Let’s face it – customers are fickle. Unless you’re a global mega brand (such as McDonald’s, Apple or BMW), it seems that loyalty is only as strong as the last sale. This is why attracting and retaining customers should be a top priority for any small or mid-sized business. One marketing strategy that is quite useful in achieving this is handing out promotional items.
Below, we’ve outlined our top 6 cost effective marketing tips for keeping your customers happy:
- Know What Sets You Apart: The secret lies in understanding what attracts your customers in the first place. What is it that sets you above your competitors? Whatever it was that initially wowed your customers is what will keep them coming back for more. Once you know the answer to this question, it will be far easier to build a customer base and keep them loyal.
- Be Seen: Visibility is key. Whether its signage, an online presence or carefully branded promotional products, you have to be found. After that comes your prices (and how competitive they are), which is also linked to the quality of your products/services. Finally, there is the feedback from other customers – good and bad.
- Keep Your Customers Happy: Each year, the average business loses around 20% of its customers simply because it fails to attend to customer relationships. Whether sales are online or offline, it’s far more cost effective to retain customers than it is to try winning new ones. Remember that customers are the cornerstone of your business, so keep them happy.
- Keep Your Finger on the Pulse: Knowing customer trends and keeping your promotional offerings fresh and appealing is a major component of customer retention. Offering the same old items that businesses were offering twenty years ago isn’t really going to get you anywhere. These days, it’s all about being unique – tech gadgets are actually some of the hottest items.
- Target Your Marketing: A one-way-approach is very rarely going to work – you have to target the right sort of audience. One of the most common mistakes made is taking an approach that is far too generic – you have to know who your customer is and the reason they will buy. Then your marketing material, including corporate gifts, needs to be targeted accordingly.
- Keep It Effective: If you want to make some serious money in the long term, your customer-acquisition costs have to be low and the lifetime value of the customer has to be high. The only way to achieve this is to be super efficient and targeted in your marketing strategy. Fortunately, there are plenty of affordable promotional products on the market.
If you’re a small or mid-sized business, we hope that you’ve found the above tips useful in keeping your customers (both existing and potential) happy. At the end of the day, it’s not just about obtaining them – it’s about getting their repeated patronage. Promotional items can be quite useful in achieving this, as it lets your customers know that you value them and understand their needs.
