The downhill trend in the economy has prodded a lot of online business entrepreneurs to look for ways on how they can maintain online marketing success, despite the financial crunch. A lot of e-customers suffered from mass layoffs and salary cuts; hence, even income generated through the net was affected.
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Yet, online businesses can still afford to hang on since they don't have to spend much in overhead expenses. Some of their counterparts in the real business world had to deal with closing shop as the only feasible alternative.
For this purpose, you could consider the following tips to keep your online marketing success working, while waiting for business to pick up again:
- Identify the remaining active purchasers. Double your efforts to keep them satisfied and strengthen your merchant-seller relationship by using a more personal approach. Make their e-shopping with your store more convenient by allowing faster delivery time and after sales maintenance support.
- Seek out more buyers with a great deal of similarity to your remaining active customer. Their line of profession, their hobbies, their residential areas, and the likes are some aspects you could probably explore.
- For inactive customers, keep in touch by sending newsletters, well-wishers, birthday greetings and let them know you still value their support.
- Do not sacrifice the quality of your products. Do your cost cutting elsewhere but never for the cost of providing quality merchandise or service. If suppliers increased their prices, do not add a hundred percent of the increase to the selling price of your product. Online marketing success is not always about profits but also about absorbing losses rather than lose your remaining customers.
- Offer your clients some form of recession scheme, like prepayments or pre-purchases that could lock-in the prices of the merchandise or service to their original selling prices. Announce this scheme simultaneously with your intention to increase prices due to the rising costs incurred in manufacturing the merchandise or delivering the service.
- Offer lay-away plans or installment sales for those who are qualified. Entitle those who have good credit standing and credit history based on FICO credit scores.
- Be truthful. If you are introducing sub-standard or refurbished products as alternative merchandise to offer, inform and disclose all details to your buyers. Make it clear that the buyer knows that it is substandard. Factory overruns perhaps or slightly defective merchandise but still operational and useful.
- Assure customer support and guaranteed actions for any complaints, whether or not they are covered by warranties for as long as the complaint is reasonable.
- Put your old stocks on sale by giving big discounts. Rather than rendering them obsolete with the passing of time, convert them into sales and attract additional customers in the process as part of your online marketing success steps.
- Establish deadlines for your promotional sales and offers of discounts.
Remember, we are just passing through a cycle in the wheel of life. Currently we're on the downtrend and as we slowly inch forward, we have nowhere to go but up. In the meantime, the best thing for you to do is keep your online marketing success working no matter how minimal. The important thing is to be ready once business starts picking up again.
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