Good customers are hard to come by, but thanks to digital and mobile media, you can easily find and keep them for life.
Here are 12 online and mobile ways that you can utilize in finding and keeping good customers for life. Enjoy!
- Attract the customer: To attract a customer, you need to research and find out what they really want – via forums, social media, blogs. Then prepare to attract them to your store or opt-in list through the following methods:
- Write killer sales letter/ad on your website,
- Free gifts/trials,
- Word of mouth,
- Write articles that solves people’s problems on either your blog or other people’s blogs with a link back to your sales page,
- Solve people’s problems on forums and place a link back to your sales page through the forum’s signature file,
- Organize free webinars,
- Advertise on facebook, twitter, linkedin, Google AdWords,
- Advertise on mobile phones through sms messaging.
- List your business on Google places.
2. Make A Sale On Your Website: Now is your website’s copy really convincing enough to make your prospect want to buy from you? Does it have a buy-now button in place for completing the sale? You need to make it very easy for your customer to purchase immediately by either installing payment processors or shopping carts. You could also leave your bank account number for your local clients to make their payments.
3. Make your customer feel special: How do you make your customer feel special? Simple, thank your new customer for his or her purchase via the following means:
- Send a thank-you email or text message.
- Redirect the customer to a thank you page on your website.
4. Capture your customer’s contact information: it’s very important to capture a customer’s contact information. This is because, most clients might not make a purchase the very first time they land on your website. Therefore, you need to place a web capture form on your website, blog and Facebook page or an opt-in url in your email signature file and forum signature file. This will make the process of capturing your customer’s name, email address and/or phone number a lot easier. Be sure to give them something valuable in exchange for leaving their email address. For example, Get a free ebook on “Cloud Computing.” Some examples of web forms you can use on your website includes;
5. Keep in touch with your customers regularly: This helps to avert “customer remorse syndrome”. This is a situation whereby your customer begins to wonder if he/she really made a good buying decision. This can make the unhappy customer to either return your products or ask for a refund or they will never buy from you again.
Therefore, it is very essential that you try to prevent this situation by offering them customer support, online/offline training and webinars to help them get used to your products or services. You can also try to keep in touch with your customers regularly, so they won’t forget you completely by sending them in advance announcements via email or text messaging about new product launches, special promotions, enter-to-win or text-to-win contests, press releases, tips and tricks, events etc. Example of a good text messaging service is BBNSMS.
6. Make it easy for your customers to contact you: How can you achieve this you say? Okay, do the following:
- Place a contact us form on your website (via the contact us page).
- Create a social media page on Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube. Then include your website link on your social media pages. Also copy the social pages’ widgets codes and paste on your website.
- Put a live chat button on your website for answering your customers’ inquiries. Examples of live chat buttons include Clickdesk, Zopim, or Olark.
- Put your phone number or a toll-free number on your website.
7. Answer Customers’ inquiries in a timely and friendly manner: This gives customers the impression that you are serious and ready to be of help. It also turns angry customers into happy customers and brand advocates /ambassadors. Thereby bringing more leads to your company. Therefore endeavour to answer their questions via email, live Skype-video chat, Facebook page, twitter, YouTube.
You could also monitor @mentions about your company’s keyword or #hashtag on twitter using Mention, Google alerts and HootSuite’s keyword monitoring services. This helps you answer their inquiries in a prompt and friendly manner.
8. Create a community for your customers: this idea gives your customers a sense of belonging and a value for their money. Through such community, they can gather to share ideas and ask questions about your company. You can create such community online through creating online forums, a business blog, organizing webinars.
9. Ask your customers for their feedback, opinions, and testimonials: this method helps you find out what your customers think about your product or services and how you can improve on it to serve them better.
10. Ask Your Happy Customers To Spread The Word About Your Brand: You can do this by placing a script code called free-tell-a-friend button on your site. You could also make use of addthis bar.
11. Make A Repeat Sale To Your Customers: Yes, experience has taught me time and time again that it’s easier and cheaper to introduce and sell more products or services to your existing and satisfied customers than acquiring and selling to a new customer. This method is called back-end sale. So don’t be afraid to offer them more quality back-end products.
12. Rinse and repeat the cycle.
What other ideas do you have about finding and keeping good customers? Share with us in the comment box. To your business success!
