Top 10 Tips For Being An ADA Friendly Company – accessiBe

Business

Running a company can be a difficult task, no matter what industry you’re in. There are many things to take into consideration when building your company from the ground up, and this will only become more difficult once you’ve been given the responsibility of hiring employees or opening up a new branch of your business. However, there are ways to make your website more accessible to people with disabilities by using available tools on the web, such as accessiBe.

1) Be proactive – The lawsuits are just starting to come in because of changes made by the Department Of Justice regulations which went into effect March 15th, 2012. Don’t get caught off guard, and never assume that the changes made to your website will be enough. Have a plan in place so you can update your site quickly should you find that there are areas for improvement.

2) Determine what measures need to be taken – The next step after assessing whether or not your company is ADA compliant is determining which changes need to be made to improve your site. You can get the assistance of someone familiar with disabilities, but you want to make sure they’re not part of the problem (ie; Not using flash elements).

3) Get some help – If you don’t have the skills or staff necessary to address these issues, it might be time to hire an experienced web development company. Make sure you vet companies carefully, so they’re not just throwing out buzzwords about making websites more accessible.

4) Know that it will take time – You can’t go into this with the idea that everything will be fixed by the time your site goes live. This is an ongoing process and can lead to additional costs down the road if you have a large company with many branches.

5) Not everyone will be reached – Just like any other market, there are some people that will never purchase from your site, and this is especially true when it comes to disabilities. You may never see an increase in sales of certain products, but at least you’ll know that you’ve done the best you can to meet your requirements under the ADA.

6) Avoid using marketing – While it may be tempting to use buzzwords like ” Accessible Website Design ” and other phrases, this is not the best way to go about it. Using terms that are too fancy only confuses customers when they’re searching for companies online.

7) The future – As time goes on, you’ll start to see more changes to the ADA regulations, which will affect your business. These are typically not large scale, but you want to make sure that everyone is up-to-date with these changes so they can adjust accordingly.

8) Stay current – There are many organizations and events that help to keep people informed of the latest news. For example, National Disability Rights Network has several seminars that can be beneficial to businesses and is a great way for you to network with other companies in your area.

9) Resources online – There’s an abundance of information on this topic available online. From the ADA website to other sources, there’s plenty of information for you to read and sort through so you can find the solution that works best for your company.

10) The bottom line – You’ll always come across opposition when you do something to better your business, and in this case, this means finding a web design company that understands the needs of its customers. Keep an open mind and remember that there’s always more than one solution to any problem or issue.

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5 Ways to Improve Your Customer Relationships

Business

Having a good relationship with your customers is essential if you want to be successful and achieve growth in your business. Improving your customer relationships should be high up there on your list of priorities when running your own business as it can either be the key to success or the key to your demise. There are many different features and software that are now available to help you improve your customer relationships, establish customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Customisation 

Customers like to feel special as this makes them feel appreciated and will make them more loyal to your company. A great way to go about this is to customise and personalise each of your customers experience with you. This can include sending individual emails out to your customers that address them by name so that they know you are making the effort to email them directly. 

You should also consider sending your loyal customers a newsletter using software like Mailchimp to keep them up to date on developments in your business. 

Build Trust by Being More Transparent 

It is important that your customers trust you and one of the main ways to build this trust is by being transparent. While many businesses tend to keep their operations secret, you can build trust with your customers by letting them see what happens behind closed doors. This way, they have a greater understanding of what it is you do and what your staff are doing daily. 

You should consider inviting them to your business headquarters and give your customers a chance to have a look around where you work and give them a guided tour. This will help your clients feel special and appreciative while giving them a better understanding of how your business functions. However, it also gives you the opportunity to build a personal relationship with your customers as you can spend time talking to them and getting to know them better. This personal relationship is often lacking in modern day business negotiations so can make for a great added extra. 

