Given all the attention paid to viral and word-of-mouth marketing, lots of websites are including features to let you tell a friend about their product or service. But after completing a transaction with a popular online application, I started to wonder: which group of customers is most likely to actually refer their friends to the site? For a typical web-based application, there are three categories to consider:

– Customers who paid for the service (in other words, normal paying customers)
– Customers who got the service at a discount or for free (i.e. people using a coupon)
– Customers who not only got the service for free, but were paid in terms of extra gifts or bonuses for doing so (such as members of a focus group)

Normally, I would say the first group is the most likely to tell others about their experience, since people who pay for things tend to value them more and seek external validation for the money they spent. This is arguably why customers who pay an annual fee for American Express charge cards tend to be very loyal and vocal about AmEx, for instance.

But with all the word-of-mouth and sharing tools available online, are paying customers really the most likely to talk about a product? It’s hard to say. Perhaps the people who first got the product at a discount, but then were impressed enough to pay full price after that, will lead to the most word-of-mouth referrals. Or maybe those who got paid to try the product are your most vocal allies. No matter which group ends up being the most valuable, one thing is certain: if you want people to tell their friends and colleagues about your products, make sure to ask them to spread the word. Even if you don’t think a particular group is going to be very chatty, it usually can’t hurt to ask.

My building has an online bulletin board where people can post ads for various types of items, including apartments they’re trying to sell or rent. It’s rather basic: just a text listing plus some contact info. But there’s one aspect to the real estate listings that I rarely see elsewhere: every listing includes the floor number that the apartment is located on.

Why don’t regular real estate ads do this more often? Even in big cities like Chicago where high-rise buildings are common, I’d say no more than 10% of the real estate ads specify which floor the apartment is on. And why does the bulletin board at my place list the info so consistently?

Perhaps our bulletin board has big, bold text on the page that you use to post a listing, reminding people to include the floor number. Or maybe people just think of it more readily when all the listings are in the same building, making the floor number a main differentiator of one apartment versus another. Regardless of the cause, the takeaway is simple: if you’re posting a real estate ad for anything that isn’t on the ground floor, be sure to specify which floor it’s on. And if you’re designing the interface for a real estate site, it’s probably a really good idea to make the floor number a required field.

This month, the Chicago Transit Authority is rolling out their latest series of service cuts. Unlike previous changes, these are far-reaching: every train line will have fewer cars, adding another 2-5 minutes between most trains. Obviously, this means more waiting and additional crowding, especially for those who take the train back and forth to work each day.

Luckily, I don’t rely on CTA for daily travel. But a lot of people do. And with these severe service cuts, I’m sure many people will get fed up and start driving to work. That’s a shame, but I can’t blame them. What’s more, this situation underscores the chicken-and-egg problem facing public transit nationwide.

The scenario goes something like this: not enough people are taking the train, so there isn’t enough fare revenue to cover the operating costs. To make ends meet, the city cuts back on service or raises fares. But this further reduces the number of passengers, making the situation ever more dire. Regardless of whether low ridership or reduced service/higher fares started the cycle, the problem keeps escalating. Repeat this every few years, and you can see why virtually every public transit system in the US is losing money.

What’s the solution? Well, the first step is to make riding the train as pleasant as possible, which usually means restoring service to the old levels. Then, adjust the fare structure so frequent riders pay less than occasional ones, probably by exempting those frequent riders from fare increases. Finally, put more effort into targeting occasional riders who aren’t price sensitive, like business travelers who are heading into the city from the airport. If even 10% of the people who hop in a cab at the airport took the train instead, that’s a ton of new revenues.

Granted, this might not solve the funding shortfalls. But it’s a lot smarter than the hopeless spiral of service cuts and widespread fare increases that America’s public transit systems are turning to today.

Want to get more people to buy groceries online? One of the major obstacles is translating the mental or written shopping list from your local store into a list of products that the online grocer carries. How can the website make this easier? Simple: hire personal concierges to kickstart the process.

The approach is actually quite elegant. Start by providing a way for new customers to scan and upload their grocery receipts into the website. Then, have members of your staff translate those into an online shopping cart, complete with personalized tips for saving money and notes on substitutions. Finally, schedule a live chat session to help orient the customer to their online grocery list. Compared to making customers hunt and peck for the products on their own, this method is bound to create a huge increase in average ticket and repeat business.

But wouldn’t this be incredibly expensive? Not necessarily. You could limit the service to those people who already spend a pre-determined amount of money on groceries each month, or use a service like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to farm out the repetitive parts of the process. In the end, you should easily be able to cover the cost of the personalized concierge service for each new customer with only a few months’ worth of their spending. And if you do it right, those customers should be loyal and profitable for a whole lot longer than that.

After reading a few articles that covered the latest cell phone products, I started thinking about the many questions that arise when you’re faced with naming a product or a series of products. For instance:

– If your current model numbers go something like 8000, 8500, 9000 and so on, do you move on to 10000 after that? How many customers will read it wrong and think it’s the 1000 series, which would presumably be a lower-end offering?
– Is the whole Silver, Gold, Platinum thing a bit overused? Are there better ways to denote different feature sets or service levels?
– If you call one model the Pro or Enterprise version, will people think less of the non-Pro model?

Clearly, there’s no right or wrong answer to these questions. The best approach will vary based on the type of product, how customers perceive the product variations, and other factors. The point here is to think twice before adopting a so-called industry-standard naming convention for your own products. Otherwise, you may be painting yourself into a corner by running out of model numbers, or unwittingly encouraging customers to make assumptions about your products that end up hampering sales.

