4 steps to improve your online customer experience (Small Business E-Commerce Link Digest – June 26, 2009)

Everybody wants to do better by their customers. But what’s the best way to do that? Check out these tips and you’ll find it’s not as hard as you might think:

• Before you can improve your customer’s experience, you’ve got to know who your customer is. Mining your internal data gives one type of valuable customer view, while personas offer another. John Quarto-vonTivadar at GrokDotCom provided an excellent overview of how personas work that’s worth checking out.
• Once you know who you’re trying to talk to, the next step is to get ’em to your site. And it’s no secret search engines play a big role in making that happen for most online businesses. But how to put search engines to work for you is a bit of a secret. Fortunately, SEOmoz’s new SEO best practices unravels some of the mystery to ranking well, while Search Engine Land unmasks a cool tactic for finding link opportunities .
• Of course, getting people to your site is one thing. But if they don’t stick around, what good is it? Assuming that your site is fast enough to keep customers around, you’ve still got to convince them you’re the right place for them. Your reputation remains one of the top reasons customers choose to buy online. How can you convince customers you’re the right place? Well, Linda Bustos offers an excellent overview of how to communicate your reputation to customers online.
• Finally, it’s a good idea to make sure you’re taking care of all your customers. Linda Bustos returns with a strong overview of accessibility and its importance to your business (think “taking care of your customers” because it’s the right thing to do and “avoiding lawsuits,” if nothing else). Following standards offers many benefits, including accessibility, SEO, a faster site, and lower costs. And that just might be the best way to improve your customer experience.

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