Advice for budding entrepreneurs: customer is king!
If you are a budding entrepreneur, people will ask you to focus on building your idea, raising money, growing your team and more. However, if you get your customer relationship and loyalty right, everything else with follow!
Loyal customers create stability in business operations and help recruit new customers through positive word-of-mouth communication.
According to Bain & Co. 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by up to 125% ! **
Once you have your product ready, here are some ways to get started growing your customer base:
- Spin a network web: Build a network with your customers online as well as offline. Keep in touch with your customers over messages, business cards, mail and various social media sites. Networking is a lifelong investment. Build a powerful relationship with your clients by understanding and catering to their needs in the market. If possible, get to know your customer in person. Maintain a database for customer contact details to keep in touch with and send them your best wishes on important holidays!
- Flexible services: Keep on updating your services in tandem with the trends. Make your services customer-friendly and reliable. Make sure to take customer feedback constructively and strive to constantly improve on your services based on the feedback you receive.
- Be clear and transparent: Communicate well to the customer your aims and goals as a company. Understand what the customers want from you and your product. Be clear and transparent while corresponding to their demands and your supply.
- Reward loyal customers: Loyal customers are the crux of every business’ success. Interestingly, companies have a 60 to 70 per cent chance of selling to an existing customer, while the probability to sell to a new customer is only 5 to 10 per cent ***! Hence, to maintain a healthy relationship with these loyal customers reward them with discounts, schemes and other means.
- Create brand ambassadors: Growing a community is necessary for new-age startups. This helps in expansion of the business and ultimately reaching out to newer avenues. Brand ambassadors also contribute to a healthy client relationship by relating to the success stories of the customers and the product.
In this age of digital media when most companies have a team dedicated to social media and online marketing, online engagement such as referrals, shares and likes are critical. The opinions of every individual consumer are being heard by your entire customer base following your page on any social media platform and hence has to be taken seriously. According to Harvard Business review*, customers who encountered positive social customer care experiences are nearly three times more likely to recommend the brand!
So go build your customer relationships. If you do it right, you will build your business too!
Sources:
*(https://hbr.org/2012/12/turn-customer-care-into-social)
**(http://www.bain.com/Images/BB_Prescription_cutting_costs.pdf)
***(https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-maintain-customer-relationships/)
Link to published article: http://bit.ly/2iGde3o
