If you own a business, you need customers. It sounds incredibly simple, but it is a key truth for any business owner. Most businesses try to maintain a large customer vase by always targeting new customers, and this is fine because attracting new customers is never a bad thing. However, keeping your existing customer -base is often easier, and certainly more cost-effective.
In fact, attracting new customers can cost as much as five times more than retaining your existing ones! That’s a huge percentage and one you should not ignore, but how exactly do you keep your customers coming back?
Reward Them
Rewarding your customers is a really important way to keep them coming back to you. If you reward them, you give them an incentive to return, rather than defect to the competition. Rewards can come in many forms from sending them promo codes to get a little off their next purchase to setting up your own customer loyalty program that lets them earn points on each purchase – just make sure you are doing something.
Keep in Touch
You can hardly expect to keep your customers coming back for more if you don’t actually stay in touch with them. That’s why you should be using the latest communication tools including an email list, to ensure you can get in touch with them, let them know what’s new in your business, and send them entails of sales and other incentives to keep them coming back.
Make It Personal
On that note, personalizing your communications with your customers can really help to keep them coming back. It won’t feel so salesy, and you’ll be better able to target offers and incentives to them that they’re actually interested in. A good Customer Relations Management system can help you collect and manage the data that will make personalization possible, and since you can get everything from pharmaceutical CRM software to CRM software for the eCommerce industry, this should be very easy for you to do. Customize as much as you can and your customers will have a better experience, period.
Do Your Best for Them
Customers just aren’t going to come back if you give them a bad experience, so you should always be aiming to go above and beyond, on every step of the customer’s journey, whether that means giving them the best possible advice before they purchase or ensuring that their packages are delivered on time. Good experiences basically sell themselves.
Be Responsible
These days, customers care about a range of social issues from Black Lives Matter to the green movement, which means, if you want your customers to keep coming back you need to be socially aware and ensure that your business is as ethical as it can possibly be. If you do that, it will be far easier to beat the competition and maintain your customer base.
Keeping your customers coming back is good business sense, and as you can see, it is a lot easier than you might previously have thought.
