How Well Do You Know Your Customers?

How well do you know your customers? Do you know how often they frequent your business? Do you know what their favorite product or service is? Or if they’ve shared your business with their family and friends? You would if you had a close relationship with them.

How well they “know, like and trust” you is a direct result of how well you know, like and trust them. It’s not enough to just provide quality products, good service and a decent price; you need to connect more with them and engage them more with your business. But how do you do that?

Well, start with offering them a reason to come back perhaps sooner than they normally would. Loyalty programs go a long way to demonstrating your thankfulness for their business and, with the right type of offering, it will also show your customers that you understand what’s important to them.

The key to relationship building is listening. The old adage that there’s a reason G-d gave us two ears and one mouth; he wants us to speak half as much as we listen. I’d go even further in business. Use all five senses to listen, see, sense and observe the people we come in contact with in order to serve them well.

Letting the customer drive the relationship is central to a good mobile APP design. It should be rooted in the concept of engagement but giving the APP user control over what they receive. That’s why something as simple as Push Notifications shouldn’t be handled like spaghetti; throw a lot up on the wall to see what sticks. All that approach will get you is a messy kitchen, disgruntled customers and deleted APPs.

But when you are able to segment your database and define your messaging by topic, you have the tools to allow users the ability to choose what topics they want to hear from you about. If you’re a pizzeria and your customer is a vegetarian, they’re not going to want receive alerts about the new “meat lovers” pizza you just created, but they might want to hear about the awesome tofu-based pie.

Knowing your customers’ wants and needs and building loyalty programs and coupon systems will go a long way to drawing them back to your establishment. The urge to get that punch card completed or get the fifth check in to get the $10 coupon is very powerful and based in psychology. Known as the Endowed Progress Effect, the concept that if you provide someone with an artificial advancement toward a goal like a 15% off coupon, that person will believe they have a head start and the urge to reach the goal will be stronger. It’s an idea that leads consumers to be 84% more likely to return to an establishment that has a loyalty program than to one that doesn’t.

At the same time, creating a loyalty program that offers something unrelated to the reason your customer is engaged with you, may not do the trick. That’s why knowing your customers well will ensure your marketing strategy and loyalty programs match your audience.

For more ideas about how you can leverage loyalty programs, click here to schedule a 15 minute call with me.