Small businesses spend a great deal of time trying to generate new business. They search high and low for new customers with advertising campaigns. However, what happens to those customers once the business has attracted their attention? More often than not, businesses don’t try hard enough to keep customers coming back. The focus on generating new interest is far more important than establishing a strong base of regular customers.
However, businesses need to do more to keep customers coming back. After all, it costs much less to retain an existing customer than to attract a new one. Sales, advertising and marketing strategies for regular customers are a little different than those targeting new audiences. Here are five tips that can help small businesses learn how to keep customers coming back:
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Use Incentives
One great way to keep customers coming back is by offering incentives to them when they make a purchase. Popular incentives might include a complimentary gift, a discount coupon to be used with the next purchase, or a special financing offer. Providing incentives for regular customers demonstrates appreciation and gives them a reason to return to your business when it’s time to make a purchase.
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Celebrate Relationships with Major Customers
If you have a core group of regular customers that make up a high percentage of your annual revenue, then you can show appreciation for those customers by hosting a special event. An evening dinner event or wine tasting creates the perfect environment to recognize regular customers for their loyalty. Events such as these will keep customers coming back.
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Develop Flexible Options for Regular Customers
For customers that you know and trust, there are some practical ways you can make life easier for them and keep them coming back again and again. You can make special arrangements such as onsite delivery, ordering via email or offer flexible payment options. When doing business is easy for your clients, then it’s easy to keep customers coming back.
One way to discover how to keep customers coming back is by exploring what your competitors offer (or what they don’t offer). You can use your competitor’s offerings to develop more flexible and customizable options for your regular customers.
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Listen to What Regular Customers are Saying
Your regular customers possess valuable information that can help you enhance your small business. Keep your ears and eyes open when working with these customers to learn what their wants and needs are. You might even consider providing a quarterly survey to generate direct feedback that you can use to fine tune product and service offerings.
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Diversify Your Products and Services
If you want to keep your regular customers happy, then you need to make sure that all the products and services that they need are readily available. This might mean that you need to develop package deals or complimentary add-on services to meet customer needs.
Regular customers are the heart and soul of your small business. While it’s important to develop new business relationships and explore new markets, you should never neglect the loyal customers who have contributed to the success of your business.