Naturally, if your business didn’t have customers, it wouldn’t be able to sustain itself. However, if you want your business to foster strong, long-term growth, you should aim to not only attract customers but also inspire them, where possible, to buy again – and, ideally, buy regularly – from this company.
“I think it’s important for brands, especially brands [that] are really consumer-centric, to stay connected,” Jessica Alba, founder and CEO of The Honest Company, opined as quoted by Business News Daily. “Customers tell you so much from their behavior and how they shop with you.”
Treat customers as individuals rather than transactional opportunities
Making customers feel special entails forging a personal, rather than simply corporate, relationship with them. If you run a smaller company, you will have a head-start here, as you will have fewer customers to find time for, making it easier for you to ascertain each customer’s interests and requirements.
You could even reach out to them in person, though some customers do genuinely prefer speaking to employees remotely, and might insist on it while the pandemic continues.
Fortunately, by implementing a unified communications solution like the Gamma-provided Horizon Collaborate, you can let your employees easily call, email and message from a single, unified interface.
Establish an active presence for your brand on social media
The “active” part is a very important part of the equation, as you can’t expect customers to long maintain interest in a social media page that appears to have been abandoned. Also, on social media, you would be expected to reply to customers’ queries quickly, as revealed in research mentioned by Marketing Dive.
According to that research, 40% of consumers anticipate a brand responding within an hour of connecting with the consumer on social media, while 79% believe a reply should arrive within 24 hours.
Surpass your customers’ expectations
Another advantage of being active on social media is getting a greater, more reliable insight into what customers expect. Once you know where the bar is set, you can work on beating it – and then some. Your mantra here should essentially be: “Under-promise and over-deliver.”
Serial entrepreneur Mike Kappel suggests in an Entrepreneur article that you could “deliver a product or service faster than anticipated”, adding as an example that you could “tell a customer their order will be ready by the end of the month, knowing you will have it ready a week earlier.”
Show your customers that you appreciate them
There are various ways you can do this, such as by sending out cards at special times of year like Christmas and Easter. Alternatively, you could hand out inexpensive branded items or offer discounts.
While on the subject of discounts, those could soon start stacking up pretty heavily if you establish a loyalty discount scheme. A customer participating in this program could earn points from buying products or services – and, through amassing a specific number of points, earn a reward in the form of a discount. Therefore, you would be incentivizing people to continue buying from your company.
Also Read: Key Ways To Help Engage Customers With Technology
