When you start a new business, building up a solid customer base and maintaining it is probably one of your key goals. While it can take time to build up your reputation and see results, there are different things you can do to attract new customers and keep them coming back.
With this in mind, here are five simple tips to help you grow and retain your company’s customer base.
1. Set up a loyalty scheme
Encouraging your customers to keep them coming back to your business is about keeping them loyal towards your company. And keeping them loyal is a lot to do with giving them something back and showing you appreciate their custom.
A good way to do this, especially if you’re a retailer, is by offering customer loyalty schemes. Companies that provide these schemes can offer your customers different incentives and rewards to encourage them to keep using your service or buying your products. This could involve giving customers discounts with regular purchases, or providing a loyalty card, which allows them to collect points to put towards the next products they buy.
2. Offer good customer service
Providing a good customer service is essential in business. It’s the key not just to maintaining your customer base, but growing it too.
Just as good customer service can sway people to re-buy from a company to experience that service again, bad customer service can do quite the opposite – even encourage a new customer to walk away from making a purchase. Good customer service can also provide some free advertising in promoting your business, as people tell their friends and family about their positive experiences of buying from your company.
3. Ask for feedback
Hearing from your customers is one of the best ways to know how effective your customer service actually is. By asking them what they think of your products, services, company departments, or overall business, you can find out what they like and what they don’t like, allowing you to improve to ensure they keep coming back.
It also shows that you value your customers and what they think. You can ask them for feedback in different ways. This could involve sending out an email after they buy a product or use a service, adding a survey to your company website, or speaking to them directly in your business or over the phone.
4. Distribute a newsletter
Distributing a free weekly or monthly newsletter provides a more personal way for you to engage with your customers, which can also help grow and maintain your customer base. You can use it to give details about new developments at your company that might interest your customers, like new services or future products, or use it to promote special offers and discounts.
Allowing customers to sign up to your newsletter for free also shows that money isn’t the most important factor in your business. When done well, your customers should look forward to receiving your newsletter and become more aware of your offerings. All this can help improve the loyalty they have towards your company, while keeping your brand front of mind.
5. Make use of social media
In today’s evolving world of digital communication, this is another great way to maintain and grow your customer base. It’s important for any business to have social media handles, whether that’s on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, depending on your business.
A well-managed social channel – where you are tweeting or posting updates and sharing information throughout the day – can help you build and maintain high numbers of followers that stay loyal to your company. They might look forward to your posts and engage with you by liking and sharing your comments, for instance.
Conclusion
All this can help you get more of an insight into your audience. You can learn more about what they like and think about your company, about their interests and general issues, which is especially important if you’re a retailer. With this information, you know how to develop your offerings to ensure those people remain a key part of your growing customer base.
