How does a company attract new customers and retain them?

Agree with the expert answers here

1. Let customers know what you are doing for them

This can be done via a quick informal phone call or a friendly email newsletter – either way, you want to subtlety let your customers know about all the work you have been doing for them. For example, you may have spent part of your weekend fixing up a few problems for a customer – you can hint about this when you follow up the next week. It’s important to realize you are not being cocky here; you are simple letting them know you value their business and are willing to go the extra mile for them.

2. Write a personal letter

For long time clients, get personal. Tell them you value there business. Send them a letter like this. “I was grabbing a coffee the other day and your name popped into my head. How has business been for you? Are you on track to hit your targets this year?” Be genuinely interested in their business and life, be personal.

3. Remember special occasions

Send regular customers birthday cards and holiday cards. Try not to be boring (like all the other companies). If you can make these special cards/gifts unique in your own way, that will go a long way to building customer loyalty. Use your creatively and find a way to tie the gift ideas into your business, the customers’ business or his/her personal life.

4. Pass on information

If you read an article, see a new book, or hear about an organization that a customer might be interested in, drop a note or make a quick call to let them know.

5. Follow up calls with customers are business development opportunities

When you talk to your customers, they’ll probably have referrals to give you. Make sure you take an open approach to every contact you have with each of your customer, you never know what new business you can get out of it.

6. Go to where you customers hang out

If you want to create customer evangelists, you need to hang out where they already are. If they’re on Facebook, or Pinterest – jump on there and engage them. If they are on a wildly popular body building forum, start contributing discussions on there.

7. Strive to empower and educate your customers

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.

Become your customers go to adviser on all things relating to your industry. For instance, if you’re in IT, be their IT Guy. Help them with choosing the best mobile plan, let them know about upcoming compliance regulations. Go the extra mile.

8. Invest in a self-service channel

Create a knowledge-base or FAQ section of the common questions and problems that your customers encounter. Direct customers to specific answers – this will save you from answering the same question 100 times, plus it will give your customer a solid response to their problem.

9. Make customer retention a priority

This may seem pretty obvious, but I’m serious. Make a commitment to put customer retention at the top of the list. If you spent as much time building customer loyalty and retaining customers, as you did acquiring new customers, you’d have the world’s best advocates and a 100% retention rate!

10. Owners must lead from the front

Let’s face it; everyone loves dealing with the business owner. There’s something about dealing with the face of a company, the number one man, the boss in charge. As the business owner or CEO, you should be the one engaging existing customers and building customer loyalty. Make this your priority and not anyone else’s.

11. Understand the true purpose of marketing

Effective marketing is about building trust and developing relationships. Too many times people think marketing is just push a bunch of ads and they will come. Well, it’s not that easy. Tom Asacker, marketing author, explains the purpose of marketing it to ‘create and maintain a strong feeling with customers so they are mentally predisposed to continually choose and recommend you’. Building customer loyalty is about building trust and developing relationships – you see how it’s all interlinked?

12. Tap into what your customers want

By understanding what you customers actually want, you can build relationships that are memorable and set you apart from the competition. Focus on understanding each of your customers on an individual level and find out what really makes them tick, and why they like doing business with you.

13. Focus on integrity, which leads to trust and loyalty

Integrity involves fundamental behaviors such as keeping your word, being honest, providing a consistent level of service, and being reliable. Businesses that demonstrate a high degree of integrity are seen as trustworthy.

Building trust requires businesses to continually put customer’s interests ahead of their own. Customers will see this, and you will earn their trust and go a great distance to building customer loyalty.

14. Never take loyalty for granted

A successful marketing strategy will bring customers through the door, but only a successful customer loyalty and retention plan will keep them coming back for more. Never take customer loyalty for granted.

15.  Create enlightening experiences

A successful business is about more than just selling stuff. It’s about selling experiences. Chris Zane of Zane Cycles knows this all too well. He focuses on making his customers feel good, and does this by not charging for every add-on, and now gives away free drinks at his in-store coffee bar. His customers walk away with an experience, an experience that will keep them coming back for more, and telling their friends about. This will go a long way to building customer loyalty.

