Every business owner should strive to increase the number of customers for their business. It doesn’t matter whether you are selling makeup or offering IT services – increasing your customer base is essential for letting your business grow.
To guide and assist you, here are five simple tips on how to increase your customer base.
- Ask For Opinions
Asking for opinions from your customers is an easy way to get customer feedback, build a stronger relationship, and get a new customer. When someone is leaving your website, ask them to complete a short survey about your business. Even if the person completing it is not a customer yet, they will feel like they are valued and might come back later to purchase something from you. After all, people are always happy to talk about themselves and their experiences, both online and offline, and giving their opinion on your business is a great way for them to express themselves.
Keep in mind that the survey you ask them to complete can have different aims and you structure your questions according to it. For example, here are the top three purposes your survey can have:
- Industry Research: Your survey can help you do industry research without having to search for thing manually yourself. The customers you ask will provide you with all the information you need. Ask questions that compare you to other similar companies or to your direct competitors and see what your audience thinks of you and them.
- Customer Experience: Another purpose your survey can serve is getting as much information about customer experience as possible. This can involve your customers’ experience only on your website, or experience with your company in general, maybe even face to face.
- Customer Satisfaction: Lastly, consider collecting feedback about customer satisfaction. Ask them about their impressions of your product or service. This is especially important if you recently started offering a new product or service and you would like to know how much your customers like it. You can also ask about satisfaction with customer support, delivery, performance, and so on.
- Excellent Customer Support & Service
Customer support is perhaps the most important aspect of any business. When a customer calls, – no matter if it’s their first or tenth purchase – you must be able to provide them with the best customer service possible.
Satisfied customers are the ones coming back for more. If a customer is happy with what they got from you, they are more likely to recommend you to their friends and family. Likewise, if they had a bad experience, they will be the one going to your site to post a negative review about whatever they didn’t like.
In order to improve your customer support and service, here are some tips you can use:
- Install Live Chats: The best way to ensure that all of your customers’ questions are answered instantly is to install live chats on your website. This can be done with the help of LiveChat or a similar service.
- Improve Delivery Quality: The speed with which your customers get your product matters a lot. If you promised a week, then it shouldn’t be longer than a week, but, of course, the sooner the better. In addition to that, make sure that the delivery is done safely and your products aren’t damaged when they arrive at your customers’ doorstep.
- Train Your Customer Support Employees: If you want your customer support department working perfectly, then you have to make sure they know how to behave themselves. Train them and remind them to always be polite when speaking with customers.
- Work On Your Products & Services: While all of the above may be perfect, they won’t matter at all if your product or service is awful. Always strive to improve whatever you are offering to your customers.
- Offer A Free Newsletter
There is a magic word that everybody is always happy to hear – “free”. If you offer something for free, you will be showing your customers that you are willing to provide them with free information from the very start. Moreover, this also shows them that you are doing everything to make their experience better with you and your company.
One of the best options when it comes to free offers is a newsletter. This is something every company can create, whether it be a small business or a large corporation. Your site visitors who are coincidentally your potential customers will not only willingly start a relationship with your company but will also provide you with their personal information such as their name and email.
To create the best newsletter, follow these tips:
- Provide Value: Your newsletter must have interesting and important content in it. Otherwise, what’s the point? Include links to articles on your blog, discounts and offers, sales and product announcements, and one-time deals.
- Don’t Be Clingy: Even though your newsletter is a great email marketing tool, it doesn’t mean that you have to be sending out emails every single day. A weekly or even a monthly newsletter works fine. Remember not to sound like you are trying to sell something too much.
- Be Multilingual: While a newsletter in English is great, a newsletter in different languages is even better. With the help of an online translation service such as The Word Point, you can easily translate your newsletters and the content on your website to other languages.
- Include Visuals: Including stunning visuals to your newsletter is important as it helps you stand out in the mass of emails your customer checks daily. Even one good image can make a difference and help your reader remember your email.
- Social Media Promotion
Social media promotion is the easiest way to reach new audiences and attract attention to your products or services. By dedicating time to your social media accounts, you can significantly increase your customer base, improve engagement and brand awareness, and get extra exposure.
Provide value through your social media channels and then have your customers promote your brand for you. By sharing your content on their account, they make their friends and followers see it on their own feeds. This chain attracts more and more followers and, eventually, potential customers.
In order to make your social media activity effective, keep at least two accounts. You can choose from the three most popular ones: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Depending on your target audience, you might also want to use LinkedIn, Snapchat, Tumblr, and others. And because you will have to manage several accounts, use such social media management tools as Hootsuite that allow you to control all of your accounts from one place and post simultaneously.
Remember to past regularly and try to schedule your posts beforehand. Posting during certain periods of time such as in the evening or early in the morning can help your post be seen by more people. Don’t forget to make your posts different and always find interesting topics to write about. At the same time, don’t forget about images and videos as they can be a great attention-grabber and often get more engagement than plain text posts. Lastly, consider going live from time to time as it is regarded as a great way to establish better customer relationships.
- Fresh Content
Directly connected with the previous point, creating fresh content for your audience is crucial for establishing better customer relationships, attracting more traffic, growing your follower base, presenting yourself as an authority, and so much more.
You must create fresh content both for your website or blog and for your social media. These will vary tremendously as content on social media has a different aim from the one on your blog. But nonetheless, both have to be of high quality and solve your customers’ problems to be relevant.
The content you create can be anything from news reports to how-tos. Try to publish both evergreen content and discuss industry hot topics. A balance between these two will ensure that the traffic you get is organic, while not all of your content becomes outdated.
The biggest difference between content for your social media and content for your blog is that the former needs hashtags to be found while the latter must be optimized for search engines with the help of relevant keywords. Don’t forget to do your research prior to creating your content so that you can add appropriate hashtags and keywords to your text.
By the way, proofreading your articles is a must if you want to look professional at all times. Your content is one of your most important weapon in marketing, so it should always be on the highest level of expertise.
Conclusion
To sum up, it is quite possible to increase your customer base quickly and without spending a lot of money on it. Follow these simple tips and implement into your strategy to get more customers for your business.
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