Planting the Seed for a Meaningful Customer Relationship this Arbor Day
How do you nurture your connection with your customers in a meaningful way? How do you ensure their experience is such a positive one your customers become loyal ones?
Every smart marketer knows that it’s easier to keep an existing customer than acquire a new one — and yet, far more focus and energy is expended on acquisition, and not enough on retention. To celebrate Arbor Day, BARE International are exploring how to grow a purposeful rapport with your customers through an engaging experience. Here’s 4 ways to nurture a customer’s relationship to help gain loyalty and longevity…
1. Taking interest in your customer’s needs
Knowing and understanding customer needs is at the center of every successful business, whether it sells directly to individuals or other businesses. The more you know about your customers, the more effective your sales and marketing efforts will be. It’s well worth making the effort to find out:
- who they are
- what they buy
- why they buy it
You can learn a great deal about your customers by talking to them. Strong sales are driven by emphasizing the benefits that your product or service brings to your customers. If you know the challenges that face them, it’s much easier to offer them solutions.
2. Engaging your customers
Businesses that focus on customer engagement are focused on value creation, not revenue extraction. They give people something meaningful beyond a sales pitch: a brilliant end-to-end customer experience, great content, or interactive, real-time customer support.
Existing customers provide the most consistent long-term revenue streams to companies that know how to keep them engaged. According to Gallup, fully engaged customers provide a 23% boost to profitability compared to average ones. Prioritize dependable customer service by empowering frontline representatives and leveraging data to do as much of the work for the customer as possible. Follow your customers on Twitter, retweet posts from their company accounts, and commenting on their LinkedIn posts is a great way to show them you’re listening.
3. Show your customers you are there, and you care
People want to be appreciated and respected. Remembering that consumers are people with needs and problems they want solved is a much better business strategy than looking around for whoever has a big bank account.
As a business, you’re already in a position to provide value and benefits to your customers. Since you’re already a known entity, you can pass over the “getting-to-know-us” phase of marketing and instead focus on reminding existing consumers of the benefits and value you bring to the table. Remind them that their patronage is appreciated and of value to your company by asking their feedback, suggestions and ideas.
4. Rewarding their loyalty
By rewarding repeat business, customers are more likely to retain their loyalty.
Rewards and incentives don’t always have to come in the form of hard discounts. Offer existing newsletter subscribers exclusive access to new content before it hits the main page. Provide early purchase access to new products. Post to social media pages with exclusive deals for followers. The more customers feel rewarded for interacting with the brand, the more often they will do so.
By taking action on these 4 steps you are not only going to nurture a deeper and more meaningful relationship with your customers, but you will certainly raise in them an interest to maintain this relationship as well as motivate them to share their positive experiences within their network.
Wishing everyone a happy Arbor Day from all of us at BARE International.
