Every business relies to some degree on customers. Different business rely on customers in different ways and different capacities. Some rely on the customers being consistent, and buying frequently, while others may only see a customer once or twice. There are a number of different ways that can be undertaken to work towards generating more consistent and long term customers.
TRACKING YOUR CUSTOMERS
The essential first step is to find ways to track, where your customers are coming from, how often they purchase, and any number of other key points that you feel will provide a benefit for you in looking to grow the loyalty of your customers. Some of the simple ways that you can track your customers are through your marketing (tracking return from marketing). Or another way if possible is to include customer details on invoices. Or finally through a short customer survey.
ONCE YOU HAVE THE DATA
Once you have put in the effort to track your customers, and to find out some information about their buying patterns. You need to actually put the data to use. Of course how you do this will depend upon what data you have managed to collect and what you want the eventual outcome to be. But for example if you tracked where you customers were coming from you may find that you are getting 80% from one source and as such better utilize your marketing dollars. Or maybe you have found a way to track how often the customers purchase, by looking at this trend you may be able to rearrange your marketing to increase the frequency of purchases.
OTHER METHODS
While you should be looking for ways to track different aspects of your business, there are other methods which can not only help you track your customers buying activities but also help to encourage them to purchase from you over a competitor.
- Discount card – Customers love a discount. You can find any number of ways to provide this type of card, maybe give them to your best customers, sell the card for a nominal fee, or give them away in a weekly business card drawing. Whichever way you choose to do it, you need to make it so that the card shows reasonable value to your customers, while not impacting your bottom line to greatly. For example, customers will not see a 1% discount as good value (unless maybe your products are high ticket items), where as offering a 20% discount will potentially impact your profit a lot. Often 5-10% are good points, or maybe a fixed dollar amount off when spending a certain about maybe $5 when you spend over $50.
- Rewards card – This type of card can be a little more flexible and help to encourage customers to purchase over a longer period or more frequently. Often they are cards with spaces for a set number of purchases, and a space is filled in for each purchase over a certain value, and when the card is filled a reward is available. For example Every purchase over $10 gets a stamp, and when the card is filled with 10 stamps, you get the reward of a $10 gift card to spend in store, or a free bonus on your next purchase.
- VIP Newsletter – Rather then offering a card some business prefer to offer special offers, just to a select group of customers, or this can even be anyone that wishes to join the list to receive the newsletter. What this often help to do is share products with customers who may not have otherwise known about a specific product or may allow you to promote product more frequently to your customers. You can include vouchers, or other newsletter only offers to ensure that customers have some motivation to take action. The only warning is that you do not want to send information to frequently.
While it can be quite a task to build your cusomter base, it is often easier to sell to an existing customer then to gain another. The added bonus is that often a small discount or reward for loyal patronage, can cost your business less then the marketing costs involved in gaining a new customer.