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One of the best ways to ensure more success as a business owner is to retain as many loyal customers as possible. There’s often a lot of emphasis placed on finding new customers through marketing and advertising campaigns, but your bread and butter will often be repeat customers, especially in certain industries.
While a fantastic product or service will definitely help in this regard, as well as fair and competitive prices, you can also go far by making your customers feel special. Here are some tips to help you do so.
Promotions and Deals
Loyalty begets loyalty. This is true in life and business. If you’re loyal to your customers and reward them for buying from you, they will be more inclined to continue to buy from your company. People like what’s familiar, but it always helps to incentivize repeat purchases.
One great way to do this is by offering promotions, deals, and discounts to customers. There are a few options here. First, you can encourage customers to buy more by creating bundles, so they can get a discount for a larger purchase. Or, after a transaction, you can offer a deal for their next purchase.
You can also offer discounts for leaving reviews or, if someone is considering a purchase, offer a discount on their shopping basket. It’s a nice surprise and the potential benefits are well worth the slightly lessened profit.
A Membership Scheme
On a similar note, a membership of a loyalty scheme is a great way to encourage customers to be loyal. Once someone is a member, they are far more likely to shop more often, especially if they benefit from discounts or other perks.
Loyalty cards are a very simple way to implement that. Simply put, if someone buys a certain amount of a product, they can then get one for free. It’s functionally a small discount, but it gives customers something to reach for.
You can create membership ID cards to identify people who have signed up for certain perks and discounts, so you can identify them. This can also provide some passive word-of-mouth advertising for your company, especially if you incentivize people to spread the word.
Great Customer Service and Support
Ideally, people will be happy with their purchase and the experience surrounding it. Customer service starts before you make the sale and can continue sometime later. Be polite and friendly and, if in person, take advantage of your smile. Some people do prefer to be left alone, so read the room and follow their lead.
But customer service and support can continue after the purchase. If someone has a problem, it can sour their experience. But great customer support can smooth over this problem and, in some cases, even warm people to your business even more.
In-house customer service is always helpful, but for simple issues, outsourcing to a call center can make things run much more smoothly without putting added pressure on your team.
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