Show them love year-round, and they’ll return the favor.

By Gail Goodman
www.entrepreneur.com

Everyone wants to feel valued–particularly when people are making hard choices regarding their wallets. We can’t take their patronage and support for granted. Regularly communicating that you care about your customers’ success strengthens your connection to them–and differentiates you from competitors who only reach out when they want to sell something.

These five actions will show customers you care long after Valentine’s Day is a wrap:

1. Share Your Knowledge

Give away helpful advice in your e-mail newsletter, as well as on your Twitter and Facebook pages–information that will better your readers’ lives. Anticipate customers’ questions and concerns and offer useful information to educate and guide them. Ask them what they’d like to learn more about from you.
Be different from others who are merely promoting products and services in their communications. Sharing your knowledge gives customers something valuable for free and proves your expertise. It’s a win-win.

2. Ask, Listen, Respond, Adapt

Ask customers what’s on their minds regularly. That includes their satisfaction with their most recent sales or service experience and with your employees, as well as their general impressions of your business. Invite feedback at multiple contact points–via e-mail communications, online surveys, on your website, after online sales and on paper sales receipts. Keeping a finger on your customers’ pulse is good for the heart–and bottom line–of your business.

Listen to what customers are saying about you in surveys, on Twitter or Yelp, or anywhere else they give feedback. Publish survey results and answers to customer questions in your e-mail newsletter. Create a sense of community around your business based on dialogue with your customers. Respond to customers promptly when they contact your business, whether it’s a complaint or a compliment. Show them you’re listening and that you care. If there’s a problem, fix it so they can go away happy to return to your business.

Adapt your business based on customer feedback to better meet their needs. Communicate the changes you’re making based on what they’ve asked for.

3. Reward Customers

Coupon: A coupon can go a long way in this economy. Use your e-mail communications to offer coupons that stimulate business and give cash-strapped customers a break.

Gift: Everyone loves a freebie. Offer a small branded gift as part of a promotion. Give customers something that helps them remember–and love–your brand.

Information: Offer a free white paper, guide, or report about your industry, products, or services as thanks for signing up for your newsletter.

4. Hold a Customer Appreciation Event

Hold a “VIP Night” in your store or office. It could be a free seminar, early-bird sale, special access to new products, or a get-together with entertainment or a guest speaker. Promote your event in your e-newsletter and with links on social media websites so no one misses out.

5. Do Good

Get your business involved with a nonprofit or charity. Invite other local businesses and the community to participate. Use your newsletter and social media to tell customers about the cause you support. If you can, donate a portion of the proceeds from sales to the charity or match your customers’ donations. Another option is to hold a fundraising event. Remind people when they patronize your business that they’re doing something good.

Do these things again and again.

Showing customers you care should be an ongoing communications effort–not a once-a-year occasion the way we celebrate Valentine’s Day. Whatever you do, be sincere. Customers can spot hype a mile away. Here are some additional hints to take to heart:

Don’t pass off promotional content as editorial content. Give your audience something valuable and useful in every e-mail newsletter.

Only make promises you can stand by. Make sure employees understand your brand promise and communicate with them as you would with customers.

Remember what your mother told you: If you make a mistake, say you’re sorry. Then make things right.

Offer your contact information in every communication so customers can let you know when they’re dissatisfied–and when you’ve exceeded their expectations.

Customers demand more than good products and services. They want you to care about them and the world we live in. Show them you care all year long and you’re more likely to win their hearts . . . and their business.

Gail Goodman is the CEO of Constant Contact, a web-based provider of e-mail marketing, social media marketing, event marketing and online survey tools for small businesses. She’s also a recognized small-business expert and speaker.

There’s a huge market for telling women how to be happier. Maybe it’s because women read more than men. Or maybe it’s the discrepancy that women know when they are overweight and men don’t. Or the discrepancy that most men think they are good parents and most women think they need to be better parents. The list goes on and on, in a glass-half-empty kind of way.

In general, I think the strength of women is that they see things more clearly. Yes, it’s a glass-half-empty world for women, compared to men, but women should leverage their stronger grip on reality. So here’s my contribution to women and clarity. I am debunking five totally annoying pieces of advice I hear people give women all the time.

1. Take a look at the lists of best companies for women to work for
This is an advertising ploy, not a plan for you to run your life. Every single time there’s a list like this, women write to me from the companies on the list to tell me how much they suck for women. But it’s not like I need those emails. I can just look at senior management, which is almost always all men, and see that corporate careers are set up for a one kind of life: very

focused, no other interests, except, maybe, oneself. And this is not all that appealing to most women.

So you can forget the lists. The bar is so low to get on the lists that which company is on and which company is off is statistically irrelevant to women planning their careers.

2. Get a book deal that lets you write about men you admire
Yes, it is exciting to get a book deal, but why do women spend years writing books that fawn over the men they work with? Here are some books by women I admire, and I can’t get over that they spent years researching and reporting on men doing what, in fact, these women would probably like to be doing themselves. Why not just dump the book idea and do the cool jobs you write about instead of pretending you’re not interested in that?

If you want to get paid to write about men, aspire to be Mary Gaitskill.

3. Marry a stay-at-home dad to give you more space to grow your career
Based on my own experience and some research I don’t believe men are happy in this role. Please, stay-at-home dads, do not write to me to say you’re happy. I understand that there are exceptions to this rule, and also that all those exceptions happen to be blogging. But on balance, I find that stay-at-home dads are actually talking about some other project they are doing that is either a) BS and then they are in denial that they are totally lost or b) not BS and then they are not stay-at-home dads but rather dads with flexible work schedules.

Meanwhile, no matter how much money a woman makes, most women try to find a guy who earns more than she does. So whether or not it’s good for your career is a moot point; be true to yourself and admit you don’t want a stay-at-home husband.

4. Join an all-women networking group
Women are less connected in the world than men are. Men do not drop out of work during their highest earning potential years to take care of kids. So they have better connections. And, in my own work experience, men have been extremely helpful. So why would you go to a group that self-selects for people with fewer connections? There are a million ways to slice the world for networking potential – by location, by interest, by experience, by goals. Why would you do it by sex?

More importantly, it’s clear that women are not particularly supportive of each other. Everyone is competitive, but there are more problems between two women than between two men or between a man and a woman.

I would like to tell you that this is outdated research and that with the post-feminist generation women are not so back-stabbing to each other. But it’s not true. Anne Manci‘s research at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater finds that the culture in the top ranks is still disturbingly slanted toward women taking down the best women. (Thanks for the link, Kristine.)

5. Don’t cry at work
Newsflash. Women cry a lot and men don’t. So let’s just stop telling women to be men at work. No point. People who do best in their careers are people who are their true selves.

And, I have first-hand research on this topic, because I have cried at all levels of my career. To be fair, I cry mostly when I have PMS. But whatever. PMS is just your body telling your brain that you need to start crying about the stuff that you’ve been ignoring all month.

Here’s the big secret about crying though. Men who are secure with themselves and their position in the world actually deal with women crying just fine. So any guy at work who cannot deal with you crying needs to get some therapy in order to be more self-assured. You, on the other hand, are doing just fine with those workplace tears.

About Penelope Trunk

Penelope is the founder of 3 startups — most recently, Brazen Careerist, a social network to help young people manage their careers. Her career advice appears in more than 200 newspapers. In a review of this blog, Business Week called Penelope’s writing “poetic.”

Read this article any many more on Penelope Trunk’s Blog.