Filed under: Email Marketing | Tags: Constant Contact, CustCon, Email Marketing, MailChimp
You have successfully attracted a prospect to your website or a customer to your restaurant. How do you retain their interest and keep them coming back? Your best bet to develop a long term relationship with your customers is to obtain their email address and include them in your electronic marketing campaigns. Here are a few reasons why email marketing works:
Email marketing is cost effective.
Email marketing software, email template design, and the time to create the content is far less than many other marketing methods. Not only are they cheap, but they are worthwhile: the Direct Marketing Association reported that, for this year, every $1 invested in email marketing earned back $40.56 in revenue. While this is a broad figure applied to a variety of small businesses, with a few measurement initiatives in place you can determine what that number is for your business.
You will create more sales opportunities.
Every email you send is another chance to make a sale. If someone briefly visits your website, you may never hear from them again; but, if you were able to collect their email address, you could then continue to contact them and thus remain on their radar. Emails are a great way to generate new or repeat business by drawing people to your business with announcements of new items and special promotions or coupons.
Emails can be targeted to a specific audience.
Once you’ve built up a substantial email list, you’ll have enough information about your customers to segment the list and customize the message accordingly. Targeted emails make your message more relevant to your particular audience, which means that they will be more likely to pay attention and your marketing will be more effective.
You will build relationships with your customers.
One of the best ways to keep a customer returning is to earn their loyalty and trust. Using your email list to contact customers on a regular basis will keep your brand top of mind, and customizing content to be relevant to their interests will inspire their trust. Further, when you request customers’ email addresses, you can offer them the option to opt in or out of your communications. This ensures that you’ll be contacting only those who are genuinely interested, making them more likely to pay attention and respond positively. In short: you’ll have a whole list of loyal customers at your fingertips.
You can easily track results.
There is a wide variety of software available that allows you to instantly track the results of your email marketing campaigns. Unlike other marketing methods, you can analyze in real-time the effectiveness of your efforts by viewing open rates, and what links were the most or least popular in the email. You can then use these results to determine the impact on your business and continue to update your marketing campaigns accordingly.
Survey on the Spot integrates seamlessly and adds opt-in email addresses to several email marketing systems including Constant Contact, Fishbowl and The Customer Connection.
Here are a few easy to use email marketing systems:
Constant Contact
Fishbowl
MailChimp
The Customer Connection
Filed under: Restaurants | Tags: instant surveys, mobile surveys, survey app
When was the last time you heard a friend or colleague complain about service at a business? How often do you find yourself listing off what you disliked about your last hotel stay or lunch meeting? What many businesses don’t realize is that an unhappy customer is more than just one bad experience. Statistics show that 91% of dissatisfied customers will never again purchase goods or services from your business.
According to studies, news travels fast and far. The average unhappy customer will tell between 8 and 16 people about his or her negative experience at your business. Your existing customers may forgive a little bad news about your business, but don’t expect to attract new customers with complaints flying around town. Even the smallest customer can impact your bottom line when he or she starts talking.
Sharing negative experiences is quick and painless in the online age, where language travels beyond your personal social circle. From message boards to review sites, Twitter accounts to facebook pages, anyone with an Internet connection and an opinion can bring your business to its knees before millions of readers. While unhappy customers are likely to tell their story to friends and family, they may never mention it to you unless there is an easy way to do it. This puts an added burden on you to maintain the highest level of service and also to continue to encourage customer feedback.
So think about it. If your average customer visits your business once a month and spends $40, you lose $480/year in revenue. If you have a loyal customer base where you keep customers for several years – say 5 years on average, this has now cost you $2400 in revenue. And finally, if they tell 10 friends who never have a chance to become loyal customers, it has cost you and additional $24,000 in revenue. That’s a lot to pay for a single bad experience that you might have been able to avoid.
The Bottom Line: Each customer you lose or fail to attract will take a toll on your business’s success. Each unhappy customer may mean a domino effect of failed potential new customers. With each person who hears a bad review, you risk losing one sale – or more. With businesses spending considerable money on advertising and marketing, it would be a waste to allow negative word-of-mouth to undercut all paid efforts.
There are dozens of ways to lose business – don’t allow dissatisfaction to be a cause for lost customers, both existing and potential.
Filed under: Healthcare, Survey Feedback | Tags: Healthcare surveys, Hospital survey app, mobile survey apps, mobile surveys
Beginning in October 2012, patient satisfaction will reach a new level of importance to hospitals. Medicare, the largest single payer for hospital services, will give patient satisfaction more weight in determining hospital reimbursements based on quality of care.
In accordance with a new rule mandated by the Affordable Care Act, hospitals will soon compete against each other to best satisfy patients, receive the highest scores, and ultimately see higher reimbursements for services. Medicare plans to reserve 1 percent of its regular hospital reimbursements for a bonus fund, to be distributed to hospitals based on performance rankings and yearly score improvement.
Patient satisfaction ratings will be used to determine 30 percent of the total bonus payments.
To determine the ratings, patients will be asked to fill out Medicare-approved surveys once they are discharged. The surveys will ask a variety of questions regarding the patient’s level of satisfaction with their overall experience, including staff communication, the hospital environment, and the level of care. Medicare intends to set the bar very high, giving hospitals credit for only the highest possible responses.
Unhappy patients will now mean less revenue, an unpleasant thought for hospitals already struggling with increased pressure from 
insurers. Hospitals will have to put more thought and greater effort into delivering superior service and ensuring positive patient experiences. Service providers should ask patients directly about their performance in order to fully understand patient expectations and to determine how best to make improvements.
Hospitals can be proactive in improving patient service by implementing their own patient satisfaction surveys. Survey On the Spot’s real-time surveys can be customized to ask specific questions about their patient’s experience, allowing hospitals to spot weak areas that might negatively influence their ratings and to identify and solve potential problems before the patient checks out.
Through survey results, service providers are able to analyze their own performance and make the appropriate changes for their next patient, and any issues can be quickly addressed before subsequent patients are negatively affected. Results are recorded in real time and service providers are immediately notified of any negative feedback, allowing staff to quickly act to solve the problem before the patient leaves. Simply administering the survey on-site demonstrates genuine concern for the patient’s experience.
With Medicare’s new ratings system, it is of the utmost importance for hospitals to take extra steps to understand patient expectations, target weak areas, and identify and respond to immediate issues. What better way to ensure all of the above by asking patients directly? Real-time surveys will set the foundation for patient satisfaction, higher ratings, and better reimbursements.