When I walked into the gym on Saturday night, it was surprisingly busy. There was only a single treadmill available, so I quickly stepped onto it before anyone else could beat me there. But when I turned it on, I realized why that particular treadmill was unused. The belt was making a rather awful noise. Rather than take a chance with it breaking or being the jerk who pollutes the place with noise, I waited for another treadmill to open up instead.

How long will it take the building to repair the broken treadmill? From what I understand, the equipment repair people show up pretty quickly after an issue is reported. But this raises an obvious question: how much time will pass before someone actually reports the problem? Since you’d have to call or email the management office about the issue, I bet it takes days from the initial malfunction until someone finally gets fed up enough to tell management about it.

There’s obviously a better way. The key is to make it easy to report the problem right after you notice it. On the web, that’s easy: just put a help or support link on each page. But in real-world venues, you need to be more creative. For a fitness center environment, I would start by putting up a white board or a clipboard in a high-visibility location. Next, give it a big title like “Problems with the equipment? Tell us about it here”. Then, pre-fill the white board or form with a little diagram of the facility, so people can circle the machine that’s having problems and write a little summary of what’s wrong. And finally, make sure someone from the management office stops by to check the problem reports on a daily basis.

Sure, this is a rather low-tech approach. But I bet it would lead to quick and concise problem reporting in a way that email or other communication methods cannot. In other words, if you rely on people to tell you what’s wrong after they’ve physically left your venue, you’re going to get a whole lot less feedback than if you let them tell you about the problem while they’re still on the premises.

Several years ago, I bought a periodic table poster to hang on the wall. It was advertised as being high-quality, with a laminated coating. Well, the poster arrived in good shape, but there was one problem: they shipped it rolled up in a tube. And no matter how many days I let it sit flat on the floor with big, heavy books on each corner, it never stayed flat. Indeed, after hanging on the wall for years, it still shows the damage from spending a few short days in a tube.

I understand why the seller mailed it that way. Shipping a tube is probably cheaper than a flat box. But here’s the rub: they never told me how it was going to be shipped, or gave me the option to send it another way at an additional cost. A lot of retailers make this same mistake, and I’m sure it leads to more returns and lower customer satisfaction.

In short, if there’s more than one type of shipping container you can use when sending an order, and the choice of container is likely to make a big difference when it comes to damage in transit, you have two options. Ideally, you would just use the more trouble-free container every time. But if that’s not possible due to cost or other factors, then tell customers what their options are. For those buyers who really care about the condition of what they’re receiving, a few extra bucks for the better shipping container will be money well spent.

Let’s say that you’re an airline, and you notice that more and more customers are booking one-way tickets. Are all these people moving to a new state or country, and leaving their old lives behind? Doubtful. The more likely explanation is that the other half of your flights suck. And since many airlines have cut back on flights and nonstop routes, these customers had no choice but to book each leg of the flight with a different airline, which is why they bought a one-way ticket from you instead of a round trip.

In fact, every one-way ticket is an opportunity to learn from your customers and add profitable routes to your schedule. What’s the secret? Just show a little survey when someone buys a one-way flight. Ask them why they didn’t book a round trip, e.g. because you didn’t have flights at the time they wanted, all the flights had a stopover, etc. If you collect enough feedback this way, I bet you can expand the flight schedule incrementally, and convert a bunch of those one-way flyers into round trip customers.

Buying unpopped popcorn is great. You purchase a container or bag of the kernels, stick it in the closet, and throw it in the air popper when you’re ready. Like magic, a little scoop of kernels turns into a giant bowl of popcorn. In terms of space efficiency, it’s hard to beat. Oatmeal and dry milk are the same way: you get a whole lot of food in an easy-to-store package.

I’d love to see more products sold in a compact form, including:

– Apples (get a dozen apples in the space that one regular apple takes up in your bag)
– Tortilla chips (buy a box of tiny wafers that expand in the oven)
– Wine (just add water — imagine all the ‘water to wine’ marketing opportunities)

Surely there are technological reasons why you can’t rehydrate an apple or make wine from a powder. But if someone figured out a way to do it, they’d open up whole new markets for these products. Plus, since they’d be non-perishable, you could even sell them online. Perhaps Amazon Grocery will tackle the task on their own. Grocery products are a huge market, and the convenience of dry, uncooked and unpopped foods could help convince a lot more people to buy some of their groceries online.

Most e-commerce websites make it a point to prominently display the logos of the credit cards they accept, along with alternate payment options, throughout their site. The rationale is obvious: there’s no point in convincing customers to add items to their cart and go through checkout if you don’t accept the payment methods they want to use.

However, transactional sites that aren’t quite as retail-oriented don’t seem to follow the same protocol. For instance, when I bought an insurance policy online a few weeks ago, I got to the very last step before I learned they don’t take Amex. I used a different credit card instead, so it was only a minor annoyance. But for someone who only has an Amex card, they would have to abandon the whole purchase, leading to frustration for them and lost revenues for the insurance company.

The takeaway here is simple: if you operate a website or web application that involves any sort of payment, follow the lead of online retailers and make sure your payment methods are prominently displayed. These should be shown on your homepage and other high-traffic pages, on the product detail pages, on the shopping cart page, and at the start of the checkout process. That way, customers will be properly informed about which credit cards you accept, and a higher percentage of people will complete the transactions they started, leading to increased sales for your site.