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15 High-Income Skills to Learn

Underlying all effective marketing messages – physical brochures or web pages – is great copywriting. Copywriting is the art of stringing words together to drive results.  It compels your audience to sign up for your newsletters, free trial, or to make a purchase! And a person who specializes in doing so is a copywriter. Writing seems easy until it isn’t.  Anyone can write, but not everyone can produce writing professionally – on time and delivers results. Only professional copywriters can do so, after accumulating years of experience and knowledge. If you’ve been running your business and want to up your game, hiring a professional copywriter may be one of your best decisions yet! Learn about the 9 benefits of professional copywriting, and why your business needs it. 1. Copywriting Builds Your Company’s Image Your web copy is the first thing readers see when they discover you. It helps them determine whether you’re credible, professional, and potentially worthy of their business. That’s why first impressions are critical. Your web copy must be impeccable from the get-go – be it your tone, grammar, or User Experience (UX) integration! Your copy reflects the quality of the products or services you provide. Any small mistake will reflect poorly on your business. Great copywriting factors all these in, and finds the best possible angle to showcase your business.  It boosts your audience’s impression, so you start your relationship with them on the right foot. Steinway Pianos utilizes elegant copywriting to paint a picture of their brand and their piano range. It allows readers to experience and feel what it is like to play on a Steinway piano and the impressive performance benefits, it can deliver. Great copywriting doesn’t just present your brand in a favorable light, it allows your reader to experience what your brand feels like and what it truly stands for. And in Steinway’s case, the copy here presents it as a magnificent brand that creates world-class pianos used by only the best. 2. Forms an Emotional Bond with Audience Through Brand Story Your audience is constantly figuring if you are exactly the solution they seek. To do so, they dig further to learn more about you.  This is where your brand story comes in! Skilfully crafted brand stories connect with your audience, assuring them that you are their right choice.  They touch on the audience’s angsts, hopes, and dreams, making the audience feel understood. Take Warby Parker’s About page for example. Warby Parker sells glasses at affordable prices, and the brand story shares why they do so. They show how, like the audience, they also went through a similar set of pains.  They lead the audience to their journey’s conclusion – the company’s conception. So the audience can skip the pain, and enjoy the gain! Through storytelling, Warby Parker builds a relationship with the readers. Only when readers feel a bond with you, do they trust and buy from you. Great copywriting helps you build that bond you need. 3. Brings Out Full Personality of Your Brand Besides your front page and brand story, your business has multiple touch-points keeping you connected with your audience. These may be emails, social media posts, or even blog posts. Each of these touch-points allows your audience to learn more about your business. It’s like interacting with a friend to know him better! And just like with friends, you trust them only if they stay consistent.  You want to see different nuances of his personality unfold after some time too. Great copywriting gives your audience exactly that experience.  It keeps your brand’s core personality consistent across the various platforms, while showcasing its different charms appropriately. Whether it is a Tweet, an Instagram post or a blog article from your brand, consistency in the tone of voice is key. This way, your audience feels more intimate with your brand.  Your audience’s impression is strengthened, so they eventually buy from you when they feel ready. The Hustle is a daily tech-newsletter that targets millennial bros and they reflect it perfectly in their tone of voice. With quips that target the older generation like ‘your grandpa’ to everyday conversation terms like ‘zapped’ and ‘lame’, the newsletters allow subscribers to identify more with the brand, making them look forward to tomorrow’s mail. 4. Distinguishes Your Business from Competitors Consumers are spoilt for choice nowadays. When they want to buy something, a simple Google search offers them pages of options! No longer will they buy from you, simply because you approached them first.  Instead, they will compare you with your competitors, to determine the best option for them. Which means to win the sale, you need to stand out. You need to connect your products’ benefits to their needs and serve them better than anyone else! Great copywriting does so by offering them a fresh angle of how you stand out from your competitors, in an objective manner. As a business owner, this can be surprisingly difficult to do for yourself! You may be too involved with the daily operations, that you distance yourself from your audience through detailed, jargon-laden language use. That’s where professional copywriters can help with their deep understanding of psychology and market experience.  They are trained to dissect markets quickly to spot gaps you can fill. And the gap you fill can make customers choose you! Email marketing software is a terribly competitive space to be in that demands your business to stand out. Convertkit cleverly stands out with other competitors like MailChimp by crafting copy that specifically speaks to creatives and side-hustlers. They use examples that are personable which their ideal customers can emotionally identify with. 5. Helps You Rank Higher on Google It’s not enough to create your website if you’re not seen. Yes, your website is an important “virtual salesperson” for visitors. Like salesmen in a store however, they can generate sales only if visitors come in! How do you drive thousands of targeted, organic visitors to your website, for your “virtual salesperson” to do its job though? You need to rank

