24 Ways to Get a customer and Keep a customer

Let's start with the bad news, and there's kind of a lot of it, before we move on the good news of how to fix it. About three-quarters of online shoppers are unsatisfied with their online shopping experience. The other quarter are, flatly, satisfied, in that even bad pizza is good pizza kind of way.

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Editor's Note: It's interesting how many ways etailers drop the ball when it comes to customer service. With so much focus on search traffic (front end), it seems webmasters are ignoring their back end responsibilities. Know some effective techniques for better customer satisfaction? Let us know in the comments section.

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Sort of anticlimactic, isn't it? The good news is there's a lot of opportunity satisfying customers, even making them very, very happy.

But first, more bad news. Three-quarters of online shoppers surveyed said website content is insufficient to complete research or purchase a product online always, most, or some of the time. Nearly 80 percent rarely or never purchase a product without complete information, and 72 percent will take off to a competitor that does supply that information.

It seems that consumers really want to buy online, but retailers aren't making it easy for them. Sometimes, it seems like retailers go out of their way to lose customers.

My recent search for information about a Polaroid camera comes to mind. In that experience, Polaroid didn't have top ranking for its own product (not even in the top ten), and didn't have sponsored search ads targeting very product specific keywords. The retailers who seemed to pick up Polaroid's slack in the paid results—big names like Circuit City, Target, and Wal-Mart—failed to offer a relevant landing page. When I did find product reviews or pages, the information I wanted (price and specs, mainly) were either garbled by nonsensical rhetoric or was nonexistent.
If researching for myself and not for an article, I would have long before that said, "Screw it. I'll just go to the store myself." All of them lost a potential online customer.

Problems like these aren't uncommon. In fact, it seems many sites are severely lacking in the customer service department. If customers don't prefer online shopping to brick-and-mortar shopping, it's because retail sites haven't done enough to make the online shopping experience a good one.

Ready for more bad news? Here are ways many sites have failed to serve their customers:

1. Only 37 percent offer multiple images views of products.
2. Only 33 percent offer customer reviews.
3. 62 percent have difficult to read fonts.
4. Only 14 percent allow customers to change the font.
5. Only 43 percent offer free shipping.
6. Almost two-thirds do not offer in-stock information on the product page.
7. While just over half of online retailers have physical stores, only 10 percent offer in-store pickup.
8. 58 percent do not offer shipping costs early in the checkout process. One third have checkout processes with more than 4 steps.
9. Only 58 percent correctly answer an e-mail question within 24 hours.
10. Around 80 percent don't seem to get that more ways to pay means more ways to buy. 20 percent offer pay-by-check, 10 percent offer Google Checkout, 20 percetn accept PayPal and 18 percent offer Bill Me Later.

That's a lot of ball-dropping. Fortunately, it can all be corrected to give yourself a leg up on the competition. Hint: Just inverse some of those numbers above to understand what you should be doing.

Spitzer Scandal Sheds Light On Web Prostitution

The controversy surrounding New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has shed light (a red light) on a number of underground activities. Besides government corruption and the sex trade in general, Spitzer's use of the Internet to connect with prostitutes is exposing a huge industry with which people may not be familiar. Or even know exists.
Editor's Note: So it turns out that escorts and/or their agencies have excellent web-marketing skills, a revelation we can thank Gov. Spitzer for. But this little investigation found a staggering number of virtual red-light districts complete with good SEO and paid search advertising campaigns. There's so much to say about this, so let it be said in the comments section.
The online escort/call girl/"model"/prostitute scene isn't so hard to find, though. Just use Google. If the organic results don't fit what you're looking for, AdWords can help, too. The truth is, investigating this scene is much like investigating the adult entertainment scene. The breadth, depth, and scope of prostitution available via online booking is staggering, indicating that just like the online porn industry, sex trade is not just a huge industry, but one that employs cutting edge marketing techniques, and one that apparently is thriving.
Just Google It
It's unclear at this point exactly how Governor Spitzer was referred to the Emperor's Club website. But if he's a self-starter, he could have used a search engine like Google. A search for [new york call girls] for example brings up a host of relevant organic links, most of which seem to be news article related. The sponsored links, though, are another story. Sponsored results for these keywords brought back websites like BadGurlModels (screen shots will be provided but no links), HourGirl, and a site advertising "full service" $50 half-hours and $100 hours. Full-service is, according to research, code for you-know-what.
Similar results came back for [full service escorts] and [ny gfe]. "GFE" is another code meaning "girlfriend experience," which means the escort is open to certain things like kissing and other "girlfriend"-type activities. [ny gfe] brought 491,000 results in Google, along with their very own targeted ads. Not all incarnations of the word "prostitute" work, by the way. A search for "whore," for example, brings back a myriad other results. Apparently the connotation of that word has changed a bit.