Perhaps the only way to differentiate yourself from competitors is to overdeliver. It seems that many markets are crammed full of businesses and offers so you have to stand out in some way. One of the key ways is with your support.

Be a friend. How many times have you sought support from a company, to end up communicating with someone you don’t recognise. Where possible, answer queries and problems yourself. They’ll have trusted you enough to buy your product so they recognise they’re getting real personal support when you respond yourself.

Be individual. Too many Helpdesk situations have the tone of corporate organisations. They can be anonymous even when the company is in fact quite a small one. This is a misunderstanding about being professional. People have plenty of experience already of this type of support. So make your responses individual to the customer and recognise them as a customer.

Be surprising. You can also be proactive. You haven’t got to wait for customers to contact you with a problem or complaint. If there’s a problem you’ve noticed in service or product, you can own up to this and reward people for being such good customers. You could give them anything from an ebook to a package of products. It shows you recognise them as individual customers and not simply people to give you money.

Build relationships. Your support shouldn’t just be seen in terms of your Helpdesk and so on. Be proactive by being available by email and on forums or webinars. In other words, help is on-going and not just for when problem arises.

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It is easy as an online marketer to get drawn into the use of exaggerated terms and attitudes on the internet as they seem so common and all pervasive at times.

Use power words carefully. Power words are those which have an emotional effect on the visitor in order to by-pass their rational guard. You might have words like “unbelievable” and “phenomenal”. The use of such words needs to be true. In the first example, it would have to be such a product people would find it incredible how well it works or how effective it is. In the second example, the product would literally have to be a phenomenon, so outstanding it’s beyond the capability of other similar products.

Use your experience. Also, base your description of your product on your real experience. You may have experience of HTML editors of various kinds, for example, but not of the details of autoresponders. To claim that you do know such details and are making exaggerated claims about them is misleading and doesn’t really help the buyer.

Good support. In your own business, if customers or visitors have a question or a problem, they should be able to contact you quite easily and get a reasonably quick and courteous reply. You could have different channels of contact through phone, email, messenger or whatever.

Support tells a lot about the integrity of a business. This integrity needs to be maintained particularly if you have made excellent claims about your product before someone buys it. However, there’s not much worse for your credibility than a customer who feels let down.

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