Stay Connected to Your Customers

Many organizations focus solely on attracting new customers, but you NEED to spend a good chunk of your time retaining current and former customers.

These are people you already know… they’ve already bought from you!  Hopefully they love you...

Take the time to market and sell new products to your old customers and less time trying to sell old products to new customers and you will see a drastic change in your sales, customer quality and branding position.

A few years back I was helping a camp with there summer program. Two rental groups accounted for over half of the summer attendance.

I found out that one of the group leaders was thinking about switching camps.

When I asked why he said that we were too small and he wanted to be able to grow his camp but someone told him he was capped out.

So I asked him if we could find a way to increase capacity would he stay?

"Of course, we love you guys".

We then proceeded to brainstorm several ideas and landed on adding an extra week so that he could run two camps.

The next summer we had 50% more kids and he still had capacity to grow!

Here are a few keys to retaining your customers:

1. Stay in contact: This means by phone, email, e-newsletter, in person, what ever it takes.

2. Post-Purchase Assurance: This means you need to follow up with customers. Your customers need to feel like they are being supported for their purchase and with the item they purchased.

How many times have you purchased a product, then felt completely abandoned? Something as simple as a Thank You note with your contact or customer service information can go a long way in retaining a great customer.

3.  Deals & Guarantees:  Always offer your current customers the best deals and guarantees you have. Show them you appreciate their business or even come up with a club specifically to reward loyal customers. You can also do this with a preferred pricing option.

4.  Integrity:  Using good business practices and simply upholding integrity, dignity and honesty go a long way with customers. Let's face it, there's a lot of swindlers out there and the safer and more confident you make your customers feel, the more they will trust you and that makes for an amazingly supportive and loyal customer.

Stop wasting all your time on new prospects while your current customers fall by the wayside!

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, up-selling, cross-selling to those same customers. In every ways possible – through package inserts, regular mailings, special offers – stay in touch with those customers and get them used to buying from you.
Jay Abraham