Providing personalized service to your customers is incredibly important to creating brand loyalty. Have you thought about using an e-mail notification when sending out packages to your customers? E-mail notifications make is easy for your customers to know when their package ships and when it will arrive. With e-mail notifications, you can easily give your customers the answers they want, such as shipment methods, tracking numbers or even packing list detail. This simple feature cuts down on unnecessary calls to your support desk. Studies show that this service tremendously boosts customer loyalty and re-orders.

Your e-mail notification can also include marketing information to help launch new products or special offerings as well include links to pertinent web pages. Many companies are using this service as another marketing touchpoint!

I encourage you to look at your shipping solution as another way to provide awesome service to your customers. Give me a call if you are interested in adding this feature to your shipping solution. I’ll steer you in the right direction.

Assumptions—let’s face it; everyone makes them.  We judge books by their cover, job applicants by their past track records, and foreign cuisine by its sometimes not-so-pleasant odors.   However, assumptions can also be costly—in a more literal sense than you may think.  Slashing expenses is a constant for businesses—always has been, always will be.  As business owners, we analyze processes, renegotiate with suppliers, scrutinize sales and marketing, and monitor costs.  All in the name of Savings!  Yet, assumptions in an often-ignored department can result in the rapid accumulation of costs.  I am referring to the shipping department, which incurs expenditures every single day in the form of freight expense.  Managers assume that there is nothing that they can do to save money and ease the process.  They watch helplessly as carrier rates steadily increase and grow frustrated at their inability to take effective action.   But, by overcoming 4 common myths in the shipping department, we can slash shipping costs by up to 420%!

Read the rest of this entry »