Keep Your Customers For Life
Keep your customers for life? It sounds like a great dream…but how? Well, consider this: most businesses focus solely on attracting new customers, but you must spend time retaining current and former customers. These are people who have already bought from you!
Take the time to market and sell new products to your old customers and spend less time trying to sell old products to new customers. When you do, you will see a drastic change in your sales, customer quality and branding position.
Here are a couple of keys to retaining your current customers.
Stay in contact: You can do this by phone, email, e-newsletter, in person…or how about this? Send a handwritten thank you note! When was the last time you got a handwritten thank you note from a business or salesperson that you did business with?
You need to follow up with your customers. Your customer needs to feel like they are being supported after their purchase. How many times have you purchased a product, then felt like you were completely abandoned? This happens to me all the time – especially when I buy software! You think the software will solve some big problem and then you get home and remember, “Oh yeah, I have to actually LEARN how to use the software first!” Something as simple as a thank you email to your customer introducing your customer service center can go a long way in retaining a great customer.
Always offer your current customers the best deals and guarantees you have. Show them you appreciate their business! One of my biggest pet peeves is when businesses offer specials to entice new customers to come in but do little or nothing in the way of discounts or deals to KEEP me as a customer – it really drives me nuts when I’ve been a long standing customer and get no ‘reward’ or discount to show me they appreciate me! They are so busy trying to get new customers that they don’t spend enough time or money on keeping their current customers. Don’t let this happen to you and your business. One of the best ways to thank your current customers is to start a loyalty club specifically to reward longtime customers. Another option for this would be to offer preferred pricing to loyal customers.
Lastly, have some integrity! Implementing good business practices and simply having integrity, dignity and honesty goes a long way with customers. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of deceit and deception out there and the safer and more confident you make your customers feel, the more they’ll trust you – and that makes for an amazingly supportive and loyal customer.
There are three cornerstone ideas to a successful business. The first is to offer a quality product or service. The next is to offer useful products or services that solve a problem for, or enhance the life of, a customer. And lastly, offer subjects that your customer finds interesting.
By using the approach of educating your customers and offering them real information and insight, you will be rewarded with loyalty and success.
Stop wasting all your time on new getting prospects while your current customers fall by the wayside!
As Jay Abraham says, “Your best prospects are your existing customers. If you’ve been putting all your marketing efforts into acquiring new customers, stop and divert some of your resources into reselling, upselling, & cross-selling to those same customers. Stay in touch with those customers every way possible – through package inserts, regular mailings, special offers – and get them used to buying from you.”
So, there it is! Remember, our FREE test drive can help you put together the resources and tools to do exactly that. We can help you create customers for life and when you do, you can watch your profits multiply! Visit us at www.profitcatapultbusinessschool.com today!