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business to get you to buy this service. You get special shopping days with massive discounts, and you can use the dash buttons for easy reordering. In some cities, you can get free delivery of food from participating restaurants. The value you get is amazing.
so easy to hear about a book at a seminar or on a podcast, and with a few clicks, it is at your home or office, sometimes within hours. The second area that really makes Amazon unique is their customer service. Returns are easy and typically free. They don’t hassle you on most things. How often do you hear customer service horror stories about Amazon? Amazon always puts the customer first. In any meeting that Jeff Bezos is in, he insists that there is always a chair at the table left empty, and that chair represents the customer and his needs. Do you care about your customers as much as Amazon does? Are you willing to invest in them and make decisions for them, or are you simply invested in your bottom line? Another area of difference is value. Amazon is always trying to add value. Look at the Amazon Prime membership. It costs $99 per year and gives unlimited free two-day shipping. In an article in a previous edition of this newsletter, I talked about how Amazon loses about $300 million per year on its Prime membership, and that’s just in shipping costs. That loss doesn’t include all the extra features that you get with Prime, like videos on demand. Do they really need to offer free movies and TV shows to get you to buy free shipping? Most people order enough to make the $99 a year a bargain just in shipping. With a Prime membership, you can also borrow books, which is sort of like bastardizing their original
becomes a loyal customer. Many of them come in, use you once, and NEVER come back again.
I mentioned earlier that to overcome the Amazon effect, you could simply study Amazon for the answer. Other than price, what makes Amazon different? “WE LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE THE NEXT EXCITING AND INTERESTING THING IS ONLY A CLICK AWAY. Being entertaining so people want to consume your content is an important step to building a relationship.” The first answer is ease. They make it as easy as possible to do business with them. They have one- click ordering, and your credit card info is saved in your account. They offer free shipping on most items with a minimum order or free shipping on nearly everything with a Prime account. It is so easy to see a product in a store and order it from Amazon. It is
What are you doing to add value to your user experience?
Are you building a relationship with your customers to keep them locked in and focused on you, or are you resting on your quality of service, a hope, and a prayer? On some levels, it sucks that we have to go to such great lengths to be noticed, to keep customers, and to grow. There is so much to do and focus on as a business owner. It’s hard. But with complexity comes opportunity and the knowledge that most people won’t do hard things. Most people don’t figure out complex things. Most people don’t really care about their customers. They care about themselves.
Are you most people?
Actions always speak louder than words, so if you’re not most people, what are you going to do to show it?
MARKETING QUICK TIP – Shaun What Happens When Your Marketing Campaign DOESN’T GO AS PLANNED
group of our top referral partners to join us in Las Vegas, just to thank them for sending others our way and helping us expand our influence. The highlight of this
When faced with building an ongoing marketing campaign, there is one mistake you can never make: thinking that, once you map it all out and press the “launch” button, it’s good to go and you’re done. In fact, nothing is farther from the truth. An expert marketing team knows that, sometimes, you need to pivot. This recently happened to my marketing team. If you’ve been following us for a while, you know that we have worked hard to put together KILLER referral programs for our clients, partners, and prospects. In March of this year, we invited a
trip was a behind-the-wheel racing experience at the Las Vegas Speedway. But once we got home from Vegas, our only thought was, “How do we make it bigger and better next time?”
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