Blog

21 Key Customer Service Skills

It doesn’t matter how great your product is: If your customer service is poor, people will complain about it, and you’ll lose customers. The good news: It’s not impossible to turn things around. Transforming your customer service from mediocre to great won’t happen overnight, though. It requires a serious commitment to meaningful change, a team of rockstar support professionals, and work across the entire organization. What is customer service? Customer service is the act of providing support to both prospective and existing customers. Customer service professionals commonly answer customer questions through in-person, phone, email, chat, and social media interactions and may also be responsible for creating documentation for self-service support. Organizations can also create their own definitions of customer service depending on their vaues and the type of support they want to provide. For example, at Help Scout, we define customer service as the act of providing timely, empathetic help that keeps customers’ needs at the forefront of every interaction. Download the ebook Download this free guide by filling out the form below. Why is customer service important? When 86% of customers quit doing business with a company due to a bad experience, it means that businesses must approach every support interaction as an opportunity to acquire, retain, or up-sell. Good customer service is a revenue generator. It gives customers a complete, cohesive experience that aligns with an organization’s purpose. According to a variety of studies, U.S. companies lose more than $62 billion annually due to poor customer service, and seven out of 10 consumers say they’ve spent more money to do business with a company that delivers great service. Understanding that customer service is the cornerstone of your customer experience helps you leverage it as an opportunity to delight customers and engage them in new, exciting ways. What are the principles of good customer service? There are four key principles of good customer service: It’s personalized, competent, convenient, and proactive. These factors have the biggest influence on the customer experience. By building your customer service strategy around these four main principles, you’ll create a positive, hassle-free customer experience for everyone who deals with your company. Customer service tips by business type and industry Write Support Emails Your Customers Will LoveStay on top of your emails and answer more support tickets faster and easier.Get the guide 21 key customer service skills While delivering consistently good customer service requires work and alignment across your entire organization, a good place to start is your customer service team. It’s important to hire people who genuinely want to help your customers succeed — and to pay rates that are attractive to skilled professionals. Finding the perfect hire for a support team can be challenging. No particular checklist of job experiences and college diplomas adds up to the perfect candidate. Instead, you’re looking for qualities that can’t necessarily be taught. These folks thrive on one-on-one interactions within their community. They love problem solving. They’re warm, approachable, and great at teaching other people how things work. Here are the 21 customer service skills that every support professional should seek to develop and every leader should look for when hiring new team members.Foundations of Great ServiceDiscover the tools and techniques used by high-performing customer service organizations in our free, six-part video course.Sign up for free 1. Problem solving skills Customers do not always self-diagnose their issues correctly. Often, it’s up to the support rep to take the initiative to reproduce the trouble at hand before navigating a solution. That means they need to intuit not just what went wrong, but also what action the customer was ultimately after. A great example? If somebody writes in because they’re having trouble resetting their password, that’s ultimately because they want to log into their account. A good customer service interaction will anticipate that need and might even go the extra mile to manually perform the reset and provide new login details, all while educating the customer on how they can do it for themselves in the future. In other situations, a problem-solving pro may simply understand how to offer preemptive advice or a solution that the customer doesn’t even realize is an option. 2. Patience Patience is crucial for customer service professionals. After all, customers who reach out to support are often confused and frustrated. Being listened to and handled with patience goes a long way in helping customers feel like you’re going to alleviate their current frustrations. It’s not enough to close out interactions with customers as quickly as possible. Your team has to be willing to take the time to listen to and fully understand each customer’s problems and needs. 3. Attentiveness The ability to truly listen to customers is crucial to providing great service for a number of reasons. Not only is it important to pay attention to individual customers’ experiences, but it’s also important to be mindful and attentive to the feedback that you receive at large. For instance, customers may not be saying it outright, but perhaps there is a pervasive feeling that your software’s dashboard isn’t laid out correctly. Customers aren’t likely to say, “Please improve your UX,” but they may say things like, “I can never find the search feature” or “Where is (specific function), again?” You have to be attentive to pick up on what customers are telling you without directly saying it. 4. Emotional intelligence A great customer support representative knows how to relate to anybody, but they’re especially good with frustrated people. Instead of taking things personally, they intuitively understand where the other person is coming from and they know to both prioritize and swiftly communicate that empathy. Think about it: How often have you felt better about a potential grievance simply because you felt immediately heard by the other person involved? When a support rep is able to demonstrate sincere empathy for a frustrated customer, even just by reiterating the problem at hand, it can help to both placate (the customer feels heard) and actively please (the customer feel validated in their

