We have been in a completely new situation for a month or two now. The corona crisis has caused revenue to come to a complete stop in certain sectors, but has risen spectacularly in others. Let’s take a look at the last group: how do you make sure that all your new customers also become loyal and returning customers?
Home delivery has become even more popular. The optician delivers contact lenses to your home and also restaurants deliver complete three-course menus. Entire branches, such as coaches, psychologists and physiotherapists, have discovered working remotely. Media companies see a growth in their reach, week by week. The digitization of consumer spending is growing faster than ever, partly because consumers are open to change and service providers have no other choice.
Consumers are looking for new possibilities for all kinds of products and services. So there are opportunities for entrepreneurs looking for new customers. The next step is to retain these customers. Ordering food once is not enough, of course. Only when customers come back more often, you will benefit from it for the long term. But the question is: how?
How do you make sure that all those new customers also become loyal and returning customers? Below you will find a short step-by-step plan to help you do this.
Step 1: Ask for real feedback
A few weeks ago, we had food delivered home from a local restaurant for the first time. We noticed that this was new to them. The food was excellent, but the packaging was not completely heat-resistant and partly melted. Like many consumers, I understand that something goes wrong and I am not going to complain immediately. However, if they had asked for feedback, I could have helped them further improve the customer experience.
Asking for feedback goes beyond an automated e-mail asking for a number of stars. I would start with personal questions. Call a few customers, send a personal e-mail in which you refer to the different products. And if you change things based on the reviews, let all your customers know. This way, they will notice that you’re in the process of professionalizing the experience. You take them seriously and that pays off.
Step 2: Increase use of social media
Most companies do have a Facebook or LinkedIn account. Now is the time to do more with this. Consumers are open to ideas and experiences and social media partly fill the gap created by the lack of physical contact.
As a company, it is important to rethink ways to inspire customers with beautiful content. If you have time, spend it on good, timeless content. When asked for feedback, the step to social media is quickly made. For example by creating content about new ways in which you improve your product. People are looking for positivity, entrepreneurs who show that they can make the best of it, can count on more followers.
Step 3: Building loyalty with e-mail marketing
Social media are an excellent channel to build reach and therefore an accessible way to get in touch with potential customers. Keeping that relationship is a bit more difficult.
It is not always easy to get to know followers and increase your conversion. The combination of e-mail marketing with social media works perfectly for my company. With good content on social media you increase reach, this creates a low threshold to subscribe directly to the newsletter with even better content. The most interested people subscribe and thus strengthen their relationship.
The newsletter gives more freedom to make commercial offers, preferably personalized. You also have the possibility to further enrich customer data and offer content based on interests. This increases the number of visitors and the number of orders on the website of existing customers.
Conclusion
Right now, people are open to try something new. You can benefit from that with smart offers and new services. However, your new product or service is not successful if many people try it once: success means that customers come back. So you have to work actively on that. This can be done by following the step-by-step plan above: you ask for feedback, post fun and interesting content on social media and then use e-mail marketing to stay in touch. In this way, you work structurally on more reach and loyal customers.
The disadvantage of this approach? You have to keep going. It does not work to pay attention to social media for a month or create a newsletter that is rarely or never sent. So you have to make sure you create enough content on all different channels every week, even if you only have a few followers or newsletter subscribers in the beginning.
E-mail marketing with Basedriver
Campaign coordination and campaign planning is an essential part of e-mail marketing automation. Basedriver is email marketing software specifically designed for this challenge. For example for automatically approaching unsubscribers, sending personal newsletters or automating campaigns.
We make sure that you generate more visitors from e-mail marketing and that you can recognize those visitors on the website. This will increase the revenue of your e-mail marketing team. Basedriver fits into an e-mail marketing strategy that leads to more online visitors and subscribers, without increasing marketing costs.
Would you like to know more about e-mail marketing with Basedriver? Please contact us for a personal demonstration.
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