One side effect of Le Crunch (resorting to French for a fresh descriptor) is a boon in the discount voucher market online which has helped keep restaurants like Pizza Express full in the dog days of January with two for one and three courses for £10 offers.

Playing the discount voucher game is therefore an attractive option for restaurateurs with a cold wind on their back but there is a danger that in the frenzy to keep tables full, established, loyal customers may be ignored. If no distinction is made between them and the fly-by-night, voucher clutching one timers, what are you saying to your regular customers about how you value them?

Thankfully, it’s not an either or situation, restaurateurs can combine discount vouchers with rewards for loyalty. This could be as simple as mailing your existing customer base and offering a reward for passing on the discount vouchers to friends. Email and social media make this a wildfire solution for spreading the word if the offer is attractive enough. However it is executed, rewarding customer loyalty, rather than purely commoditising the offer will put restaurants and other retailers using vouchers in a stronger position come the financial thaw.

I’m tempted to start another dog metaphor here but will resist. By unleashing the beastly I mean that if your site doesn’t have a facility for customer feedback, the motivated customer will go somewhere else to post unfavourable comments and then you lose the opportunity to easily respond. And like magnets, complaints attract ‘me too’ complaints and all of a sudden there’s a rash of negative comment spreading across the internet which you need teams of people to locate.

Hopefully some of the UGC will be positive but customers need encouragement to share positive comments. With any product or service we should be asking the question ‘how was it for you?’ and include the option to rate your service. No lengthy surveys, just a simple rating and optional comment box.

If you bear in mind that someone who has made a repeat purchase is much more likely to buy again and again, their comments will help you understand better those people who could become brand ambassadors – important because personal referral is the number one influencer for purchases online.

Some of the larger mounds of snow were causing my dog some trouble this morning and it occurred to me that the way the short legged fellow would disappear from sight periodically behind one of them was a useful metaphor for customer service online. I’ll use that I thought.

For mounds of snow, read data silos where customer history literally disappears from sight when the customer changes channels from say a company’s telephone line to their website. What you really want is for the guys on the phone to see what you’ve done online and vice versa. Nothing can be more frustrating than having to personally act as go between for departments in the same company.

The go between should really be that technology known as API – application programming interface which rather like the amoeba in o level biology, allows one application to speak to another via a sort of fibrous membrane that holds things together.

For large companies with many databases, integration of this type takes a lot of money and planning but its also achievable for smaller entities using a customer audit trail approach which means your phone call conversation is confirmed by email and also recorded on the website for future reference.

Going back to the doggy metaphor, gaining a centralised view of your customer across all channels isn’t a walk in the park, but your customers will thank you for removing obstacles between them.

Just in case the ‘Obama bounce’ fails to cross the Atlantic and relieve some of our economic woes, online marketers need to look to their laurels and focus harder than ever on servicing their existing customers in 2009. Here’s my top 6 resolutions for online marketers this year.

1) Don’t forget Pareto. His advice maybe 100 years old now but his 20/80 rule is one of the ineluctable truths of marketing; 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your income so segment and reward them for their loyalty and help them become advocates for your brand.

2) Make your website as friendly and easy to use as possible and make sure it contains lots of information. There’s been lots of development in how to improve online experience in the past 12 months so apply the latest techniques to ensure your website is super sticky.

3) Be clear about what you want your website to do and make the calls to that action clear. Websites are all about funnelling people to a certain outcome.

4) Clarify your email communications strategy. The market is seeing a lot more email being sent out with brands more comfortable with sending out three or four emails a month. However be careful that each message is unique and offers something not available on your website – otherwise customers may start to experience ‘email blindness.’

5) Differentiate or die, as Jack Trout dramatically titled book has it. Make sure you’re offering customers something they can’t readily get elsewhere. There are thousands of companies out there offering products and services online but it’s the ones who personalise their pitch and have great customer service that hold on to customers and even turn them into brand advocates.

6) Cycle more!