20 Secret Ways to Generate Customer Loyalty and Win Your Past Clients Back
Did you miss this month’s Monthly Marketing Mentoring on 20 Secret Ways to Generate Customer Loyalty and Win Your Past Clients Back?
Well, lucky you ‘cuz here they are listed below. AND we recorded a whole radio show on it a couple of days ago. So, here you go:
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- Market to Your Strengths: Always market your strengths over your competitors’ at all times. Make it part of your re-marketing ads, hold music, email marketing and sales pitches. It will help keep customers loyal to your brand and make it a whole lot easier to resolve problems when they do arise.
Be a Good Date: A good date is the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Apply that to your customers to show that they have your full attention. Create great conversation by actively listening, asking questions, and responding thoughtfully. Understand that it takes many dates to form a relationship, and build your customer-focused strategies accordingly.- Honestly Admit Your Mistakes: Look at the situation honestly and assess whether the customer has a valid point. If she does, apologize without any excuses. Make the subject of your email or the first line of your phone call: “We screwed up.” Companies are rarely this transparent and candid and you are more likely to win their loyalty this way than if things were going perfectly. BTW, it’s always our mistake. When something goes wrong in our promotional product company, we always take the blame – even if they approved the proof.
- Show Your Empathy, Not Your Desperation: We show the customer a little empathy towards their feelings. Doing so actually reinforces the confidence we have in our product which in turn causes the customer to begin questioning their decision to leave. There is a reverse psychology effect at play that often works better than coming across as desperately trying to save them. And reassure first time triers: First-time buyers aren’t customers at all. They are triers. And their first experience with your company is critical. What is the message you’re sending to your first-time triers? If you are fortunate enough to attract new customers, don’t take them for granted.
- Start a Client Loyalty Program. Try to achieve the loyalty of the customers you lost by giving them another reason to connect with your brand other than just membership or subscription. Invite them to participate in a customer loyalty program so that they can experience the full benefits of doing business with you. Induct them into the loyalty campaign and then encourage them to pay more visits to your website, check out your new content, and connect with them more in exchange for unique and lucrative rewards. And show loyalty to your own customers with reviews for them: it’s one thing for you to talk about product benefits, and another for customers to comment on the pros and cons of your products and service. Share online customer reviews in offline media messages, as well.
- Let Them Know You Noticed They Were Gone: Let your customer know you know who they are and you’ve noticed they’re gone. Send them an email and personalize it.Remind them why they signed up. Use their name. The point here is to show them you value them as individuals, not just as another number in your books. Sometimes, people unsubscribe or abandon their accounts by mistake. Make sure to offer them a way to get back. This should be an automated email. See this example from LinkedIn:
- Keep It Human: Particularly for tech, there’s hesitation to insert humans into the retention process. Even though most of the value might be coming from technology, it’s still economically sound for most businesses to have account managers or customer success reps whose job it is to put a human face to the brand and product. Then, if there is a problem, the customer already has a relationship with the company.
- Pick Up The Phone to find out exactly what wasn’t working: If their issue could be answered by a soon-to-be-released feature, we offer a deep discount until that feature is released. We may need to just do a little coaching and create a plan to re-engage the end user.
8b. Also call to alert customers to added value and quirky product applications. Get ideas from customer reviews and your own product innovations. Sharing real-life tips in your e-newsletter or package inserts extends product value and positions you as an innovator. 
Appreciate Them BEFORE They Leave: If a customer is threatening to leave or has left you, it may be too late. I learned this early in business. As we strive to win and gain new business and new customers, we tend to forget to appreciate, communicate with, and stay in front of our current customers. To stay ahead of this situation, go out of your way to appreciate your clients daily.
Offer Help Outside Of Your Platform: Your customers are facing many problems that are outside the scope of your product or platform. That doesn’t make these problems any less important, though. At Hilton, they’ve found success offering suggestions to travelers and suggestions unrelated to their product. Doing so helps to demonstrate value and credibility while building trust.- Communicate The Right Way: It’s one thing to communicate. It’s quite another to do it correctly.
