Tip#4 – Talk to your customers. On the phone.

In the age of e-mail, Twitter and Facebook, the good old phone call is still an extremely powerful tool. Make time to call a few of your customers on a regular basis, preferably towards the end of the week when they are most likely to be upbeat and willing to speak to you. A good place to start is calling customers that placed an order on your site in the past 24 hours, and ask them how they found the experience. Was it easy for them? Did they have any trouble finding what they were looking for or checking-out? Is there anything that you can do to improve their experience? Take notes, and do not stash them in the bottom of a drawer. Act upon this insight. If you can end the call with a discount code for their time, all the better.

Tip #1 - Twitter as a communication channel

Twitter - the microblogging platform launched in 2006 - saw phenomenal growth during 2010. In fact, the company claims that over 100 million new accounts were opened during last year alone. While it remains to be seen how many of those accounts are actually active, what is clear is that as of today Twitter is too popular to ignore as a communication channel. Allow users to interact with you through Twitter as an alternative (not a substitute) to email, telephone or other more traditional channels.