16. When you do wrong, make it right

Resolving customer complaints is the best way to build customer loyalty. By handling complaints in a professional manner, you earn the opportunity to fix the problem and regain customer trust. In doing so, you engage your customer on an emotional level. Providing you resolve the problem, you customer now has a very unique experience with you, and you have shown first hand your willingness to recognize the problem and go out your way to ensure it is fixed and won’t happen again. Customers love this.

17. Quantify Customers’ Love

Talk to your customers, ask for their opinion on your service. It doesn’t have to be extravagant, a simple customer satisfaction survey will do the trick. I talk more how to measure customer loyalty in this 3 step guide to measuring customer loyalty. To improve survey response rates, I like to tell my customers that I will make a small donation for each survey completed. Even better, I recommend Client Heartbeat – this tool can get you up to 65% survey response rates.

18. Build a loyalty program

Whether you want to use old school punch cards or new mobile apps, a loyalty program can go a long way to keeping your customers coming back. These programs are a great way to engage your customers, build a relationship and drive repeat business.

There it is… 18 strategies and tips you can use to start building customer loyalty. Apply these today to start retaining more customers and growing your business.

Attract a new customer through advertisement and deliver what is promised on the advertisement itself. And there's only two rules to retain them: 1. Meet their expectations. 2. Exceed their expectations. 

using adv. and marketing

ans service Beyond expectation

Content Marketing Defined Content marketing is the art of understanding exactly what your customers need to know and delivering it to them in a relevant and compelling way to attract , retain customers grow business. It’s About Telling Stories That Matter. This is much more than offering product information, but rather it extends into providing best practices, case studies, success stories, thought leadership, and more. Once you have delivered relevant content, you become a trusted resource. Content marketing enables companies to build a level of trust among their customers that makes it easy for those customers to buy. This is easy to say but hard to do because it almost certainly means changing the way you think and act about marketing.

One way is to Be the Media In the pre-Internet world, buyers relied on traditional media companies to fill their information needs. With today’s technologies, that is no longer true. In fact, YOU can be the media: You can deliver tangible benefits to prospects and customers by providing relevant content that helps provide solutions to some of the toughest problems they are facing. This type of content marketing benefits the customers of course. Customers love it. Who wouldn’t? But content marketing also drives revenues, and may ultimately be the most important and effective marketing strategy/ tactic available to successful marketing professionals. By delivering content that is vital and relevant to your target market, you will begin to take on an important role in their lives. You don’t have to be a big, powerful brand with a huge budget and global reach to incorporate these strategies. In fact, startups, small- and medium-size companies, associations, and non-profit groups are all benefiting from rethinking how they market their products and services. So too can you deliver top-line and bottom-line results for your company.

How to Develop a Strategies to attract and retain customers

First:  Become an Effective Change Agent Within Your Organization Okay, so you’re convinced of the need to initiate a content marketing strategy. How do you begin? • Develop a content marketing mindset— First for you and then for your organization.

• Make the commitment—Understand that developing and executing content marketing initiatives that work takes time, effort, and expertise. It’s extremely difficult to extract content from organizations that have no experience with content marketing.

• Think and act like a publisher—Content marketing requires you to view yourself more like a publisher delivering valuable editorial products than as a marketer selling products and services.

• Learn how to create the kind of high-quality content that emanates from great publishers and great corporations.

Second:  Use the B.E.S.T. Formula as Your Content Marketing Roadmap Simply put, the B.E.S.T. formula is a structured approach for creating a content marketing roadmap—a simple way to begin your rethinking process. Use it to gather the information necessary to develop and deploy a successful content strategy and plan. In a nutshell, the B.E.S.T. formula simplifies a complicated process. Apply it so that your marketing is:

• Behavioral—Everything you communicate with your customers has a purpose. What do you want them to do? • Essential—Deliver information that your best prospects and customers really need to succeed at work or in life.

• Strategic—Your content marketing efforts must be an integral part of your overall business strategy. Link your content strategy to your bottom line results.

