Courting Your Customers: Back to Basics

In a survey of 1,000 business owners, the biggest challenge cited was “finding new customers and keeping them.”

Sound familiar? Everyone is facing the same challenge. So what do you do?
There are two key approaches that are especially working now: courtesy and communication.

Courtesy. The New York Times said you need to “hug your customers.” Haughty maitre d’s are suddenly friendly. Retailers are serving complimentary cocktails to get customers to stay in the store longer. Bars are lowering prices and serving free food. Couture fashion designers are hosting luncheons to woo buyers. The ancient art of handwritten thank you notes is revived -- hallelujah!

This is not really so new. Smart business people have been on this track all along. Everyone is adjusting and ramping up the perks, but developing better relationships with customers is not a new invention. A couple good books on the topic are: Jacques Werth and Nicholas E. Ruben’s “High Probability Selling,” Linda Richardson’s “Stop Telling Start Selling,” and Mary Mitchell’s books “The First Five Minutes” and “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Etiquette.” (Click on any of the titles to order.)

Civility and niceness are back in style. Every business, no matter how big or small, can afford to increase their marketing efforts in this arena. Saks Fifth Avenue (www.saksfifthavenue.com) is showing customer appreciation by giving dollar value gift cards for purchases, and my favorite sandwich shop Pumpkin Café (www.pumpkinphilly.com) is giving paper loyalty cards – 1 free sandwich for every 10 you buy. Different price tags, same idea.

Communication is a little more complex in that the same methodologies are not necessarily as efficient or effective for small and big businesses both. Walmart, for example, used Twitter to tell customers about special offers during the holidays. Hospitals are twittering during surgery as a training tool. It is time-consuming and expensive and unwieldy though for a small business owner to build up a large enough database, track all the exchanges and maintain communication – unless the small business owner themselves has a proclivity towards Twittering.

Marketing has so many options. Great ad and PR practitioners have a combination of experience and instincts about what works, and the honest ones will tell you that every campaign involves testing. With the advent and proliferation of internet marketing, the scope of options has exponentially increased. It’s tough for an average business person to scale the technology learning curve and figure out what approach makes sense for them.

I’ve examined several options for myself and my own clients and my opinion is echoed by Timothy Ferris in his recent book “The Four Hour Workweek” (click to order), and that is SIMPLIFY.

Podcasting, social networking, search engine optimization and analysis, mobile marketing – all are valuable, but they have a barrier to entry of several thousand dollars each, and I can’t in good conscience blanketly recommend that small business owners try them. Depending on your type of business, I might suggest them, but most businesses don’t need major campaigns using these avenues.

What I can and do recommend is that you make sure you review your basics. So you’ve built a customer database from networking, fishbowls and email address farming. Are you maintaining it? Do you not have the staff or time to do that?

Call Audrey Julienne, database and customer communications expert and owner of Raison d’Etre Marketing. She has helped our office improve our database, and she also designed and publishes our newsletter for us through Constant Contact. (Click here to reach her now.)

Newsletters, like all marketing vehicles, go through cycles and gluts, but my sense is that email newsletters are still at early-adaptor stage and, furthermore, are better poised for longevity, because of spam filters and permission-based options. It is a healthier system than direct mail, less expensive and less invasive, faster, greener.

It takes Audrey on average three days to a week to design a newsletter based on your letterhead and logo and general look. It costs $160 for her to set up your account, $70 for a master template. Then if you write the copy, she will send out your newsletter, track it and prepare a report on the response, for $45. If you don’t want to write the copy, Audrey will do that too, or help you find someone who will.

You can’t afford not to do this.

In the seminar we held, Audrey gave some great tips for newsletter content, which make good marketing sense offline as well.

1. Be more aware. Pay attention to your customers. What are they talking about, buying, not buying, complaining about? Where are they going when they have free time? What do they care about? What do they value? These have always been valuable clues to business, but now they are crucial. Your newsletter should be an extension of the conversation that is already going on around you.

2. Be the solution. Share mistakes you have made and how you corrected them. Our collective unconscious recognizes the world has erred and we need to correct a lot of systems, not just financial and energy. Honesty takes courage. People who come up with solutions at every level give hope and get respect.

3. Be generous. It is not just about giving a discount, which does help, but sharing valuable information that is relevant to and helps people right now. Kroger supermarkets made national news because their loyalty card not only gave discounts at their stores but at gas stations as well – during the gas crunch, they were heroes. In spring’s rainy humid weather, hair salons do well offering specials on anti-frizz treatments. In restaurants, what counts now is not just cheaper prices, but better service and special touches. When you make an effort now, people notice it all the more.

4. Be fun. The two primary motivators are 180 degree opposites: fear and joy. What realm do you find more attractive? If you are doing joint promotions, connect with events that are are uplifting. Life goes on. Babies are being born, flowers are still blooming (seed companies are doing well by the way). Can you find the good around you and point it out to your customers and connect them to it? Lift your spirits and theirs too!