Today I'm back in Houston "celebrating" my friends lay off from his company. It's definitely a time for many changes for many people. How's all this going to effect you? Many of these people are going to attempt to join the ranks of business ownership, giving us more competition. The other way is that many of your current customers will STOP BUYING cause they "can't afford it." Now both of these reasons are why its essential for you to start stepping up your marketing today.
Now let's continue our 1st lesson. To read the 1st part click here.
I left off telling you to create packages of your services or goods. Put them together in 3-4 different levels. Obviously starting with less in "entry level package" all the way up to your all inclusive premium package.
The next step with this is to always have something to offer your customer. Offer a followup product or service immediately and like I mentioned before, make sure its so good that they wouldn't go anywhere else.
Your goal is that once they buy from you one time, they will be off the market for your product/service from anyone else. No price shopping, no looking around forever.
The third thing you can do to maximize your relationships with your current customers is to deploy a customer loyalty program. Popularized by the airline industry, you reward customers for their purchases from you, helping you build a wall around your customers and preventing them from going anywhere else. Not only does a loyalty program give you the opportunity to "reward" your best customers but allows you to build a better realtionship with them also.
A loyalty program can be simple or as complicated as you want. To get started quickly and easily is do get small punch cards made like many restuarants do. After each purchase you stamp the card and after so many purchases, give the customer a premium that would motivate the customer to continue doing business with you until they get it.
This also gives you a great opportunity to continue to keep selling to them!
Remember, your goal as a business owner is to sell your service to others that want and need it. By taking advantage of your existing customers, you're doing just that, but at a cost that's considerably LESS than what it costs to sell to a brand new customer.
In order to grow you business, once you have created a process to continually sell to your existing customers, it is now time to turn your attention to finding new customers.
Now that I've shown you how you can IMMEDIATELY boost your business from the most important customer, in my following tip I will show you how to take find NEW customers effectively at low costs.
Until next time,
John Barry
The Marketing Dude
http://www.ontargetprofits.com
Follow me on twitter http://twitter.com/realjohnbarry
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2 comments:
This is good advice, John. Strangely enough - even though I work in a public library where you wouldn't think we'd have to worry about this kind of thing - marketing our programs and getting good numbers is essential to our future funding. I'm constantly looking at ways to address your point that we should always offer something for the customer. In our case, that might be a film program instead of a product niche, though. :)
Allyson, that is great. I didn't really think about it but many of the principles I teach can definitely be put to use in almost any type of service. I'm sure with the sophistocated systems now it should be easier to get them to come back more often. Just matching offerings to what people are looking for. For example if you get a new World War book in, there should be a way that you can notify everyone that has checked out a World War book within the last year. Events and themes would be another way to attract customers back. By looking at what customers are checking out it would make it very easy to see what would kind of event would motivate them to come back in. Obviously the kids events but as well as adults. I understand working for a public library, funding can be a large problem but with a little creativity I think almost all my lessons can be used for you. Thanks for the comments and let me know if there's any thing specific I can help with.
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