17 – Obtaining & Keeping Customers
Getting customers is essential as your business is starting out. As you grow, you’ll find that it costs less to keep an existing customer than to get a new one. How do you keep your customers coming back?
Finders Keepers
You keep customers by deepening the relationship, continually building your likability, and cultivating trust. Customers typically remain with businesses that:
- Provide high quality goods or services.
- Ensure customer support is friendly and helpful.
- See questions and complaints as opportunities to build trust.
- Are timely with delivery, payment, etc.
- Give more than expected.
- Find ways to continually improve the product or service.
Despite your finest efforts, sometimes even the best customer will come to you with a complaint. When that happens, you’re left with a choice. You can take offense and defend yourself, or you can act quickly to address the complainer’s concerns. Because negative experiences tend to spread quickly, make complainer’s feel special by hearing them out, quickly remedying the problem, and going above and beyond what is required to build trust. In doing so, you may turn the most vocal critic into your most vocal fan. While every once in a while you’ll find a customer who just cannot be satisfied, it’s best to assume that’s not the case.
In addition to building a relationship through good business practices, certain tools can keep customer’s coming back. For example, consider:
- Loyalty Programs – points, rewards, discounts
- Emails about product updates (such as new versions)
- Contests/Events
- Conversations with customers, usually via social media
Deeper Ties
As your business grows, you may also want to find ways to serve existing customers more deeply. Customer may keep coming back and buying more from your business if you offer more features or additional products and services to them.
ASK YOURSELF:
- Are there new features that my customers want added to my current product that they would be willing to pay for?
- What are my customers’ related problems and how can I solve them in the future?
Worth Over Time
Everything you do to build or deepen a relationship with your customer costs you either time or money. Focus your efforts on people who will be paying customers. While it’s fun to make new friends, getting, keeping, and growing customers is the ultimate goal. Evaluate their worth to you based on the entire relationship with your business, not just that first purchase.
ASK YOURSELF:
- How much does it cost me to get each paying customer?
- How much money do I expect to get from a customer over time?
- Will I make my money back?
- Is this customer a good investment of my money and time?
- Is my customer someone who will only buy once? Is it important that my customer comes back or does my solution solve the problem in its entirety the first time? How could my product or service change to keep my customer coming back?
- Does my product or service encourage my customer to share it with other potential customers?
You need to make sure that the total profit you make from your customer over time is more than you spend in getting and keeping the customer. Some customers may cost you more on the front end, but if they keep coming back, if might be worth it.
Complete the assignment in the lesson before moving on. (You can either complete the assignment digitally on the fillable PDF or you can print the assignment, complete it by hand, scan or take a photo of it and upload it below.)