• Targeted—You must target your content precisely so that it is truly relevant to your buyers. Use the B.E.S.T. approach for all of your online, print, and in-person communications. That’s how you can play the same role that newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, conferences, workshops, and websites have played in the past. Now it’s your turn to become the trusted source that persuades prospects and buyers to become loyal, long-term customers.

First Understand, Then Be Understood You cannot hope to implement a successful content marketing strategy without understanding exactly what outcome you require. Equally important is an in-depth understanding of your targeted prospects. Only then can you craft a content marketing approach that will deliver more sales, more customers, and more measurable results. The answers to these questions will guide you to a profitable content marketing strategy: Behavioral

• How do we want the customer to feel?

• What effect must we achieve with them?

• What action do we want them to take?

• How will we measure their behavior?

• How will we put them on the path to purchase? Essential • What do our buyers really need to know?

• What will provide the most benefit personally or professionally?

• How can we present the content for maximum positive impact?

• What are the mandatory elements of the campaign? • What media types must we include? Strategic

• Does this content marketing effort help us achieve our strategic goals?

• Does it integrate with our other strategic initiatives? Targeted

• Have we precisely identified the prospects we want to target?

• Do we really understand what motivates them?

• Do we understand their professional roles?

 • Do we understand how they view the product or service we offer? By taking the time and committing the resources to answer these questions, you will have the necessary information to create a content marketing plan that works.

Third : Determine Goals, Buyer Needs, and Desired Outcomes After you’ve worked through the B.E.S.T. formula, take the information you’ve gathered and follow these four steps in detail to create your content marketing plan:

• Determine which organizational goals will be affected by the content program. Before you launch your content program, list your key organizational goals. Goals must be two things: specific and customer-focused. For example: “To generate an average of% revenue growth with our top% of customers in Latin America.” How will your content marketing program affect these goals? Results should be measureable and drive behavior change.

• Determine the informational needs of the buyer. Businesses create specific content so that customers react in very specific ways. Without a clear understanding of the customer’s information needs, any reaction that is close to the end goal is pure dumb luck.

 

Fourth:  create a buyer persona (a vision of who your target customer really is), and a true understanding of what information they need (not just what you think they need), which in turn will enable you to meet your objectives.

• Determine what you want your customer to do and why this helps the business.

To summarize, before you initiate and create the content for your content marketing plan, make sure: The content plan specifically drives your organization’s goals and the action(s) you want the customer to take are in some way measurable

• The content is based on your research about the buyers’ informational needs. If you have each of these components, you can create very specific goals for your content program. Some of these goals will be easy to link to your overall goals (e.g., achieving a business transaction). Others will just be pieces of the overall pie that keep you going in the right direction (e.g., getting a prospect to sign up for a trial offer or an eNewsletter to begin creating a relationship). Today, most organizations call these instances a conversion. Whatever you call them, make them specific and measurable in some way. Even print programs can measure conversions through group A/B benchmarking studies, or specific calls-to-action that drive customers to web landing pages.

 

• Determine the product and content mix. There are many content products to choose from, and the list grows longer every day. By mixing your knowledge of the customer, your organizational objectives, and, frankly, your budget, you should be able to determine an appropriate content mix of products. Remember, even though certain vehicles (e.g., a custom magazine) may prove to be the best options for your own particular organization, your content marketing program should be well-integrated with your website, microsites, ancillary content initiatives, and other collateral. Make sure all touch points speak to each another (see The Content Marketing Playbook in Resources for more).

Agree with experts answer >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

It agreed with the answers to the rest.

The Companies are following various methods based on business line, if it is product based business then they are following, online marketing, bulk mailer marketing and social media marketing and they mainly focus to implement carefully the digital marketing components. Whereas if it is service based business then they will focus on in getting vendor registration with national and international companies of that location, appointing business development professionals, making JV with same industry or other industries major  companies,  and so on as per the type of industry.

These steps should help:

1. Right Marketing and sales programs

2. Right competitive product

3. High Customer' service level

4. A strong management.. !

 

Thank You

i fully agree with the answers been added by experts..........thanks.

Thanks for invitation

I amagreeing with my colleague’s answer Ms. Ghada Eweda