- Decide If You Actually Want Them Back: Not every customer is your ideal customer. If the customer you lost was difficult to work with, then they may not be a good customer to have. The best thing you can do at that point, is to make sure that they are leaving happy and that they will continue to refer you.Start by finding out exactly why they left: Was it price? Then you know there is disconnect between what you offer and the value they perceive.No matter what the reason, ask at least two more probing questions to find out exactly what you could do to improve the offer.Regardless, do show that you care: Ask them where you screwed up and how you can improve. Offer something to make up for it. People respect brands that care about improvement and they give them a second chance. This isn’t just about winning lost customers back. It’s also about continually improving (and keeping your reputation intact). You need to find out what makes your customers lapse, so you can fix bugs or improve your offers. Getting feedback is super important. You can gather it in many ways, like sending a feedback form, emailing out a survey or simply by reaching out and asking in a personal manner.
Introduce New Features: Whenever you’ve made an improvement or introduced a new feature or a product, inform your lost customers. Make sure you personalize the email and any offers inside. Nobody likes to be spammed by irrelevant emails. The good news is, since you’ve already done business in the past, you should be able to obtain data about your past customer choices and preferences.You can use that to win them back.Sometimes just making progress and showing your company is doing well makes you more attractive. So, it doesn’t just have to be a new feature or an offer. If you have some great news, like winning an award or making a major advancement, use it to your advantage.- Oh No! Do You Have Poorly Trained Staff? Imagine you walk into a paint store and, although there are several paint salespeople, all eager to serve you, none of them seem to know anything about paint. Frustrating? You bet. How long before you look somewhere else for your paint? Customers have an expectation that the people at a business will know about what they are selling. If your bottom line is based on customer expectation, then you better have trained people.Bottom line low prices? That’s another story.
- Restricting Your Hours Also Restricts Your Customers: A coffee shop that only stays open until 3 pm; a doctor that only works 2 days a week; a bakery that closes for a month at a time so the owners can go on extended vacations….
3 examples of businesses who lost customers and money because restricted hours that seem unreasonable to prospective customers. You need to provide customers with what they will consider reasonable access to your products and services. - Make It Easy To Do Business With You: A business with no answering service or voice mail; a home business where clients had to walk through the house to get to the tiny basement office; a retail business that only accepts cash; a service company that can’t seem to show up on time; and a professional that only answers emails once a week…Yikes!
- Make Your Client’s Job, and Life, Easier: Look for articles about their industry; send referrals; get them noticed in press via HelpAReporterOut.com; share tools that make their life easier (like you’lll find on the new home page of Yuloff Creative.com). When you shop with them, let them know what you liked about their service people.
Continue to Evolve YOUR Business: Some clients are no longer your clients. Get new ones. Develop your business to attract better clients. Some of our clients would prefer to work alone at their own pace so we created TheSmallBusinessMarketingPlan.com- Launch a Win-Back Campaign: A marketer’s ace in the hole. Shoot the lost customer an email asking them to try your product once more, but now at discounted rate. Be careful, however, since winback promos while effective initially, sometimes turn out to be problematic in the long run. BUT…. Any dollar spent in customer retention and winback out-values that spent on customer acquisition; we teach you to be stingy about where you spend your marketing dollars.Remember that buyers who re-engage simply because of a reduced price point are the least loyal of the bunch. All this means that the chances are greater of them putting to an end to the business relationship once more. Moreover, rely too much on winback promos to regain customers, and you might end up with diluted margins.19b. Position Pricing to Add Value: Here’s a tip from direct marketing legend/strategist/ copywriter Bob Stone.
WHICH OF THESE 3 OFFERS GETS THE BEST REPSONSE?
1) Half Price,
2) Buy One-Get One Free, or
3) 50% Off?
- Understand Why They Stopped Their Business With You. Some of the most common reasons are: Your service failed to impress them; they did not find the product to their liking; their order was delivered later than the specified time; their contact information is no longer the same; your customers got a better deal and services from a competitor; you failed to address an error in the shipping process satisfactorily; our business helpline was always busy, and they were not able to get in touch when required; one of your customer representatives or salespersons behaved in an unprofessional or rude manner with them.Explain to the customer how your company has changed and convince them to do business with you, if you find out that they were not satisfied with you. Know what to say to irate customers, and do not point out any faults on their end.Update their contact details in your records if you find out that you had been getting in touch on the wrong email or number.
- BONUS!!! Add an Awesome, Irresistible Offer to win them back!
So, all this is great, right? But what should you do now? So glad you asked! Go through your past client list to see who you have lost touch with that you’d like to win back and implement at least 1 of the above suggestions.
Need some help with that? We can do that! Go to www.FreeMarketingConsultation.com where you will take a brief Marketing Assessment and then be provided a link to view our calendar and choose a time that works best for you.
We look forward to helping you win back some of your favorite past clients!
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