This article has been written by Jacqueline Howard. If you are looking for accountants in Hemel or accountants in Stockport, visit and talk to us. We are a firm of Chartered Accountants and Tax Advisers, who also give professional business advice.
Are you trying your best to retain your customers? Customer loyalty is such a tough job especially for a small business. Why? Because you don’t have a famous big name to create brand loyalty! So, let’s see what you can do.
Initially, it’s wise to try to understand your customer behaviour before offering them anything. Otherwise, the effort of keeping them loyal can be a waste. You will need to analyse your customers’ buying behaviours and understand why they buy from you. Of course, they might be made up of different market segments. If you don’t know what your market segments are, you can create a questionnaire/survey. From the answers, try to identify and analyse the different segments.
Customer satisfaction
Be loyal to your own employees and they will be loyal to your customers.
Make your employees realise that customers are the reason they get paid every week. Perhaps, your business can pay the employees basic salary and extra commission for every single thing that they sell to customers?
Provide your employees with training, development and other customer service resources and they’ll be qualified to provide exceptional professional customer service.
Trust
As a small business, it’s very difficult to create loyalty program if your business itself is not ethical. Customers need to trust you and your business before any loyalty programs really work!
Customer complain
Many view customers complaint’s as negative signs for a business. If you can make good use of your customers complains, it can be an actual advantage to your business. Find out why your customer is not satisfied with your product or service, compensate them and make improvement changes to your products/services immediately.
Focus on your current customer
Let your customers know what kind of services/products you can offer them. Often, many existing customers may use only one product/service of yours, without realising you have other products/services which also can be useful to them.
Also, you can try offers your existing customer with post out/ email catalogue.
After Sales service
Contact your customers after they have purchased your product or used your service. This can be done in a post-out survey form, follow-up call or simply an email survey form.
Build up relationships with your existing customers
A Greetings card is another way of entice your existing customer coming back to you. Perhaps, you can send your customer a greetings card on their birthday, Christmas or New Year? This is to remind them of the existence of your company and that you still remember them. In return, they will value you and your company. It’s also a way to keep in touch and strengthen the relationship with your clients.
Use “You” as the customer perspective rather than “we”
If there are newsletters or articles provided by your company, make sure you mention “you” as the customer perspective. Your customers want to know what they can do or get from your business when they come to you. They’re not interested in what your companies or employees can do in general.
Extra Customer Loyalty Programs:
Your business needs to target the right market segments in providing customer loyalty programs. For example, it’s useless to reward your customers with baby products if they are not recent parents.
Membership program
- Special deals such as discounts, free deliveries or buy 1 get 1 free.
Rewards program
- Provide free / discounted gifts according to the amount of points your customer collects.
Create Community
- As a sponsorship : let the local people know that your business is part of their community
- Sponsor local activities or campaigns.
If you own an online business, it doesn’t mean that you can’t build customer loyalty programs.
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