By MARK RIFFEY for the Flathead Beacon
Small businesses are always interested in getting more new customers, but sometimes forget that keeping existing customers is less expensive than the cost of replacing them.
While products, services and customer support are critical to the health of your business, it’s critical to maintain a strong connection with your customers through proper communications.
Tending to this connection and nurturing into a relationship is critical to the health of your business.
Think about the businesses you frequent most often. Do they communicate in a way that encourages trust, doesn’t waste your time or take you for granted?
These things build a good business relationship just as they do a personal one.
Let’s discuss five words you can focus on to help your small business prevent lost customers by improving the quality and effectiveness of your communication with clients.
1. Collect
Despite the obvious need to stay in touch or be forgotten, most businesses fail to setup a consistent, cost-effective system to collect contact information from their customers.
10 years ago, most people would give up their contact info much more readily than they will today – and for good reason. Combine spammers, data breaches by hackers (or data shared by them) and the all too often inappropriate use of customer data, your clients have plenty of reasons to have second thoughts about passing along their contact info – even if it’s nothing more than their email address.
These days, it has to be worth it to let you into their email box, even though it is (usually) easier than ever to leave their email list.
Think about the last time you gave someone your email address. Did they treat it well, thus appreciating that you allowed them to email you? Did they abuse the privilege? Did they send info that clearly had nothing to do with you, your needs, wants and desires – or did they nail it?
Imagine how much trust it takes for them to give you their full contact info. Are you honoring that trust? Given the data breaches in the news these days, this is a taller order than it used to be.
2. Talk
Most small businesses don’t communicate enough with their present customers in multiple, cost-effective ways.
I say multiple because what works for one doesn’t always work for another. If you have a great Android smartphone app to communicate with your customers, where does that leave customers who own iPhones? What about customers who don’t have smartphones?
Different people favor different communication media because they retain info better in their media of choice, be it direct mail, a blog, a smartphone app or a podcast. If you don’t make it easy and convenient to consume, you’ll automatically prevent some people from receiving your message – no matter how urgent or important.
3. Remind
Most small business owners don’t know when they’ve lost a customer, and even when they do, most don’t communicate often enough with these “lost” customers via cost-effective methods.
Without up-to-date contact info and valuing your former customers’ time, your message either fails to reach the person or is of so little value, they ignore, unsubscribe or worse.
What could be worse? They forget you ever existed.
4. Clean
Do you keep your customer list clean?
Clean means you deal with bounced emails, returned mail and bad phone numbers so that your contact attempts get to the right place. For communications that require an investment, this helps make sure the money you spend actually gets the message delivered.
5. Segment
Do you communicate to different customer groups with a message fine tuned for their needs, wants and desires – or do you sent the same message to everyone?
Many small business owners waste a tremendous amount of time, goodwill and/or money contacting their entire client list rather than using finely tuned advertising and marketing, which keeps costs low and skyrockets results.
Even if you don’t use direct mail, there’s a lot to lose if you don’t make sure the right message reaches the right people.
How many times have you received a great “new customer promotion” deal even though you are a customer of that company? What messages does that send?
Proper communication is essential – and it’s far more than broadcasting your message to anyone with a heartbeat.
Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him at mriffey@flatheadbeacon.com.
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Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him atmriffey@flatheadbeacon.com. Check out the Flathead Beacon archive of all of Mark’s blogs.