Author: Pamela Swift

BIZNESS! Newsletter Issue 116

Post author By Pamela Swift
Post date August 15, 2011

Cover Story

Go Ahead and Fire Your Customer

We all have at least one – a customer with whom we just don’t like working. Before you get too excited thinking I’m going to say it’s okay to fire any customer – regardless of the reason – guess again. What I am talking about are customers we don’t like because after we do everything we do for them….

Continued in BIZNESS! Newsletter Issue 116 >>>

Five Online Payment Processing Sites for Your Online Business

Post author By Pamela Swift
Post date August 12, 2011
1 Comment on Five Online Payment Processing Sites for Your Online Business

Article Contributed by Ashyia Hill

After the necessary marketing hype and hoopla you decide you are ready to unleash a barrage of products that your customers have been salivating after. If you don’t have a payment gateway set up however, your customers may lose interest in your product, because they can’t get what they want by paying online.

Sending a check through snail mail these days is just too slow for those who want their product yesterday. Set up an online payment processing for quick cash and secure handling. Use one of these five processing services to keep your business in the black.

PayPal

A subsidiary of Ebay.com, Paypal provides financial services for more than 200 million accounts in 22 different currencies worldwide. As just a 10 year-old company, it has grown leaps and bounds to provide customers with a variety of different services. Online companies can process credit cards through three different payment methods.

• Website Payments Standard –Through the standard payment method, a business can accept all major credit cards; avoid monthly fees and application processes. A payment button, which is easy to install, allows users to process payments through a third-party or customized shopping cart. The cost is per transaction, between 2.2 and 2.9 percent that is deducted from a registered bank account.

• Website Payments Pro –This option is the full blown process, where buyers can enter their shipping and payment options with a chance to review and confirm before actually purchasing a product. The Payments Pro also accepts all major credit and debit cards and rolls the processing and the internet merchant account into one service. There is a monthly fee of $30 for the use of this service.

• Payflow Payment Gateway –Using this option, businesses can still have the benefits of Paypal while holding on to their own third-party merchant account. When buyers go to purchase something on your site, they are taken to Paypal’s secure webpage to enter credit or debit card information. There is a one-time setup fee of $179 along with a monthly service fee of $20 for this service.

Amazon Payments

Originally as an online bookstore, Amazon.com now sells everything from books to groceries. Founded in 1995, Amazon.com has expanded their online presence to include Amazon Payments, a service that processes payments, subscriptions and donations. Check out their payments processing services:

• Simple Pay Standard –A basic processing service that takes buyers to the secure Amazon site to pay with any major credit card which is easy to implement through cut-and-paste html code. Pricing ranges between 1.9 and 2.9 percent for each transaction done.

• Simple Pay Subscriptions and Donations –An authorized button which allows buyers to purchase and confirm a subscription through Amazon’s main site. Pricing ranges between 1.9 and 2.9 percent per transaction.

• Simple Pay Marketplace –Another installable button that allows a business to charge a commission for products sold by various merchants. This also ranges between 1.9 and 2.9 percent per transaction.

Pay Simple

Younger than Paypal, Pay Simple is a processing service that specifically targets online businesses. Founded in 2005, this company offers a variety of online financial solutions including:

• Credit card processing
• Email invoicing
• Payment and fraud security
• ACH direct deposit
• Training and Support Services

They offer two different plans:

Invoice Simply –an online invoicing system that allows businesses to send electronic invoices. This service costs $11 per month.
Pay Simple Pro – A full service that processes credit, debit and check transactions. They provide this service for $35 a month.

Authorize.Net

Slightly younger than Amazon.com, Authorize.Net founded in 1996 provides online businesses with a scalable service that can be customized to a company’s needs. This gateway processes all major credit and debit cards, provides fraud protection and also provides additional services based on transaction and monthly fees. The basic setup cost is $99, with a monthly service fee of $20.

AlertPay

A Canadian based company created in 2004, Alert Pay works to create a simple solution for online payment. Their business service accepts Visa, Mastercard and American Express credit and debit cards in 22 different currencies. As with Paysimple, they also provide invoicing services as well as fraud protection and customer support. Signing up for an account is free, however, transactions can cost up to 4.5 percent per transaction.

Do Comparisons

Do your research to find out which service will work the best for your business. Contact each site’s customer support and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Jot down the answers and compare them with each site to compare the benefits.

About the Author
Ashyia Hill blogs at CreditDonkey, a site that provides small business owners with credit card research for entrepreneurs.

