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Building long-term customer relationships is one of the most important actions you can take in business. There are a number of reasons for this. Most obviously, the longer you can keep a particular customer coming back, the more they will buy from you, and the more your profit margins will increase.
Secondly, longer-term customers become aware of what your company offers and the type of products or services that interest them. They will require next to no marketing budget allocated to them because they simply don’t need it. This will save you money and stop you from wasting time advertising to the wrong people.
Depending on your business model, this may also help you to better predict your medium- and long-term finances. If you know you are likely to have a certain number of sales from particular customers or clients, you can better estimate how much money you can reinvest into your company or how many new customers you need to attract in order to remain profitable.
Here are five marketing ideas you can use to secure long term customers:
You can use live chats to attract customers towards your on-boarding process
Live chats are a useful tool in helping you to secure long-term customers. By chatting to your customers in real-time, answering questions, and addressing complaints, you will improve their experience of dealing with your company and increase the chance of them giving you return business.
However, live chats are not easy to operate without the right technology in place. Assigning one or two people to answer all customer service requests would inevitably lead to them falling behind with messages, causing delays and mistakes as they rushed to keep up with customer demand.
Instead, use a Mac live chat app to help increase the efficiency of your live chats. They give you time-saving features like predictive text, canned responses, and multi-device utility. As a result, your team can keep up with customer messages, ensure they stay on-brand, and increase the likelihood of meeting the customer’s demands.
As well as this, live chat apps allow customer service staff to answer messages on the go, whether on their phones or laptops. Great customer service is the heart of effective marketing. You cannot win the trust of prospects without having the customer service to back up your claims. Therefore, use your live chats as an opportunity to demonstrate the knowledge and effectiveness of your team and the trustworthiness of your company.
You can also integrate marketing into your live chats by directing customers towards your email list, helping to ‘on-board’ them to your products.
Send regular marketing emails to keep your brand at the front of your customer’s minds
Another great marketing technique you can use to secure long-term customers is to send regular marketing emails to customers subscribed to your list. Of course, this particular technique works best if you have a strong and responsive email list in the first place, and there are a number of methods you can use to build it.
You could, for instance, entice visitors to your website to subscribe to your email list by offering a freebie in return. Common examples include an eBook, which helps your customers with a problem in your industry, or a one-time discount on selected products.
In addition, most customers who buy from you will opt into your email list as soon as they purchase an item. This second option is lucrative because the easiest people on your list to sell to are the ones who have already bought from you.
Once you have built a strong list, it is important to send regular emails. Many businesses fear that subscribers will leave their list if they do this because it looks like spam. This is a mistake. Marketing emails are only treated like spam if the content isn’t useful to the reader, is clickbait, or is unengaging to read.
Avoid falling into this category by taking the time to research your subscribers comprehensively. Find out which of your products is popular, why it is popular and what your customers are crying out to find out more about. You can learn more by reading Zopto reviews.
This way, you will keep both new and existing customers engaged with your brand and likely to buy from you again and again. Remember, the more a particular customer buys from you, the more likely it is they will buy from you in the future.
Encourage your customers to share your brand with their friends using discounts
If you want to create long-term relationships with customers while attracting new prospects at the same time, you should consider giving discount codes to any customers who encourage another person to buy one of your products.
It is effective on many levels. Firstly, when your existing customers tell their friends and family about your company, they will become more emotionally invested in your brand. No one wants to recommend a company that doesn’t reflect well on them, so by evangelizing your services, you will deepen your relationship with these existing customers.
Furthermore, if they do attract more people to buy your products or services, you will enjoy more business without needing to spend money on expensive advertising campaigns. On top of this, these new customers are more likely to do the same thing in turn, attracting their friends and family to sign up and starting the process over again. It’s important to create incentives like these for your existing customers, since this will motivate them to spread the word about your business. You could also hand out discounts on tickets to customers when you’re sponsoring an event – if you’d like to go the extra mile, throw in some free corporate lanyards in there as well! By showing your loyal clients you care about them, they’ll feel much more obliged to tell people they may want to get in on the savings as well.
Create lasting relationships with customers using social media
Alternatively, you could use social media to create longer-term relationships with customers.
By using a similar approach to marketing emails, you are more likely to secure repeat business if you are consistently at the forefront of your customer’s minds. Daily (or at least weekly) social media posts on platforms appropriate to your brand have the potential to remind previous customers of your products and encourage them to buy again.
It could also attract new customers to your brand, which will give you another opportunity to develop long-term customer relationships.
Tailor advertising towards customers who would find your products useful
Most of the heavy lifting in advertising is done by targeting the right customers in the first place. After all, there’s no point investing time and money persuading a certain demographic to buy your products if they are never going to buy from you.
Instead, do detailed customer research before starting your advertising campaigns, being sure to precisely target the right demographic in order to make the most of your budget and increase your marketing efficiency.
