5-star reviews online are like GOLD and should be aggressively pursued and shamelessly exploited in your marketing. Without reviews your asking your customer to give you a try blind. Amazon has trained us all to check the reviews before we buy… If you don’t take reviews seriously it will significantly impair your ability to grow. A great place to start is to go to your favorite customers first and ask them to leave a review on your google page. Start there and regularly pursue more reviews as you grow. Reviews should be used in all your advertising both online and print.

It is crucial you have a system and a culture of referrals in your business. It should be expected they refer their friends. Also, the person who refers is more likely to stay than the people who doesn’t refer. So reward the ones that do, and keep reminding the ones that don’t. Once someone demonstrates the ability to refer - That’s who can refer more! You MUST make a BIG deal of it when they refer. I think it’s also worth mentioning the bigger the deal you make about referrals, the more you will get. Especially when you consider people are motivated far more by recognition than they are by money. You can and should use this to leverage more referrals. 

The best way to retain customers is through relationship with them. So personal touches is one way, b-day cards, gifts, follow up calls etc… Are you recognizing them for contests you run or for how long they have been with you? Is there a way for them to spend more money with you through upgrades or a more premium membership or service? The quickest way to keep people around is to get them to give you more money. 

Do you send surveys out to your customers regularly to study them? Where do they shop? What do they listen to? Are they primarily men? Women? Do they have kids? What is it keeping them up at night? If you don’t know who your customer is, then how do you know who to market to? And (equally as important) if you don’t know what motivates your customer then you will not know what to say in your sales message to them. 

When a customer calls your business who answers? What do they sound like? Are they happy? Are they trained with scripts? Do you mystery shop your own business? Do you have regular training to focus on 5-star customer service? The truth is, no matter how good your marketing is, it won’t matter if you don’t have awesome customer service. The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos said “Customers are loyal to you up to the moment somebody offers them better customer service.” 

Have a marketing system with at least TEN different lead sources. You cannot expect to get a big response in your marketing if your just in one place. Or worse… No place. You have to be everywhere. Online AND offline. Don’t be fooled into thinking you should only be marketing online. Do YOU still read mail that come in your mail box? Yeah… I do too. And so does your prospect. You need to be there. 

If your website lands on page two, it might as well be on page 812. It’s irrelevant. There’s a reason everyone uses the phrase “just google it”. It’s because EVERYBODY USES GOOGLE. Don’t waste your time and money worrying if your on the other search engines. Nobody cares about Yahoo or Bing… Google is king. Your ability to get yourself to page one of Google as fast as possible will directly reflect in your sales numbers. 

One of the ways to retain your customers and keep them coming back and paying you money is to stay engaged in relationship with them. The bigger you get the less this becomes a possibility. A newsletter that is sent to their mailbox every month is a fantastic way to continue interacting and relating to them. This is a must if you expect them to continue to be committed to you and not forget about you and go with your competitor.   

Your friends opinion doesn’t matter, your colleagues opinion doesn’t matter, your competitors opinion DEFINITELY doesn’t matter… Only RESULTS matter. At the end of the day, no matter how much you like an ad you might have written, if it doesn’t get results, it’s gotta go. If you have a product that is not selling, no matter how much your employees like it, no matter how pretty it might be… It’s gotta go! If you want your business to survive for any length of time you MUST extract your personal opinion and bias and just follow the money… The ONLY thing that matters is results. Period.

What you do is just a deliverable… Ultimately, it’s just a commodity if there are others offering it too. So you don’t want to be in the commodities business because you’ll be just another one of the thing you're offering. You’re REALLY in the business of getting and keeping customers. A lot of business owners take great pride in the deliverable. Which is fine. But no matter how good you are at what you do, it will be irrelevant if you have NO CUSTOMERS. So whether you like it or not, you are really in the marketing business.