Online Business

Email Marketing and Startups

Post author By Pamela Swift
Post date August 11, 2011

Successfully building a company from scratch takes dedication, a clear business plan and a good amount of marketing know-how. Word of mouth is certainly something you want, but you can’t rely on it for all of your advertising needs, even if you offer the best customer experience around. One of the most cost-effective marketing methods for startups is email marketing. It’s fairly easy to find an internet marketing blog full of content for advanced marketing, such as automation or dedicated marketing software, but today I am going to talk about the basics of an email marketing campaign, how it can help your startup and how doing it wrong can negatively impact your business.

The Basics

Before you start an email marketing campaign, there are a few things you should know. First, your initial emails to subscribers should not be attempting to sell them anything; they should, instead, provide useful content that will answer their questions and display your knowledge in your field. Every email you send should include a call to action, prompting the recipient to respond or connect with you in some way. The most popular way to do this is by providing links to the business’s Facebook or Twitter account, accompanied by a simple message like “Join us on Facebook” or “Connect with us on Twitter”. You should never purchase email lists, because it will make your newsletter seem spammy. Instead, point your website visitors to a subscription page and ask your customers in person if they’d like to be included in your email list. This ensures that only people who actually want to receive your emails are on your list.

Doing it Properly

Making your emails friendly and recognizable will help you build a good relationship with your subscribers, hopefully prompting them to become customers in the future. Keeping your emails consistent is key to keeping your subscribers and ensuring that they remember you and your company. Set a regular schedule for your emails and stick with it. Don’t change the format or design, either. Your subscribers shouldn’t have to wonder who sent them the email. Pay attention to the feedback you receive, from people unsubscribing (which will happen) to people who engage you on social media or by email. The responses you get from consumers can help you focus on a specific area where your potential customers have a need.

Doing it Poorly

There are some things you should never do in your emails. First, never try to force a sale onto a subscriber, even if you’ve built a relationship with them. Make them offers, give them coupons and give them quality articles, but make sure that every email benefits the recipient without requiring anything of them. Don’t trick people into subscribing to your list, either. Some companies automatically enroll people in their newsletters when they make a purchase or sign up for an account, but that will merely lose you customers in the long run. Keep your emails brief, too. Needlessly wordy emails will prompt people to unsubscribe from your list, undoing all the hard work you’ve done to get them there.

Whether you’re hiring a company to take care of your marketing campaigns for you or heading them up in-house, you’ll be able to connect with potential customers more easily and receive valuable feedback on both your marketing campaigns and your business as a whole. If you use an email marketing company, you should keep in mind that you’ll have less control of the whole process, though it’s often worth it if your business sends emails out once a month or less. Being consistent, taking user criticism into account and imparting value to the reader will help your business become known as a leader in its field and will drive customer relationships. Your business could be negatively affected if you buy email lists, send overly-long emails or attempt to use your newsletter to sell to your subscribers without building a relationship first. Reliable, valuable email marketing takes time and patience, but is ultimately an invaluable tool in any business’s marketing campaign.

Customer Service

World Class Customer Service

Post author By Pamela Swift
Post date July 28, 2011

As more and more businesses find themselves fighting against the tide of commoditization, it is becoming increasing difficult, (if not impossible, depending on the product and services) and significantly more expensive, to differentiate from the competition.

I believe the least expensive way to do it is developing true differentiation in customer service. But it has to be truly, exceptionally, noticeably unique and different. How can a company with limited resources and with its products and services continually fighting commoditization differentiate itself with “world class” customer service?

By creating an initiative that among other strategies combines customer service training and employee engagement. But neither in the way companies traditionally try to do those 2 things.

I thought of this approach after being reminded recently about a former client whose company leadership preached to employees about providing “world class” customer service.

Yet, when I asked many of those same employees to define “world class” customer service and how they were expected to deliver it, I received mostly blank stares.

The great thing about employees is that they are also customers. Every single one of them has experiences organizational leaders should be tapping into. Most do not.

Instead of bringing in a “customer service expert” to take employees through a training on customer service, there is an alternate solution.

Imagine if you were holding an internal customer service symposium that would tap into the collective genius and life-long experience of the people in your organization. Doing a program like that would:

Allow you to engage your best advocates in solutions to improve your company from the bottom up;
Make every one of your employees feel valued because their input was requested and the ideas they provided or contributed to were actually seen to be implemented;
Improve motivation and morale;
Give employees ownership of the ideas and strategies making it easier to hold themselves and their teammates accountable for the implementation;
Improve customer service, customer relationships and customer retention.

Here’s how it would work:

1. Get as many company leaders and employees together in one room as possible.
2. Pair up people at different levels, President-Receptionist, Board Chairman-janitor, etc.
3. Give each group 30-minutes to share one story of the BEST example of customer service experience they’ve ever experienced; a time when someone truly exceeded their expectations.
4. Create a forum/format for capturing the best ideas from each of those experiences.
5. Brainstorm additional ideas that your company can add or build on the ideas captured from the stories.
6. Vote on the 10 best ideas that are a fit for your company that you are not already doing.

