It is pivotal to any business to ensure you contact your customers. It’s just as important, or perhaps even more so than acquiring new ones.
This is such an important, and sometimes overlooked, a necessity for a successful business. You have worked hard to obtain each and every client or customer that has walked through your doors, gotten some service, and can potentially get more. It’s pivotal to retain that customer, have them return their business over again…this contributes to the lifetime value of a customer. Which, if measured over time, is more profitable than one single service by a new customer.
Contact Your Customers On The Regular
Keeping in contact with your customers is vital, particularly for businesses that rely on repeat customers. It is much more time-efficient and cost-effective to keep getting business from the same customers (recurring customers) than to solely focus on continually acquiring new one-time customers.
Recurring customers is your bread and butter, if you will.
The lifetime value of services they will come to you for is what should be looked at, potential services they will have in the future…if they get treated well and not forgotten.
Clients/customers/patients, want to feel important. Also, once you acquire that business (however many dollars and cents it took to do so) it would be silly to not try and retain them.
So for your bottom line, please contact your customers.
If You Are Contacting Your Customer, Are You Doing It Correctly?
We suggest to write down your current strategy and look for any gaps.
Think of absolutely everything you are doing with your existing and even past customers. Include email, telephone, text, mail, how often, and the message.
Once you do that, question your methods.
By questioning, the gaps or room for improvement will become more evident. You want to ensure that your efforts suit the audience and that it is timely as well.
Questions you should be asking yourself:
- Are you sending email reminders to all of your clients, despite the fact that some of them are elderly and are more likely to prefer a good old-fashioned phone call?
- How often are you following up? Is it too infrequent? Do they remember you?
- Do you follow up with customers shortly after their visit?
- If you do the follow-ups, what is their usual response, and how can you encourage them to continue doing business with you?
It’s important to evaluate your telemarketing, sales, or outbound calling strategy. When done correctly, with the right audience, it can be highly effective in getting responses.
Outbound Calling
Evaluate your outbound calling, if you are doing it.
Plan it out. Have a list of customers, know what services they got in the past, what age they are, what their concerns where…and so on.
If you are scrambling to get business, such as if you own a clinic that hasn’t had patients come in for a while—target your efforts on those who are most likely to need your services again. It’s easier to sell to an established client than to sell to someone completely new.
Try Coupling Your Efforts
Often, using more than one point of contact will give you better results. Plain and simple.
Think about your demographic and you can couple your offline strategies.
For example: mailing postcards to a specific local demographic and then follow up with a phone call to each postcard recipient.
Not only will you be getting that person’s attention with an offline postcard and (through compelling ad copy) driving them to your website, but you will also be calling them to ask whether they received your information and would like to schedule an appointment.
The trifecta.
Consider including a direct response special offer with a time or limit scarcity in your postcard, such as, “Get a free 15-minute consultation (a $497 value), yours free if you respond within 5 days.” This is a direct offer that will have them responding to something of value.
Think about different ways you can reach customers offline and think about multiple approaches. The more they hear about you, the more they will remember you. That’s a fact.
Don’t Have A Strategy for Contacting Your Customers?
If you don’t already have a strategy in place, it’s never too late. Start by creating a specific process, and adjust it as you learn what works or doesn’t.
We have learned, as we have done so for each of our clients, that we have been able to create a winning method. We cater our approach to what works best for each demographic in each industry.
We strongly recommend, for your customer service, training yourself and your admin team to learn the following:
- how to talk to customers in sales
- how to make conversation with customers
- how to talk to customers face-to-face
- how to talk to clients on the phone
- how to interact with customers when they call or email
- how to talk track, or track calls and your engagement with customers
