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!

It’s Christmas and ‘tis the season for banging out emails and so amongst the work mail and penile related spam my inbox attracts are an increasing number of commercial offers from retailers I shop with regularly.

A lot of these are welcome – offering discounts on goods I often buy, from traders I respect. However there is a problem. Some offers are starting to arrive so frequently as to appear desperate and as any person being courted will tell you, the cologne of desperation is not an attractive one.

In contrast to the retailer offering hourly discounts on everything from their granny to the kitchen sink are those absent who won’t or can’t compete in the currently rampant discount market – their brand value stubbornly intact, at least until the year’s profit figures come out.

Of course it’s proving hard for retailers to steer a straight ship in these unusual trading conditions – the route is somewhere between the rocks of discounting in the short term and the hard place of not devaluing your brand over the long term.

To do this takes resource – one of the prevailing myths is that email is cheap – it isn’t, at least not to do well and it also takes long term strategic thought. Some retailers may be in the fight for Christmas but what about January, February & March? Rather than the 12 days of Christmas, retailers should be thinking in terms of the 12 months of Christmas.

It’s not just congestion zone stakeholders who are obsessed with traffic, so too it seems are some start-ups, and not in a good way.

I use a couple of web services, one is for builders (a service which is both creditable and painful). Annoyingly, when a builder posts a message against my enquiry I get an email or text message asking me to login to see it. This is a bit like a receptionist phoning to say they have a message for you and would you mind going down to reception to hear it. Why not just give them the message? Of course this has nothing to do with making the customer’s life easier and everything to do with boosting the website’s visitor figures.

People rapidly get fed up with this. What they really want is to receive information by their preferred channel – usually email and have the option to start a dialogue if they need to. This is essential in some sectors – for example restaurants where customers will often have questions they need answering before and after they book.

Start-ups (indeed all sites) need to understand that customer experience drives the success of the site and that increased traffic is just a by-product of that. Trying to recycle customers through the site will just lead to them cycling off.

In these unprecedented times, confidence it seems, is everything. A lack of it has had unbelievable consequences for some former giants of the financial markets and trickling down, smaller businesses now have to factor in the potential fallout.

Consumers don’t want to order something from a supplier that might be bought out, sold off or floated off on a bankrupt debt raft. To gain trust, the onus is on businesses to be open and inform customers if there are changes in ownership that might impact on supply of goods.

This is partly a question of nerve and whether businesses are looking at the long term picture. A failure to do this got the banking sector into trouble and it could cause retailers problems too.

Looking around at all the pre Christmas discounts available, it makes you wonder what everyone is going to do in January? If customers continue to be offered discounts everywhere, they’ll eventually consider that the norm and we’ll have devalued our own market.

We need to get our eyes back off our stumbling feet and on the near horizon.

It’s heartening to read this week that you don’t have to be a mega brand to survive the retail slump. A top ten retailers ‘survivability index’ commissioned by BDDO Stoy Hayward and Verdict published in The Times online this week features the expected big brands – Tesco, John Lewis, Sainsbury’s but also a few clever minnows – Howies, Boden and Fat Face.

Howies, which started life in 1996 selling T-Shirts in a mountain bike magazine, can be found at number 6 in the index, sandwiched between the mighty John Lewis and Waitrose. The reason Howies can compete in such esteemed company is that they have invested in developing a special relationship with their customers.

Howies are selling not just a good product but also a set of values their customers feel wedded to. Online, the shopping environment they’ve created has a community feel to it and this brand experience extends to their catalogue in which only half of the pages feature their products, the remainder being articles on subjects they think their customers will be interested in.

With consumers cutting down on non-essentials, businesses have to work hard to win ‘discretionary spend’ and it’s those online vendors, big or small, who can inspire their customers, giving them something they want rather than need, who’ll weather the storm well.

Online marketers feeling the pressure to maintain sales in these straightening times may be tempted to start sending out more emails than usual to their customer base. This is no bad thing, so long as the messages are right. However industry figures show that while volumes are increasing and delivery rates are constant, the open rate and click through rate are declining which suggests the messages lack impact.

So the question becomes not so much how many emails to send but how good to make the offer. In the restaurant market, the days when the offer of free bottle of wine would significantly increase bookings are over. Email offers need to be compelling and differentiated enough to make them worthwhile. We recently ran a campaign for Slug & Lettuce to win a holiday in New York that led to a big increase in bookings, whilst for Novus Leisure a campaign that offered Champagne at half-price let to them selling the majority of their annual quota of Dom Perignon during September alone.

When the email offer is good, the promotion significantly unique then customers will take action. If you make it easy enough to take the action then it will go viral. A lot of people remember the Thresher offer from last year, so long as you have control of the parameters and are prepared for the offer to go wild, the results can be spectacular.

Relevant websites: http://www.latenightlondon.co.uk, http://www.slugandlettuce.co.uk

“It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.” Warren Buffet’s famous axiom is in all too frequent use in these times of financial Armageddon but it still remains a useful one for online marketers as they trade through these exceptional conditions.

A great deal is made online of differentiating functionality and experimenting with new features, which is great if your main objective is brand differentiation. However spend too much time tinkering with your costume as the tide goes out and you won’t have any water to swim in at all – if you’ll forgive the extended metaphor.

The place to focus budgets right now isn’t on developing brand differentials through experiential marketing, but on the conversion funnel.

In the midst of the financial crisis that enveloped the country during the second week of October 08, We carried out an email campaign for one bar and restaurant chain that generated over 5000 new enquiries within three days, representing a huge leap on prior performance. The reason – well the offer was great but the campaign allowed customers to easily make their enquiry and because of this, it was quite literally like turning on a tap within their eCRM system.

Of course the communication process has to be good and automating large personalised campaigns is never easy, but the investment will pay off several times over if it’s done well.

So even while the tide is going out, some savvy operators online are seeing large percentage increases in their online trade simply by focussing on customer service delivery and loyalty schemes for their existing and new online customers; in measurable campaigns that add to the bottom line.