4 Top Tips To Attracting New Customers And Keeping Them

December 8th, 2007 | by Paula Brett |

Do you want to make money on line selling goods and services?

Of course you do - but you need customers to make money, right? It’s obvious.

We all know that if you have a happy customer then that person will want to do business with you again. And the odds are that the person will tell someone else how great you were to do business with.

They will network with other people online, in chat-rooms, on forums, on blogs, by MSN or other instant messaging medium. Word of mouth is a powerful medium and probably the best way to attract new customers.

However, if you treat a customer poorly over one little conflict or request then that person will probably never do business with you again and you can bet that they will spread the word about what a total ****** you are!

So when we look at how to keep customers and, of course, attract new ones, the place to start is with treating all of your customers like gold.

Treat Your Customers Well – Always!

You should treat all of your customers nicely all of the time. There is no exception to this rule. These are the people who give you money, without them there would be no point in running your business. Never lose sight of this.

Naturally, there will be times when you don’t feel like being nice. We’ve all experienced the rude, obnoxious, brainless idiot, haven’t we? And there’s no doubt you’ll run into more than your fair share of idiots in the future.

These include people who demand too much of you, people who accuse you of trying to cheat them, and people who just don’t seem to understand what you try to tell them.
There is also the customer who thinks that the world owes them big-time, and the world includes you.

However much such a customer tries your patience, try to be the perfect business owner and do everything within reason to make every single person happy. If it does get to a point where you simply can’t continue helping someone, because they are just impossible, then move on.

It will happen…. just make sure you are polite and respectful no matter what the customer might say to you.

Here’s a great example that happened to me the other day…

I was fiddling around in my Aweber autoresponder program and goodness knows what I did, or how I did it but I caused a set of emails to go out to a number of my subscribers, thanking them for purchasing one of my products that I released at Easter time - can you believe it, that’s about 8 months ago!

Understandably, I got a few odd emails back. Some were very polite and others were a bit miffed to say the least. “What did I buy”, “Where did I buy it from” “Who are you?” and even “Well, if I bought it, I want a refund…”

One particular person was really hacked off about it. I emailed him politely (as I did all the others) and apologised - I offered to remove their name from my list and I wished them a peaceful Christmas.

I immediately got an email back, apologising for being quite so rude and hasty (I couldn’t print here some of the stuff he said, lol) and we got chatting, backwards and forwards, as you do, and then he asked me to take a look at a new product he was working on that was similar to the one he had bought from me at Easter time and would I like to do a JV with him.

How cool is that? Because I was polite and held my hands up to my mistake, I diffused the situation and it was turned into something that could be advantageous to us both.

Social Proof

One of the most effective ways I’ve find to attract customers to your goods and services is social proof. What is social proof?

Take a look at my testimonials page on this blog. Every time a customer hires me for a service, I ask them if they would be kind enough to leave a comment and I am then able to send prospective customers there to check what others say about my work before they make their decision.

Another such example is my hosting business. Dan Thompson, my business partner, and I have just revamped our hosting website and we decided to add a testimonial page so that prospective customers could check us out before they decided to buy - when we emailed our existing customers asking them for testimonials they were effusive and very pleased to provide testimonials for us.

Happy customers attract happy customers, attract happy customers…

Over-Deliver

It’s amazing how customer problems drop dramatically when you over-deliver.

For example, you promise your customers a bonus gift if they buy a specific product. They buy the product and you give them three bonus gifts. That’s over-delivering. Always do it.

You’ll be building unbelievable customer loyalty and you’ll also cut-down on most of your customer problems before they even happen.

Follow-Up

Following-up with your customers is a great marketing move to retain customers, yet most people just don’t do it. All it takes is a quick email and nothing more [ do make sure you don't send it 8 months after the sale, though ]

A few days after someone buys something from you just send them a brief email thanking them for the sale and then ask them if everything is going OK and if they have any questions for you.

Remind them that you are there for them and then say another thanks and end the email.

Do not try to sell them anything else. You can send another email a week later, but make sure you first send one email that’s just a plain and simple “thank you”.

So those are four key tips to keeping attracting new customers and keeping them…

• always be nice to your customers
• try to obtain social proof of your product or service
• over-deliver with all your products
• always follow-up on your sales

If you do these four things, you’ll find that you have many loyal customers and the word will be out that you’re a fantastic person to do business with!

Best wishes

Paula

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