It Is About More Than Just the Sale 

Sometimes businesses make the mistake of focussing too much on just the sale transaction and neglect the opportunities available to improve their customer relationships. While it is important that sales staff meet targets and keep the sales coming in, sometimes being too pushy with customers can make customers feel like you don’t really care about them and just want their business. It is important to show your customers that you do care about them as just because they aren’t interested in buying your services or products today, this doesn’t mean they won’t be in the future. 

Sometimes a customer will come back to you later when they have had some time to consider the purchase, so it is important that you make a good impression even if you aren’t making a sale right there and then. 

By focusing more on the overall customer experience when they interact with your business in any way, you can ensure that you are developing positive relationships with your customers. 

Offer Interesting and Helpful Content 

A lot of the internet is now full of content that is used to entice online traffic, in the hope of turning views into sales. Therefore, it is important that you carefully consider the sort of content your customers will find the most helpful and relevant. Offering information that may help them is a bonus reason why they should choose your business over any of your competitors. 

You should also make sure that your content stands out and is interesting enough to hold your customers’ attention. According to Mail Online, the internet age has made us have shorter attention spans due to ‘information overload’. Therefore, it is more important than ever before to offer interesting content on your website so that you hold the attention of visitors and customers. 

Monitor and Review Feedback  

Potential customers are likely to research your company before they do business with you in the form of previous customer reviews. Therefore, it is important that you ask previous customers to review their experiences with you and show these reviews online for people to see. This will help with transparency, as well as offer a way for you to brag about how good you are! 

However, not all reviews are going to be 100 percent positive, so be sure to respond to all feedback to show you keep on top of customer issues. 

Customer relationships are key to your success as a company, as the happier your customers are, the more likely they are to use your business again, and they may also discuss their positive experience with their friends as a way of a recommendation. So, make sure you consider customer relations as important as customer sales.

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What Is Customer Engagement and How Does it Help?

Freedom Channel

It is now known that customer engagement is a hugely important element in the success of a business. This is why companies like Webio, who enable businesses to capture and increase customer engagement, are now so popular. Customer engagement is something that is seen across three distinctive elements of business, and it is important to understand that, so that you can appropriately measure how successful you are being. Let’s take a look at the three areas of customer engagement, as well as at some ways to measure this.

Advertising

According to the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) engagement is best described as getting a prospect interested in a new idea by introducing them to the context. In other words, it describes how various viewers, readers, or other customers interact with a newly presented advertisement. There are different schools of thought about this. The old fashioned idea was a stepped approach:

  1. Catch the attention of the customer.
  2. Stimulate the desire interest of the customer.
  3. Drive the customer to make a purchase.

Today, however, things have changed. Now, the focus is on combining the message of the advertisement with symbols, associations, and metaphors.

Within advertising, a customer is considered to be engaged when they interact with the specific advertisement. This means they have purchased the product, decided to purchase the product, or recommended the product to others.

Website Analytics

Customer engagement is also very important in website analytics. This is one of the newest forms of customer reengagement. It describes how customers interact with the website of a brand. The goal of websites is to attract traffic, and to turn traffic into customers (conversion). However, there are different forms of conversions within website analytics, including:

  1. Making an online sale.
  2. Gathering new email addresses for the newsletter.
  3. Encouraging people to sign up for a free trial.

There are numerous metrics used to define engagement. A popular one is to calculate how long someone stays on the website, but also how many pages are viewed on average per visitor, or how many comments an individual makes on social media platforms.

Marketing

Finally, there is customer engagement in marketing. This describes the level of engagement with a specific brand. Very often, marketing customer engagement speaks of things like customer loyalty, and customer satisfaction. This is because the focus is strongly on how attached an individual is on the long term to a certain company. The result of high engagement is usually seen in an increase in customer advocacy and word of mouth advertisement and referrals. A lot of companies focus strongly on changing their customer engagement strategy with a focus on marketing. This is because a lot of research has demonstrated that there is a direct link between marketing customer engagement and elements such as share of wallet, ROI, stock price, and profit levels.

In an idea world, customer engagement is about all three things. Being aware of this makes it more likely that you will also be able to truly increase the number of customers who feel engaged with your brand.

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