Marketing Sins and Solutions : Connect with Customers
Welcome back to our series on Marketing Sins and Solutions: Non-Habits from Hell.
In the last post, we talked about life just getting in the way of doing those little soft marketing activities that make a huge impact on your clients and customers in getting them to choose you. So let’s continue on with the next one:
Calling and Connecting with Your Customer – Just Because
I’ve been on a soapbox of "loving your customer" for over a decade now. It got rolls of laughter from the management teams of my manufacturing company employers. Then somewhere around the late 90’s and the early 2000’s Fast Company wrote an article called "Love is the Killer App" and suddenly, loving your customer was hip and cool.
Well, loving your customer and working with people you love that love you back, has never gone out of style. Legendary companies like Southwest Airlines, L.L. Bean, and the Ritz Carlton have done it for decades because they know that getting and keeping great, profitable customers is how you consistently make lots of money.
So today, show your customers a little love.
5 mintue tasks that will make your customer LOVE you.
- Call at least one client and customer per day – check in to say hello, ask how things are. Just talk to them about what’s going on in their world. Talk to them as a professional, share insights and trends. You never know what might come out of it.
- Send at least one client a card, note,article, cool tool or reference that you think they will find useful.
Ivana,
Speaking of love, I love the way you framed this bit of advice about staying in touch with clients. I’ve done it and it invariably seems to be appreciated by those I call. As they say, business is about relationships. What better way to build a relationship than to give of yourself, whether it’s a phone call to check in and really listen to a client’s business problems or challenges, or to ship them an article or link that might prove useful.