New York, NY (PRWEB) December 13, 2012
Shiny Reputation urges business owners to apply some thought and utilize free website monitoring services, in order to maximize sales this Holiday Season. Shiny Reputation states the relevancy of this advice for today is due to the closing window of being able to get product to consumers by Christmas day. Most shipping providers state their cut off as the 20th and 21st of December which gives businesses a week to really take advantage of online sales and delivery by the holiday.
This is especially important during the holidays as online purchasing by consumers has increased by 14% from last year amid during the Thanksgiving week 27% of consumers clicking on web searches came from mobile devices according to BizReport and Matt Grebow the Senior Manager of Paid Media at The Search Agency respectively. Shiny Reputation states that their push is relevant during the holiday season due to increased purchases for Christmas and the shown penchant for cyber shopping. They provide this explanation, "Consider this scenario: customers visit a store and are dissatisfied for some reason i.e. lack of variety, poor service etc. But on account of a lack of time, they put up with the negatives and make their purchases swearing to themselves about not returning ever. This could be a likely scenario – something that many can identify with. The major deterrent against shopping elsewhere could well be the consumption of additional time and effort. But convert the physical store into an online one and both those factors – time and effort – disappear out of the window. Poor service or a lack of good products can translate into your pain and your competition’s gain – all within a few clicks!"
If the loss in the example given above only resulted in the loss of sales, one could imagine that a heavy investment into publicity and plugging gaps in the website could bring the customers back to the site. Often, however, the loss on the tangible aspect of sales can be much cheaper than the subsequent loss of reputation through a bad review on several websites like Yelp. Consider this: a company may lose ten customers a day for various reasons. On the assumption that each customer had the capacity of spending $100 on an average, the loss amounts to $1000 per day. This is easy to set a value to because, for the most part, no third person will ever come to know. However, what if a couple of the ten customers decided to post negative feedback on the internet? Can a business owner ever work out the intangible loss? The two customers collectively cost the business $200 on a tangible scale; but how many prospective customers did they drive away from the business based on their negative reviews? That, usually, is pretty hard to ascertain. Reputation Management, therefore, becomes equally significant along with product, inventory and marketing management. For this reason, monitoring the website uptime becomes an important consideration not only for managing online reputation and generating sales, but also for improving the search ranking of the website.
The Zeno Group conducted a survey between October 4 – 11 among 300 corporate executives at companies earning revenues of $1 billion or more. Some of their conclusions were:
- 36% of executives said that the CEO of their company cared little – if at all – about the company’s social media reputation.
- 10% replied that their companies would take no action either to engage with the online audience or to address a damaging article or social media post.
Zeno Group is an award-winning public relations agency with offices located in the US, Canada, UK, China, India, Singapore and Indonesia. With many notable clients in their kitty, the Zeno Group’s areas of interest include consumer, health, technology and corporate affairs. They are the proud recipients of the PR Week US Mid-Size Agency of the Year award for 2011 and 2012.
Sources:
While most businesses would invest significant capital into getting the latest technology and security for their websites – not counting the investment into content and products, it is ironical that a service that remains free can provide them with the competitive edge they seek. Discounting their website’s performance is a path fraught with peril for their bottom-line – and their reputation.
About Shiny Reputation:
In order to help businesses influence their Yelp reviews, Shiny Reputation shares many tips that enable them to take advantage of positive feedback on review sites. Additionally, they also provide advanced levels of training to help businesses improve their Yelp reviews.