Now you have a list of 10 hot ideas for improving your customer relationships, but you are not finished as 2 key steps remain:

1. Identify and list all past, present and future obstacles (excuses) to implementing these ideas
2. Commit to strategies for eliminating those excuses that are the highest priority items so you can begin implementation of the ideas within 30-days.

These final two steps are what a colleague of mine calls “the secret sauce.”

Without attacking those final two steps, the entire effort will not just be wasted, but it will undermine and sabotage morale and motivation moving forward and you can forget about people contributing their ideas again in the future.

One final note is that you don’t have to necessarily be able to eliminate all the obstacles identified to implement a particular strategy, but you do need to give people reasons for why it’s not possible, or not possible at this time. The feedback and loop closing is key so people feel heard and valued.

But if the item is on your top 10 of “Customer Service Strategies we should implement” I’d jump through a fiery hoop to eliminate those obstacles to make it happen and set yourself apart from your competition to create a killer gap between yourself and your competition.

Often, because of emotional connection to the topics and situations, certain relationships in the room and unintended positional intimidation, it is difficult and less than effective to have an internal person facilitate these types of sessions and it can be more effective to have an external facilitator experienced in bringing groups to consensus on ideas such as these.

About the Author
Skip Weisman is The Leadership & Workplace Communication Expert. He’s the author of the white paper report titled, “The 7 Deadliest Sins of Leadership & Workplace Communication: How Leaders and Their Employees Unknowingly Undermine Morale, Motivation and Trust in Work Environments.” The white paper is available as a free download for a limited time at www.HowToImproveLeadershipCommunication.com . If you’d like to learn how you can improve your work environment by improving communication contact him directly with any questions, or for a complimentary Strategy Session at 845-463-3838 or e-mail to Skip@WeismanSuccessResources.com

Finance & Capital

Why do you need a surety bond for your new business, anyway?

Post author By Pamela Swift
Post date July 27, 2011

Article Contributed by Kristen Bradley

Starting up a new business is never easy, and it would be nice if you could just skip to the part where your business begins to turn a profit. However, if this were the case then entrepreneurs would miss out on the valuable experience that comes with building their company from scratch. During the first few months, you’ll have to overcome a number of obstacles if you really want to succeed.

Unfortunately, some of these obstacles include legal regulations that seem to be nothing more than arbitrary government-mandated requirements. One such task entrepreneurs often know little about is the need to purchase surety bonds. Being bonded is a legal obligation for businesses in most industries, yet professionals often find themselves asking, “Why do I even need a surety bond?” There are more than a few answers to this question, but the following are some of the most important.

Surety bonds are required by law.
The basic goal behind most surety bond requirements is to guarantee industry regulations are met. Mortgage brokers, auto dealers and contractors are a few professions for which surety bonds are necessary as a business license requirement. Failing to purchase and maintain any necessary bonds can result in heavy fines and license revocation.

Surety bonds provide legally binding financial protection.
Each surety bond functions as a legally binding contract that involves three parties:

the principal that purchases the bond, which is the professional or business
the obligee that requires the principal to purchase a bond, which is usually a government agency
the surety that sells the bond, which is typically an insurance company or a special surety agency

So let’s put this into action. If a contractor leaves a publicly funded construction job mid-project, the government agency overseeing the job can file a claim on the professional’s contract bond. The contractor either has to finish the project according to contract or pay financial reparation so another contractor can take over. If the contractor cannot afford to do so, the bond’s financial guarantee covers the losses.

Customers feel safe working with bonded businesses.
Business owners can also choose to purchase additional surety bonds as a sign of their well-intentioned business practices. Promoting your company as “licensed and bonded” allows customers to feel more confident about your professional reputation. By purchasing a bond you give customers an alternative to the courtroom if an unfortunate situation should arise.

Surety bond premiums are low relative to their coverage.
A surety bond’s cost depends on a number of factors such as your personal finances and credit score, as well as the specific bond type you’re seeking. Premiums typically cost just one to three percent of the total bond amount. This means a surety bond that provides $10,000 worth of coverage only costs $100 to $300.

Getting a surety bond might seem like a hassle at first, but a basic knowledge of the process makes it easier for those looking to get bonded for the first time.

About the Author
This article was provided by Kristen Bradley of SuretyBonds.com, a nationwide surety bond producer that offers assistance to entrepreneurs and new business owners. SuretyBonds.com maintains the Surety Bonds Insider, an online publication that provides an in-depth look at developing policies in the surety industry.

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