7 Strategies To Attract & Keep Customers

The bulk of the time of small business owners and sales teams goes to acquiring new customers. While neglecting its existing customers.

Every marketing strategy should incorporate strategies for gaining and keeping customers.

The first step to right this wrong is to correct the mindset and learn new ways to relate with customers.

Next, small businesses should spend more time doing activities aimed at retaining customers.

Customer attraction is the process a business implements to gain new customers. This can be through an inbound or outbound marketing strategy.

Customer retention is a business activity that ensures the continuous patronage of customers. A customer retention strategy is important to keep the customer turnover low by keeping the business’s attentive to the needs of existing customers.

7 Strategies for Attracting and Retaining Customer for your Small Business

These seven strategies would help you get better at attracting and keeping customers:

Meet Customers Demand
Stellar Customer Service
Word of Mouth Marketing
Customer Loyalty Programs
Maintain Regular Communication
Form Strategic Partnerships
Build Community Around your Business

1. Meet Customer Demand – The first step to attracting and retaining customers in any business starts with the customer. Businesses must understand who their customers are, what their needs are and how they can provide solutions to meet those needs.

Any strategy that does not start with this is bound to suffer. The best strategy for attracting and retaining customers is to offer them what they want.

2. Stellar Customer Service – You cannot claim to be a business that values its customers but yet have terrible customer service. To be able to keep customers, your business needs to provide more than a customer care line, it should offer stellar customer service.

That means you respond to customer questions, complaints with warmth and empathy and follow-up when appropriate. If your customers can not get valuable information available to them, they would go elsewhere for answers, be prepared to provide knowledge centres, and self-service portals to your customers as your business scales.

3. Word of Mouth Marketing – Customers cannot help but share testimonials with their family and friends when they find a good product or service. Even without the push of business owners, customers generate organic referrals to your business.

But because of the many benefits of referral marketing, business owners need to help customers talk about their products to people in their network. This can be done by creating a platform to track and make it convenient for customers to share but also provide incentives to customers (incentives such as discounts, giveaways etc.).

4. Customer Loyalty Programs – Most businesses use various customer loyalty programs to keep customers. Here is how it works; They create a program and reward customers for buying their products or for engaging with the brand over time depending on the goal of the program. They reward customers with products, discounts and even cash prizes.

3 Tools to Maintain Customer Loyalty

Various platforms make it easier to create customer loyalty programs. Here are 3 Top Customer loyalty Platforms in Nigeria:

ThankUCash – ThankUCash is a loyalty platform that connects customers with businesses to help businesses grow while helping customers get the best deals and to earn some cash on every sale made.
RewardsBox Nigeria – The Rewards Box platform that helps businesses manage customer rewards, incentives and Loyalty Programs.
LoyStar – connects customers with their favourite brands in Nigeria, so they can earn rewards and win exciting high-value rewards.

5. Maintain Regular Communications – The task of running a business can be overwhelming and that is one of the reasons why businesses engage in ‘Attract and Dump’ – that is they gain new customers and don’t communicate with the customers afterwards.

Another reason is that they believe that because a customer bought from them once or twice, that customer automatically becomes their customer.

But the truth is the loyalty of a customer can not be relied upon. That is why businesses must maintain regular communications with their existing customers. Thanks to technology and various business automation tools, this is a much easier task today – Connect with your customers via email, social media, events etc. At least every quarter share updates and new developments surrounding your business or brand.

6. Form Partnerships – Forming partnerships is a great way to expand your offerings to new customers. Many businesses are leveraging partnerships with complementary businesses to reach new customer segments and markets.

It is a cost-effective way to quickly gain new customers and more benefits in the shortest time. But the success depends to a large extend on who you partner with and how well both businesses fit to achieve joint objectives.

7. Build A Community – Build a community around your business or brand. It is not enough to have your customers follow you on various social media platforms. Create avenues to enhance interactions between you and them and with other customers.

A great way to do this is by creating a Facebook group where customers can post questions and challenges. And businesses can share discounts, giveaways and receive feedback too.

Getting customers and retaining their patronage is not a one-time deal. It is a continuous process that small business owners must keep getting better at.

Attracting new customers is great but it becomes a waste of resources if your business can not keep a good part of its new customers. We hope this article would help you avoid that for your business.

What do you think of the strategies we’ve shared here? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

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