Customers drive any business, so it’s important to consider how they interact with your brand. Reaching out to them is not enough to show them that you care. Staying connected and listening to your customers is important to find out which areas need improvement and how you can improve your services or products.
In this article, I will talk about ways to stay connected with customers through your website. These tips are especially for small business owners.
How To Stay Connected with Customers Through Your Website?
Staying connected with customers is very important for really consumer-centric brands. If you are an owner of a small to medium-sized business, you can learn a lot from your customers’ behavior. Here are some useful ways to connect with your existing customers and build a lasting relationship with them to keep them loyal to your brand.
Respond to Concerns
To earn your customers’ trust and respect; you will have to do more than just be available to them. You must prove your dedication to them to make them happy with your product and services.
Don’t Use a One-Size-Fits-All Approach.
Make your customers feel special by approaching each one as an individual. Grouping all the consumers result in doubts and inauthenticity. On the other hand, if you customize your user interactions for your customers individually, it improves authenticity and relevance.
Go Above and Beyond
Don’t be shy to go above and beyond for your customers, as it will increase their perception and loyalty to your business. It is easier for small business owners to develop a close connection with their customers and use it to their advantage. Try offering online deals and special discounts in online sales, for your customer loyalty, recommend products they might want to have, and always remedy and be prepared for an unpleasant experience.
Some negative experiences are inevitable but you should always ensure your client’s experience ends well. Good customer support is important for customer satisfaction and will always have them coming back for more.
Keep it Personal, Not Transactional.
Nothing builds a stronger bond with your customers than being more personal with them. Keep a consultative and conversational tone when selling instead of being aggressive. No one likes salespersons so try to make it about their business as much as possible. This helps your clients understand your intentions are good and pure.
Follow Up
Following up with your customers is the best and easiest way to earn their appreciation. Stay in touch with your customers throughout their buying journey. This will allow you to build a connection with them so they will come to you every time they need help.
When your customer with you, follow up with them and get their feedback on your product or services. Following up also identifies unhappy customers so that you can amend the mistakes before you get a negative review online.
Focus on Face-to-Face Interactions
Miscommunication is common when you are using technology to contact your customers. Telephone and Skype calls might be convenient, but nothing beats face-to-face communication; you can understand your customers better in person than over a call.
You can learn about a client and understand his business with face-to-face interactions. However, some customers might not be comfortable speaking to you in person so it is advisable to ask about their preferred ways of communication.
Keeping Your Current Clients in Mind
Happy customers will help grow your business. However, growth shouldn’t come at the cost of giving less attention to your clients and sabotaging your customer service.
Keep close communication with your clients and try to work around their schedules. Prioritizing your existing customers over getting more customers helps develop long-term loyalty.
Be Active on Social Media
You can benefit from developing social media presence and actively engaging on social media accounts. Many people check if a company has an online presence and how people have reviewed them before doing business with them.
Almost every internet-using person is active on social media, where they browse new products, and review and share their favorite items. You should meet your potential customers where they are. Social media is a great place to promote your brand and stay on your customers’ minds and feeds.
Engaging customers actively on social media and responding to their comments allows you to direct the narrative for your brand. Also, you can tackle negative comments as soon as they arise.
Show Your Appreciation
Let your customers know you recognize their importance as you would with supportive friends and family. Your gratitude should go beyond just “thank you.” Making your customers feel appreciated makes them happy, and they are more likely to return to your business. Also, a happy customer will spread the word about your brand to friends and family improving your business reputation.
You can create a business strategy to reward your loyal customers. It should include a marketing strategy to communicate with them regularly with personalized messages and promote their accomplishments on social media.
For example, if you have a record of your customer’s birthdays, you can send them a personalized coupon or card on their birthday.
Keep Your Hand on the Pulse of Your Customers
Sending out surveys to your customers is a great way to find out about their wants and needs. For example, you can send them customer surveys occasionally to get customer feedback on what kind of product they like best, which products you should add to your line, and what changes you should make to existing products. Once your customers feel they have input on what you are offering, they will become loyal to your brand.
Surveying your customers will improve your overall products and services when you will try to cater to your customers’ wants. This will be rewarding to your business in terms of money and growth of your business.
Know What Your Customers Expect From You
Understand what your customers are looking for so you can create suitable experiences for them. Also, try to anticipate the customer’s needs before they even know that they need them. You can predict what they need by looking at their activity on your website or you can use predictive analytics to understand buyer behaviors and predict their next step.
Use Marketing Automation Tools to Increase Customer Engagement
You can use a CRM system along with standalone marketing automation tools such as HubSpot Marketing Hub and Adobe Marketing Cloud. Or you can also use a CRM system that has an integrated marketing automation platform to improve personalization such as Oracle Marketing Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.
You can automate many functions using a tool such as sending text messages, showing targeted ads, sending notifications to customers, social engagement, and email marketing.
Automation will save you tons of time as it will take care of repetitive tasks such as sending follow-up emails and social media. This will help you operate your marketing campaigns at regular intervals with a specified frequency which will build your customer’s trust in you.
Use Personas
Empathy maps allow you to improve your connections and communication with your customers. Using empathy will help you understand what your potential customers want, how they feel, what upsets them, what are their pain points and how they want to connect. This information will strengthen customer relationships.
Key Take Away
Customers are extremely important for any business. You must stay connected with your existing customers to build trust and brand loyalty. Showing appreciation, responding fast, and knowing their needs are some of the ways to stay in touch with your customers. Local businesses that followed these guidelines during the pandemic were able to keep their customers engaged and let them know that they were still operational.
