It sounds obvious, but it's often overlooked. The internet is overflowing with review sites, and although most of them are about either hotels or online shops, I'm noticing more and more 'bricks and mortar' businesses are getting reviews. The wide spread adoption of Google places will certainly be contributing to this, and with its prominence in google searches, online reviews by your customers are only going to become more widespread.

This can work for and against you. Clearly you need to be aware of the possibility, in order to respond where appropriate to any negative reviews. One of the best ways to do this is to setup Google alerts. This allows you to be emailed, either immediately, or daily when your search phrase (for example, your company name) appears in a new google search.

This morning Google+ finally launched their branded pages, which allows businesses and brands to create their own google+ identity pages. I've just created VME's page here. Facebook has had this concept for a while, so google are finally catching up, but being google, this has potential to be a lot more important.

When customers search for your company on the internet (and they will - even if they are only looking up your address or opening hours) then a google+ page is going to appear at the front. It gives you a tremendous opportunity to reach out to your customers, both present and potential. That's just the beginning though - as more and more people use social media tools such as google+ and facebook, encouraging them to connect to your 'page' gives you a route to immediately communicate with them.

A marketing dream is to get your message to your target audience at the lowest cost and highest return. Targeted mailing lists, or leaflet drops through the neighbourhood doors often are typically read by only 3% of those that receive them - and the conversion rate of those 3% into customers is even lower. A leaflet drop of 10,000 might be read by 300 potential customers, but a good return would be for 10% of those 300 to become customers - 30 people out of 10,000 - 0.003% return on investment.

Then you must look at the cost of producing the direct mail or leaflet drop, and compare against the profit you've made on the sale to those 30 people. Was it worth it? Would you have been more profitable had you not done anything?

That's why we believe customers receipts are a tremendous opportunity. You'll already know how many receipts you issue, but if you're going to print a message to encourage the customer to do something that will make you money, you need to get them to read it first. 3 lines of text in the same font as the till receipt is not going to be noticed by the customer, or it will be forgotten about quickly.