Should you spend more of your marketing budget on acquiring new customers or retaining existing customers? Well, get out your calculator, because research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company indicates that it costs 6 to 7 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing customer.

In other words, if you have a $10 product and it costs $1 to sell it to an existing customer versus $6 for a new customer… then your existing customer is worth an extra $5 in gross profit to you.

Web hosting company, The Planet, has a neat way of following up with customers after providing them with customer support.

While I have no insight into how effective The Planet’s approach is, or how it contributes to customer retention or renewal fees, I suspect its simplicity and ‘wow’ factor works well for the company.

I also reckon The Planet has realized that while surveying customers is a good thing – especially to see whether or not they’re happy with the customer support they’ve just experienced (or not) – the company has also discovered that most customers don’t fill in surveys.

Business and technology pundits are quick to theorize about why Apple and its CEO, Steve Jobs, have been so successful in recent years, but what keys does Steve Jobs himself attribute to Apple’s success?

Steve Jobs recently hosted a press event and GigaOm’s Om Malik was on hand to distil some of Jobs’ explanations for Apple’s success. I’ve elicited slightly different lessons from what Jobs said during the event, but feel free to watch the video and derive your own insights (see link below).

Recently my husband, Simon, bought a rather unique book for our kids from someone on eBay. The shopping experience delivered by this particular eBay store owner is a testimony to how to run an eBay store, or any kind of online store or business.

Here are just four ways in which this particular eBay store owner shone:

As Internet marketers, we are sometimes confronted by that thorny issue of giving refunds to customers who are clearly trying to rip us off. You know – those customers who demand a refund within seconds of downloading an ebook or who expect a refund after we’ve spent hours – or maybe days, weeks or months – delivering a service to them because of trivial defects or deficiencies. Should we give these ‘freebie seekers’ a refund?

Remember, I’m not talking about customers who seem quite legitimate in their requests for a refund; I’m referring to people who we know in our gut are attempting to defraud us. Of course, you often won’t know for sure, but it turns out my advice for dealing with refund-demanding-freebie-seekers is the same as that in relation to honest or merely ‘questionable’ customers: give them the refund.

So you’ve sold your product and service and now have a happy customer. So happy, in fact, that there’s no question they’ll buy from you again or renew their membership with you… or will they? It turns out that even with happy customers, it pays to keep on selling them. Not to buy your product or service, but to USE it.

Why does this matter? For example, if you sell a product or service for which you charge an upfront fee – e.g. an ebook, home study course or even coaching or mentoring – you have the money, so what do you care if the customer actually uses the product?

The New York Times reports on an interesting phenomenon that’s been occurring over the last few years: the emergence of unpaid ‘customer service’ people who voluntarily help companies large and small.

Evidently, ‘lead users’ or ‘super users’ delight in helping fellow customers and do so to genuinely help others get the most out of a given product or service, as well as for peer recognition.

Does customer service impact on price? Are people willing to pay more for good customer service? And on the flip-side, will poor customer service turn people into price shoppers, assuming the quality of the product is a given?

I’m pretty sure customer service can make a difference – big or small depending on the product or service, and the customer, in question.

Here’s a quick quiz to see how good your customer service is…

A customer writes to you or lodges a support ticket claiming they haven’t received a bonus you promised them in return for buying something through your affiliate link. Your support desk sends them a prompt response, with the link to download the bonus.

Twitter usage has exploded in the past year. As more and more people ‘follow’ and ‘be followed’, many entrepreneurs and corporate marketers are still figuring out how the micro-blogging service really fits into their marketing and business strategies.

And whether, over the long term, posting tweets translates into positive business results… even if it’s just a means of long-term relationship building.