7 Little Changes That’ll Make A Big Difference With Your Customers
We have all heard many times how it can take more effort to acquire a new customer versus retain/sell more to an existing client.
Many businesses prioritise selling to new clients over delivering a service to existing clients. Yep, we hear you! We know sales is the lifeblood of many businesses and how important it is to keep that sales pipeline evolving…but surely not to the detriment of losing existing customers…. of course, it will depend on your business model, if repeat orders and providing an on-going service are not important, then go sell your socks off to new customers.
But for those businesses interested in the uphill battle of attracting new customers and retaining existing ones, then you can make some simple changes to focus on keeping your current customers happy.
1. Reinforce Why They Purchased and Add Value
Assuming your customers are satisfied with the products and/or services you’re currently providing them, a good on-going tactic to add further value, is to assume an advisory and thought leadership role and continue to make recommendations or share ideas that their business might benefit from.
By keeping your client’s best interests at the forefront, this will strengthen the relationship and delight your customer. Sometimes rather than keep suggesting what’s good for them and their business, you may have to also say what doesn’t or won’t work… handled well, they will appreciate and respect you for this.
This will help position your business as the go-to provider and reinforce why your customer does business with you and will continue to build your business reputation, credibility, and trust.
The bottom line is to make sure you go ‘above and beyond‘ for your customers!
2. Communication is Key
In today’s age there is no excuse for not communicating with your customers, it’s so easy to drop them a WhatsApp, email, text message, or have a quick in-person Zoom or Microsoft Teams meeting or dare I say one that many of us seem to have forgotten…how powerful it is to pick up the telephone or make a visit, we know it’s 2022, but some customers appreciate a chat over the phone or physically meeting up and it can help clarify matters and continue to improve your service and build the relationship.
If you’re providing an on-going service or one-off project, make sure to provide them a periodic update of the status and at a frequency fit for purpose.
3. Recognise Their Likes, Dislikes and Preferences
We all have our uniqueness, quirks, and tendencies…make sure to learn about your customers as you would employees and know what makes them tick or not.
As a business that specialises in Revenue Growth Platforms (CRM, Marketing & Sales Automation), we love nothing better to jot down notes about our customers, so that we keep aligned internally and externally.
Learning about our customers helps us show we care about them and our business relationship and want to deliver the best customer experience possible.
Some customers prefer a phone call to an email, some don’t like to be interrupted beyond the working-day, some will message you 24×7 (and within reason you may want to add-value and show how fast you respond to them in their hour of need!) … the bottom line is it’s all about recognising their preferences and tendencies and trying to align where you feel you can and make this a success for both their and your business.
4. The Power of A Gift
Many small businesses have extremely limited marketing and customer entertainment budgets, but you don’t need to spend much to make a positive impact on your customers…an impact that is more personal and shows your appreciation of them and their business.
As a small business ourselves, we use a wide variety of methods to show our customers we care. From simple happy birthday emails (these don’t cost!), to possibly a special event (anniversary, significant birthday, Christmas) gift, we have been known to send amazon gift cards, vouchers for a special restaurants, Marks and Spencer gift cards, chocolate treats, a nice wine/food hamper at Christmas…or send them a thank you email / text on the anniversary of your business relationship.
We also notice some of our customers support the idea of the Power of a Gift and on installation of a new kitchen or new home extension or some other type of home improvement consumer service, we know that our construction/trades related businesses will quite happily leave a bunch of flowers and bottle of bubbly behind…. the impact is quite amazing to their customers!
Remembering the small details is what makes a difference. You don’t need to over do it!
5. Be Responsive and Take Ownership
At Autus, we are great believers of working to our core business values, we call them our 3 T’s (Transparency, Trust, and Team) and we extend these values to our everyday work not only internally but externally with our clients.
With the above in mind, we like to talk to our customers about our collective challenges (value #1 Transparency) and that in turn helps us build trust and create a winning team together.
In terms of transparency, we find it of benefit to involve customers in our own challenges (of course this has to be managed carefully and selectively) and seek their input/advice on some matters that we might not be an expert on, or just get their feedback on something – a new or existing product or service…. make them feel special and part of a bigger cause and keep things moving and improving together!
6. Share Challenges and Build Customer Advocacy
We are great believers of working to our core business values, we call them our 3 T’s (Transparency, Trust, and Team) and we extend these values to our everyday work not only internally but externally with our clients.
With the above in mind, we like to talk to our customers about our collective challenges (value #1 Transparency) and that in turn helps us build trust and create a winning team together.
In terms of transparency, we find it of benefit to involve customers in our own challenges (of course this has to be managed carefully) and seek their input/advice on some matters that you might not be an expert on, or just get the feedback on something – a new or existing product or service….make them feel special and part of a bigger cause and keep things moving and improving!
7. Make Your Business A Powerful Customer Magnet
Use customer data, behaviours, and insight to build customer retention, expansion and loyalty strategies.
We are big supporters of using the right sales, marketing and customer technology and tools to run our business and that of many of our customers. With the right setup it’s easy to digitally track customer engagement, sales, customer preferences, automate personalised and targeted emails based on what you know about your customers, and determine which product/service/other segmentation they fall into and make sure you’re automating and following up with appropriate content and not treating every customer the same. e.g., If your customer has an annual renewal of a service, why not automate the renewal process or if you have annual equipment inspections you can automate the site/service visit process. Keep in mind you can also automate those happy birthday messages and take them on a customer touchpoint journey that makes sense to them and share your thought leadership in the industry you / they operate within and how you can help them further.
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About Autus
Autus provide Revenue Growth Platforms, Marketing & Sales Automation and Digital Marketing services to help sales and marketing personnel and teams build efficient and effective sales and marketing best practices and automate their marketing and sales processes by leveraging personalised content, various digital marketing tactics, segmentation and behaviour of their prospects and customers.
Autus recommend various products for automation, such as Active Campaign, Hubspot, Mailchimp and SharpSpring…it will vary on your requirements and budget the best option for your business.
Find out more here.
Our founder, Tom Berry, also provides selective fractional CMO services and is a member of some client boards.
Let’s keep in touch!
If our team at Autus can help advise further, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our founder, Tom Berry.
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