Engagement, is this article about getting engaged? Absolutely! Engaged with your customers! Why you might ask. My answer from experience… When your customers are engaged, they buy! It’s just that simple. The more your customers engage, the more they buy.
This holiday season… try a new approach or new approaches to get more engagement with your customers. Here are eight tried and true secrets to getting your customers engaged in your business.
- Hold an open house and invite your customers to attend
- Publish and send an e-zine or paper newsletter, you can’t over communicate
- Have an interactive on-line presence and be sure to monitor the activity
- Use a survey either by mail, e-mail or in-store and tell your customers about it
- Make it easy for them to do business with you. Make no assumptions that they “know what to do”
- Tell you customers what you can do, not what you can’t do
- Keep an ear open for their “pains” that you can solve or help lessen
- Tell your customers that you want to hear from them.
Let’s talk about some of the eight simple secrets. When you commit to a schedule to publish an e-zine or paper newsletter, stay with the schedule commitment. Once you deviate from the schedule the impact will diminish and diminish fast.
You should have some sort of an interactive on-line presence. Whether you think they are or not, your customers are talking about you. Have a place where your customers can talk and if they complain, respond appropriately. A Facebook Fan Page is a start for an interactive on-line presence but make sure you monitor it regularly and respond in a timely way.
At the very least you should set up a “Google Alert” for your name, the name of your business, and possibly the name of your main products. With a “Google Alert” anytime your name, your business name or the names of the products you put in the alert are mentioned on the web, you’ll get a notification. Then you can respond if needed.
Tell your customers what you can do. I experienced this very thing a few years ago while serving White Owl Wine at a local chamber of commerce annual dinner and auction. We ran out of a couple types of our most popular wine and when the evening’s guests came to ask for the wines we had run out of… we simply responded… “I can give you (one of the wines we had plenty of) or and we gave them an alternative. Not one of the evening’s guests became upset nor did any complain.
Always remember, an engaged customer is a buying customer! When you take the time to work on your business versus in your business, you will be the beneficiary of the effort and reap more rewards.
