In this week's trend report, I share my analysis on model customer service for independent Retailers & Makers.
Based on case studies of Amazon Go and a personal shopping experience with an independent Retailer, I highlight the fundamentals of strategic customer care as well as share customer service trends for 2017. (Yes, 2017!) |
#1 THE FUTURE OF RETAIL
#2 HOW TO DESIGN A FOOLPROOF BRAND EXPERIENCE #3 5 STEPS TO SELL SLOW-MOVING STOCK #4 CREATING A COMMUNITY (AND LOYAL CUSTOMERS) #5 LEARN WHY SHOPLIFTING HAPPENS AND HOW YOU CAN PREVENT IT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR MORE? When you do, you'll get insightful how-to resources, retail inspiration, and time-sensitive deals.
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HI, I'M CHRIS GUILLOT!
I made my first sale when I was eight years old and started teaching retail business classes at 20. Now, 23 years after guiding my first clients, I'm here to help you build more profit.
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LET'S STAY CONNECTED
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