Have you ever thought about the people that make up your customer base?. Like really thought about them?

Forget about thinking about them as just a faceless cash source, an anonymous wallet/handbag that you need to somehow pry open. Think of them as a person.A real person.

My favourite cafe knows that they have a lot of people passing by who are taking their dogs for walkies. The cafe places bowls of water under each of the tables. Costs nothing to do, does not scream “I want your money”, is probably not even noticed on a conscious level by non-dog people, but is appreciated by those that are. They also have comfy benches to sit on while they make your takeaway sandwiches, and the usual rack of newspapers and magazines.

This hospitality is something that should be an absolute central brick in your business foundation. The silent recognition that you welcome your customers, recognise their needs, and that you want them to be comfortable.

Same thing goes for your online presence.

While there are amazing add-ons you can put on blogs these days, it can be all too easy to go too far and just use whatever YOU think is cool. Big mistake!

Take a look round the blog and consider the following facts.

In the top five internet using countries by population, English is only spoken by 1 country ( USA who comes in at 2nd Place)

In the top 10 countries only 2 speak English. In the top 20 only four speak English !(I am counting Canada as an English speaker even though the country is bi-lingual)

So while this blog is written in English, it is a good bet that as the blog matures, more an more of our readers will not be speaking English as their first language. Makes sense to offer the opportunity for them to read the blog in their native language doesn’t it?

We all know that while the younger generations have a good grip on the internet, a great deal of the newer users that are coming online are the seniors and retiring baby-boomers. Coming with them is the quest for accessibility based blogs that help with the basics, like the ability to increase font size. Rather than trying to explain how to do that via browsers, or scroll buttons on the mouse, we have added an addon to allow our readers to adjust the font size to what suits them. The great thing is that is that the size is maintained by a cookie, so it is not something that needs to be repeated every visit.

How about this factiod. In the USA alone studies show that almost 10% of the population is deaf or has significant hearing impairment. That means a full 1 in 10 of your customers cannot HEAR your fancy videos, or your podcasts (take note IM gurus). Maybe you noticed the post earlier about What Is The SWBN where there is subtitling on the video and were curious, maybe you were absolutely thrilled you didn’t need to try and figure out what was going on as you would normally have issues; or maybe you didn’t notice it at all, because it was not intrusive, did not seem like a salesy kind of tactic at all.

Within the SWBN we will always include one version of our teaching materials that will be subtitled or captioned, and will always have transcripts as well.

Think on how you can welcome and recognise your customers in subtle ways. You don’t need to point these things out to your customers, they will see, appreciate and tell their friends (who are just like them!).