Yodle Tipster – Making Nurturing Second Nature

Posted by The Yodler

For this week’s Yodle Tipster from Local Online Advertising for Dummies, we jump all the way to pages 300 through 304 from Chapter 16, Staying at the Top of Customers’ Minds, to discuss cost-effective ways you can keep in contact with your current clients.

While a quality service, a competitive price, and superb customer service are huge factors in maintaining repeat business from your customers, nothing quite compares to the emotional connection a customer has to your business. If your customer feels personally connected to your business, they will come back, even if you’re not all that different from the competition. Therefore, if you want them coming back for more, you have to create and maintain that connection and facilitate two-way communication with customers to build long-term loyalty and foster ongoing business with them. That all sounds really complicated, but there’s a number of simple ways to achieve the goal of building a personal relationship with your customers. Here a few ideas the book offers:

Sending thank you messages: Technology has made writing the thank you note a whole lot faster. Now you can send a business email to confirm a purchase or scheduled appointment or other activity and simultaneously thank the customer for their business. Thank you emails can also help in other ways – like suggesting other products or services you offer, solicit e-newsletter subscribers, acquire testimonials for your website, generate more fans on your Facebook page, etc.

Exploiting e-newsletters: An e-newsletter is a form of communication to your customers sent out on a regular basis. E-newletters build loyalty from your customers by building your brand, keeping them up to date with important information about your company, and offering material that presents you as a thought leader in your industry.

Conducting Satisfaction Surveys: By allowing your customers to voice their opinion in a satisfaction survey, you do two things:
1) You gain helpful feedback that you need to know about your business
2) You show your customers that you value their business

If you choose to do a survey online, some great online resources include SurveyMonkey.com and SurveyGizmo.com.

All three of these ideas are easy to do and cost virtually nothing to execute!


So, What are some things you’ve done to keep your customers coming back? Tell us your great ideas!