Nurture Your Customers - Why and How

UPDATE:
I wrote this blog back in 2011. Four years later, everything in it is still valid. Everything in it is still not being done by the majority of small businesses. Meanwhile large corporations have moved into neuromarketing and can predict our buying habits over time, using algorithms and fancy online tracking software, and know what we do as pattern when shopping, more clearly than we ourselves do.

They will be coming after your customers if you don't lift your game. They may be already.

Many businesses seem to have missed the fact that their clients over the past are the key to promoting future growth and so they fail to pay due respect to this vital element of the business.

The importance of capturing good quality information on customers (and people who are not yet customers but have expressed an interest in the business) cannot be stressed too highly. These are people who have had experience with your business and in the case of customers, have already 'voted for you' with their money by spending it with you.

So what DO you do with a client list?

First thing you do is make sure you have a good amount of the right kind of information about them.

Capturing Data

Some (minimum) things you definitely want, if you can get it:

First and last name
Date of Birth or birthday (depending on your industry)
Postal address
Email address
Mobile phone number
Purchase history
What they bought
When they bought it
What they spent
Family status Single Married Children etc

What you do with the information once you have it will depend on the strategy you are going to adopt for your Client Nurturing Program. Yes, you have won these customers to your business and paid a lot of money in marketing and advertising for them to find you in the first place, so now you have them, make the most of it.

Your existing clients will always be a more economical source of new business than anything else you do to gain customers.

Many businesses throw money at new people who have never supported them, in the form of special offers, discounts and the like - and completely ignore their existing customers!

Your customers:

Buy more things in the future
Influence friends' purchases
Talk about the things they buy
Can recommend you
Appreciate being appreciated

What are you doing with your existing customers to nurture them and encourage them to come back and buy from you again? What are you doing to capture good responses from customers who are happy with you in the form of referrals and endorsements? Do you even know where to start to put a Nurturing Program in place?

This should be your priority to get this done.

If you don't know how, ask.
If you don't know who to ask, ask me.
If you think you know how to but you're not sure where to start, get the help you need.

Spending money on marketing without getting this in order is just pouring money down the drain.

How long have you been doing that?

Start using your head.

Your customers need to hear from you.




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