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Three of the Best Ways to Retain Customers and Increase Sales

In my previous post about how to increase sales I mentioned three customer service experiences that literally broke my relationship with these businesses. Today I will dig into three of the best ways to retain customers in your small business so you can increase sales.

 Although there are many more ways to keep customers in your wheel house, these three ways to retain customers will help improve sales if you continually work on them.

Now for a Really Great Customer Service story…

I purchased a piece of luggage from Jos A Bank in our local area under the guise that if anything ever happened to it they would replace it.

Well as life happens, this particular piece of luggage started to have some serious exterior issues with only 20 flights of service. So I brought it back and came to find out that Mr. Bank was no longer in the luggage business and they were in the process of merging with another mens clothing conglomerate.

Fortunately for me the man who sold me the bag was the manager and had some integrity. He went to bat for me and guess what…

He fixed part of the issue and also gave me a credit for $1000 that I could apply to anything in the store! Now that’s what I call customer service and taking care of the customer and going beyond. Considering the luggage cost less than $400, the repair plus the $1000 far exceeded the value that we paid.

Even though this company is not a small business their local store is run like one and they’ll receive my vote for great customer service and retain me as a customer for life.

This leads to what I believe are Three of the Best Ways to Retain Customers: 

A. Give Your Customers a Reason to Come Back to Your Business. Treat your customers like you treat your best friend and always have something to entice them to reenter your world.

B. Cross Train Your Sales and Customer Service Staff. This way you are never without someone in either department.

C. Find and Recruit People Who are Open and Willing to Learn Your Business. It seems that good, quality, trained retail sales and customer people are just becoming harder and harder to find these days. So when you find a really good quality individual, do what you can to support him or her and treat them like family.

Bonus – if you communicate openly with your staff about your expectations and goals, this can also be one of the best ways to retain customers, especially If you are building your business around a brand. This means that you have to make sure the people who work for you understand what brand loyalty is all about or it could mean their jobs and loss of income.

Make sense?

If not – let me know by forwarding me an email here at ClickandMortarblog.com and I’ll do my best to answer your question.

Until next time…

Dave Krygier
Publisher 

 

 

The Case for Print & Paper and Attraction – How to Combine Offline with Online Marketing

With the onslaught of technological changes it seems that more and more companies are vearing away from print and paper marketing, yet there is s segment of the business populace that still desires to know how to combine offline with online marketing.

Last summer I stopped by a higher end lake side resort to investigate and find out more about the place and what it has to offer. As I approached the front desk there was not a shread of paper in sight. So I asked the front desk guy about the resort and he just redirected me to their website.

How to combine offline and online marketing by ClickandMortarblog.com
Attract more customers to your resort by combining offline print materials with online marketing.

But I wanted more.

I wanted something tangible to take with me. Anything would do.

But all I left, disappointed, with only access to their online website.

The bottom line here is that the resort could have captured me several ways seeing that at the time I was a very warm prospect. And had they used printed marketing materials and combined them with online web properties just think of all the possibilities!

How could they combine their offline with their online marketing?

Number One: Had they trained their front desk people to just for my information they could add me into their database manually and then follow up later.

Number Two: They could easily ask for my phone number and have the sales office contact me.

Number Three: They could easily have had a classy, quality, simple brochure with a picture, attraction oriented copy, and contact info.

Number Four: They could provide an oversized contact card with QR code and shortened URL that provide the gateway to the web.

Number Five: They could have a POP sign with the Attraction oriented copy, QR code and shortened URL.

Any one or all of these methods would work for this resort and many a business I run into these days.

It seems that some businesses, like the above mentioned resort have gotten it into their heads that the web is the only way to market their business. They seem to think that since they are so booked up and that their $300 per night rates during peak season can mean that they can forego paper and print altogether. 

Yes, the web is growing faster than ever before, but we are not at the point where we can totally get rid of POP and POS based printed marketing materials. Especially when it comes to live on-location interaction with human beings.

What we need to do as small business owners and managers is to attract and connect with our target market on a continual basis. And do so in ways that the people we desire to bring into our world will desire to connect with us due to the materails we provide and manner in which we conduct ourselves.

We as a society still utilize paper. Now I’m not saying that we should step back and intitiate paper and print campaigns. I’m just conveying that for the time being printed marketing materials still have a place in certain businesses and organizations.

The question is this…

Are you involved in one of those organizations and have you been missing opportunities to grow your business? If so, reconsider and learn how to combine offline with online marketing by testing with printed marketing materials. This way you can attract more customers and keep your business moving forward.

Until next time,

Dave Krygier
Publisher

PS – Need help with figuring out how to combine offline with online marketing? SBM may have a solution, or two or three…