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Do you Educate your Customers – for Customer Retention?

 I was speaking to a group of clients recently and they were feeling a little overwhelmed and frustrated around losing valuable customers. Sometimes, as a busy business owner, we can forget about keeping a strong relationship with our existing clients. So why do our customers leave us? It can cost up to five times more to buy new customers than retaining existing ones. Did you know that 13% of dissatisfied customers tell up to 20 others about their concerns? Imagine how that effects your reputation within business. After all we are always looking for referrals, don’t you think?

Here are couple of reasons why customers leave us:

• customers feel poorly treated
• people who have a bad experience do not complain

So let’s look at Educating them!

Educate them about what, you may be thinking. Well, consider this, many businesses 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 to be a good sales potential…they’ve already bought from 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.

Here are a couple of key elements to use to retain your current customers:

1. Stay in contact: This means by phone, email, e-newsletter, in person-by pigeon if you have too!
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 along 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 along way with customers. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of swindling and crap 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.

There are three cornerstone ideas to a successful business:

• Quality product/service
• Offering useful products/services that solve a problem for or enhance the life of a customer
• Offer subjects your customers find interesting

Use this approach of educating your customers and offering them real information and insight and you will be rewarded with loyalty and success.

Stop wasting all your time on new 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 diverts some of your resources into reselling, upselling, 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.”

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 educate your customers and you can watch the benefits pay offer many-fold.

I hope this article has been of value.

Lee Stemm

Marketing Strategist and Business Development Specialist

www.hp-businessgrowth.com.au

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