If you don't treat your customers like they are one in a million, your chance of making it will be one in a million. These odds are not very encouraging.
Studying only the broad tendencies of your key customer base and hitting them with generic communication and bulk action is easy. It may even get you some marginal revenue at first.
Yet, the only way to play (and win) by generating returning business is to focus on the customer as an individual. More than ever before, technology can help you do this.
If customers have already bought from you, they are far more likely to do so in the future.
Your job here is to deepen the bond. A business relationship is still a relationship, so you have to work on it.
Here are five tips on how to make your customer feel special.
Reward the Loyal
Yes, attracting new clients and growing a customer base is important, but taking care of your existing ones is a smarter bet.
There is a 60-70% chance of repeat purchases with existing customers, while you have only about a 13% chance of persuading a new one.
A customer can easily get a similar product or service to the one you offer somewhere else, so you need them to focus on a relationship with your company, not just the product.
Lowering the price to boost sales and stand out from the competitors sometimes works as a short-term boost strategy, but in the long run, it will lead to product devaluation.
Customers will be reluctant to pay the full price, leaving you and your competitors to fight it out in a race to the bottom.
To encourage returning business, build a respectful rapport with the consumers. It is far more cost-effective to retain an existing customer than to get a new one.
Reward actions that benefit you, such as repeat purchases, referrals, or downloading demos before they upgrade.
Returning loyal customers will, on average, spend 67% more on goods and services you provide.
There are different types of software available to help you track the value of a particular customer. With it, you can create projections of their behavior and worth of this relationship in the future.
Keeping data as just one or two huge segments doesn’t cut it anymore. You need to know who pays for your products and services.
Train Customer-Facing Staff
Walls and equipment are just a shell of the business. Employees are its lifeblood. If your staff lacks the knowledge and skill to deal with customers successfully, you risk losing a large chunk of revenue.
Most skills can be taught or improved upon, but, as Simon Sinek said in the book “Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action”, it’s far better to make things work by design from the start than to fix them later.
So, for intensely customer-facing roles, it's crucial to hire candidates with innate capabilities such as extraversion, empathy, emotional intelligence.
They have to be able to handle the pressure, keep their cool, and diffuse tense situations before they escalate and tarnish your reputation.
In addition to a comprehensive, easy to access, and up to date hard knowledge base, train employees in experience-based soft skills.
One of the best low investment yet high return tactics in training new employees or staff aspiring to improve their customer-facing skills would be allowing them to learn by shadowing.
That way, they learn from the employees who've already got a handle both on hard knowledge and soft skills.
Nothing beats real-time learning, as the “mentor” is handling individual customer's questions and requests.
Ask Customers About Their Preferences
If you want to find information that will help you determine the most effective course of action—ask. And then honor the answer.
Before you invest money into developing a new product, system, or service or restructuring a large business segment, it’s essential to consult your customer base.
You might discover that what you're planning to do is unnecessary or ineffective, or you’re missing a large piece of the puzzle and going in the wrong direction.
The industry trend is that more and more customers are moving away from call centers, preferring a self-service, multiplatform option of providing relevant data to brands they’re loyal to.
Avoid burying your customers in unnecessary questions. Instead, focus on key pieces of information most useful to you.
If you're in-app development, preferences concerning user interface will be very significant.
When you deliver content, you will focus on preferred consummation time and topics of interest, while online shops will need to be aware of payment method preferences.
Send Out Personalized Notifications
Proximity marketing represents the future of personalized customer communication while showing the customer what is relevant to his current interests.
Imagine an avid reader passing your bookstore and getting an instant notification, offering him a discount or a special offer on the book title he’s been browsing recently.
The vicinity and instant availability of the offer will make it much more likely to turn that interest into a transaction. There is less time for a customer to talk themselves out of the offer right in front of him.
Keeping up with the available technologies will determine who makes it.
The era of knocking on doors and making random cold calls is over, and convenience is the new kid on the block.
Apps are the new goldmine, piggybacking businesses into a new era, where data-driven personalization is king.
For example, beacon technology is booming and is quickly getting utilized by various industries to get closer to their customers. Simultaneously, it allows businesses to collect valuable data on their movement and habits.
This enables far better and more detailed campaign customization and laser-precision marketing strategies that generate much higher conversion rates.
Write Personalized Emails
Regardless of all the new communication technologies out there, email is still an excellent marketing tool—if you send the right content to the right people.
Segmenting your customer base by interests, age, location, gender, habits, or any other relevant data point is far more effective than just addressing them by their name. The numbers don't lie:
- Birthday emails generate 342% higher revenue per email than generic promotional emails.
- Personalized calls to action convert 202% better.
- 98% of U.S. consumers reported finding marketing content personalization “very” or “somewhat” appealing.
- 58% of revenue is generated by segmented, personalized, and targeted emails.
So, put in the effort to make your customers feel like you’re catering to their needs directly, and you’ll be reaping the benefits.
Wrap Up
Whether you're just getting into digital marketing, or you're a seasoned marketer trying to expand, switch markets, or increase your customer base—a personalized customer experience is well worth the investment.
Emotions sell, and we feel pretty generous when we see someone is making an effort.
Like any other relationship, the one you have with your customer must be based on trust and repeated positive interactions.
Attention is still the greatest commodity there is, and there is a reason we refer to it as “paying attention”—because we get something in return.
In your case, what you get in return will be happy customers and a flourishing business.
