Create a Customer Loyalty Plan

• Posted December 16th, 2011
• By Bradford (bio)
• Filed under: Using BatchBook

You’ve won another customer! That’s awesome, and you have every reason to be excited. You’ll go to great lengths to make sure they are happy. After all, you care about each and every one of your customers.

But what’s next? After this sale, how do you plan to keep them coming back again and again as a loyal customer? You need a customer loyalty plan.

Having a great product and giving wonderful service at the time of purchase is a great start. But if you are going to build long term loyalty in a large number of your customers, there are a few things you can do to spur that along.

Plan it Out

You likely think strategically about how to get customers. Whether you have a sales or marketing plan, or whatever tactics you use, you know how to get people to become your customers. But what about a plan that you execute regularly to build loyalty in your customers?

Whether you send out a thank you note or get your customers subscribed to your newsletter, or any number of ideas to help you build loyalty, you should not be doing it ad hoc. Make it part of your list of tasks for each customer. You can still be personal with your follow up, but you should remember to follow up with everyone!

With Batchbook, you have a helpful tool that can really help you manage this type of follow up. One idea is to start using to-do templates to give yourself a series of tasks to follow up on after your customer buys from you.

Get Personal With Your Customers

While it is great to build a system, just signing everyone up for a salesy newsletter, or some other impersonal approach, is not going to do the trick. Whenever possible, you should strive to be personal with your customers, and that goes for your customer loyalty plan as well.

One thing you can do is pay attention to your customers. This is especially easy if they are on social media, but you might also see news stories about them or run into other people who know them and have nice things to say about them. If you read or hear something by or about your customer, this can be a great chance to reach out to them for what marketers call a “touch”. Just say hi, comment on what you read, congratulate, etc. In other words, be personable, and treat your customers like friends.

If your customers are on social media, and it makes sense for you business, develop a relationship with them there. In Batchbook, you can track some of their social media activity as well as rss feeds from their blog posts. If you have a local business, try tracking the feeds of local papers, because you never know what news you will hear either about your customers or that they may be interested in.

Keep Talking (But Don’t Forget to Breathe)

For any relationship to stay strong, you need plenty of conversation. The problem is, your business relationship with your customer probably does not reflect the customer’s real world interests. For instance, if you sell houses, that is what you live and breath. When you get a customer, they are very interested in your topic, because that is what they are doing right now, either buying or selling a house. But that interest will fade. So if your follow up plan is to keep sending them new listings on houses, long after they have settled in, you probably are not providing value.

But this doesn’t mean you can’t keep talking. You just may need to change the tone and content of what you talk about when building loyalty. For us here at Batchbook, we move the conversation away from how our software can help manage contacts, to more general discussions about small business and the importance of building strong customer relationships. A real estate agent might have a newsletter and Facebook page that offers great tips and articles that would be of interest to area home owners.

Keeping the conversation going is paramount. What that conversation looks like will be different for every business. Retail stores can send a lot of coupons to get people to buy again and again. For businesses that sell once to a customer every few years, the content needs to be more geared to that.

In any case, just be careful that your follow up communication doesn’t become more marketing white-noise. This is where you don’t forget to breath. Take pauses to reflect on how you are communicating. Evaluate to see if you are providing anything of worth, both for your customers, and for yourself in terms of repeat and referral customers. And very importantly, strive to engender two-way conversation, by asking for feedback and comments.

Building customer loyalty can make your small business life easier. Don’t neglect the importance of having a plan and using tools like Batchbook to execute that plan.

 photo credit: Spirit-Fire