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Customer
Retention |
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Anne Marie Church, AMC Marketing Church LLC (www.amcmarketinggroup.com) filled in for Kathleen Carroll of the Branding Clinic. Anne Marie spoke on "Customer Retention: An affair of the heart"... Here are some lovely images and my Top Ten Notes from our NJAWBO dinner meeting from 4/18/07: 1.Make sure your customers know you love them. 2. Have a Customer Communication Plan. What are some of the best ways to woo your customer? How often? How can you connect with your customers on a regular basis over time? 3. Connect on a personal note. Birthday. Things of interest to them. Thank you cards, handwritten. Meryl Surgan, Insurance Agent with Aflac Insurance, sends out annual thanksgiving cards. Seasonal postcards. 4. Let your clients know when you do something good/have something to share. "I want to be of service to you..."Let your clients know you're keeping up your knowledge by attending specialized training, conferences, etc.! For example, Sue Ananian, CMT, just went to Japan for special training. Let your clients know about this, Sue! 5. Referrals cost you nothing but can gain you a lot! "When you gain a customer you gain the potential for 250 referrals" (source?). 6. Reward your referral sources. Marie Salamon, Corrective Skin Therapy Beauty Center, offers a free product ($30-$75 value) as a gift to her clients who refer her to someone else. They can build their whole skin therapy supply cost free through referrals! Verena Aibel, Vibrant Visions International, offers gift certficates to Barnes & Noble, Starbucks, etc. Remember, when you lose a customer, you lose the prospect of 250 referrals. 7. Respect your customers/client's time. Verena uses an online scheduler: www.appointmentquest.com so her clients can book/ reschedule/cancel appointments with her online any time, day or night.. Also, she has a five minute rule (posted on her appointment scheduler). Verena, a life and business coach, call her clients at a pre-arranged time. Her five minute rule requests the client calls Verena directly if they haven't heard from her within 5 minutes of the scheduled time. This way, no body waits. 8. Have someone else read your marketing communications before you send them out. You don't want them to receive messages with typos or simple mistakes that really distort your originally intended message! Or you don't want broken links if you're giving website information. 9. Verena's other strategies: write resourceful Top Ten articles and send them out to clients, prospects. Conduct surveys, request testimonials, photos, or if your top referring clients would like to serve on your Research and Dev. team. 10. Verena's suggestion: Be aware of the signs, the red flags that could indicate your customer is not happy with something? Maybe they are slow to pay, bargain too hard up front, for example... |
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