Blog

9 Benefits of Great Copywriting

Underlying all effective marketing messages – physical brochures or web pages – is great copywriting. Copywriting is the art of stringing words together to drive results.  It compels your audience to sign up for your newsletters, free trial, or to make a purchase! And a person who specializes in doing so is a copywriter. Writing seems easy until it isn’t.  Anyone can write, but not everyone can produce writing professionally – on time and delivers results. Only professional copywriters can do so, after accumulating years of experience and knowledge. If you’ve been running your business and want to up your game, hiring a professional copywriter may be one of your best decisions yet! Learn about the 9 benefits of professional copywriting, and why your business needs it. 1. Copywriting Builds Your Company’s Image Your web copy is the first thing readers see when they discover you. It helps them determine whether you’re credible, professional, and potentially worthy of their business. That’s why first impressions are critical. Your web copy must be impeccable from the get-go – be it your tone, grammar, or User Experience (UX) integration! Your copy reflects the quality of the products or services you provide. Any small mistake will reflect poorly on your business. Great copywriting factors all these in, and finds the best possible angle to showcase your business.  It boosts your audience’s impression, so you start your relationship with them on the right foot. Steinway Pianos utilizes elegant copywriting to paint a picture of their brand and their piano range. It allows readers to experience and feel what it is like to play on a Steinway piano and the impressive performance benefits, it can deliver. Great copywriting doesn’t just present your brand in a favorable light, it allows your reader to experience what your brand feels like and what it truly stands for. And in Steinway’s case, the copy here presents it as a magnificent brand that creates world-class pianos used by only the best. 2. Forms an Emotional Bond with Audience Through Brand Story Your audience is constantly figuring if you are exactly the solution they seek. To do so, they dig further to learn more about you.  This is where your brand story comes in! Skilfully crafted brand stories connect with your audience, assuring them that you are their right choice.  They touch on the audience’s angsts, hopes, and dreams, making the audience feel understood. Take Warby Parker’s About page for example. Warby Parker sells glasses at affordable prices, and the brand story shares why they do so. They show how, like the audience, they also went through a similar set of pains.  They lead the audience to their journey’s conclusion – the company’s conception. So the audience can skip the pain, and enjoy the gain! Through storytelling, Warby Parker builds a relationship with the readers. Only when readers feel a bond with you, do they trust and buy from you. Great copywriting helps you build that bond you need. 3. Brings Out Full Personality of Your Brand Besides your front page and brand story, your business has multiple touch-points keeping you connected with your audience. These may be emails, social media posts, or even blog posts. Each of these touch-points allows your audience to learn more about your business. It’s like interacting with a friend to know him better! And just like with friends, you trust them only if they stay consistent.  You want to see different nuances of his personality unfold after some time too. Great copywriting gives your audience exactly that experience.  It keeps your brand’s core personality consistent across the various platforms, while showcasing its different charms appropriately. Whether it is a Tweet, an Instagram post or a blog article from your brand, consistency in the tone of voice is key. This way, your audience feels more intimate with your brand.  Your audience’s impression is strengthened, so they eventually buy from you when they feel ready. The Hustle is a daily tech-newsletter that targets millennial bros and they reflect it perfectly in their tone of voice. With quips that target the older generation like ‘your grandpa’ to everyday conversation terms like ‘zapped’ and ‘lame’, the newsletters allow subscribers to identify more with the brand, making them look forward to tomorrow’s mail. 4. Distinguishes Your Business from Competitors Consumers are spoilt for choice nowadays. When they want to buy something, a simple Google search offers them pages of options! No longer will they buy from you, simply because you approached them first.  Instead, they will compare you with your competitors, to determine the best option for them. Which means to win the sale, you need to stand out. You need to connect your products’ benefits to their needs and serve them better than anyone else! Great copywriting does so by offering them a fresh angle of how you stand out from your competitors, in an objective manner. As a business owner, this can be surprisingly difficult to do for yourself! You may be too involved with the daily operations, that you distance yourself from your audience through detailed, jargon-laden language use. That’s where professional copywriters can help with their deep understanding of psychology and market experience.  They are trained to dissect markets quickly to spot gaps you can fill. And the gap you fill can make customers choose you! Email marketing software is a terribly competitive space to be in that demands your business to stand out. Convertkit cleverly stands out with other competitors like MailChimp by crafting copy that specifically speaks to creatives and side-hustlers. They use examples that are personable which their ideal customers can emotionally identify with. 5. Helps You Rank Higher on Google It’s not enough to create your website if you’re not seen. Yes, your website is an important “virtual salesperson” for visitors. Like salesmen in a store however, they can generate sales only if visitors come in! How do you drive thousands of targeted, organic visitors to your website, for your “virtual salesperson” to do its job though? You need to rank

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