Although driving new customers to your site is important, did you know that the most effective way to boost your sales is to keep your existing customers happy?
Keeping your existing customers is also much cheaper than attracting new ones. Companies spend five times as much to attract a new customer as they do to keep an existing one. In addition, existing customers are more likely to spend more money and try new products than new ones.
So how do you keep your existing customers happy? Here are some simple tips from Local SEO Search to keep them coming back.
Put Customer Service First
Customers of the future are tech savvy and know their way around a search engine. Most customers will have read online reviews, searched for the best price, and made up their minds about the product they want to buy before they even step into a brick and mortar store.
Excellent customer service is the one thing that keeps customers coming back to your site. But bad customer service can lose you customers to your competition very quickly. Customers are buying experiences delivered by products, and services, so to keep them loyal, your customer service better be top rate.
Make Your Site Worth Coming Back To
If your site is offering your customers relevant information and a personalized experience they are more likely to return and keep coming back. They are also more likely to speak positively about your company to other people.
The digital marketing strategy on your site needs to have several objectives:
- To share your products and services to new customers
- To provide support, additional information, and additional value for existing customers.
Your existing customers already know about your products, if they are visiting your site, they are most likely looking to upgrade, or have a question or problem with an existing product or service. Here is where personalized customer service can really benefit you.
Understand The Needs of Your Customers
If existing customers are returning because of a problem with a product, or looking for help and advice, your site should understand what information they are searching for, and make it easy for them to find it.
Do some research and find out what the most asked questions are, this will help you understand your customer’s needs.
You can identify what your customers are searching for using Google Analytics. It will tell you the most commonly searched phrase on your website. You can also take a look at your most common customer help desk queries to find out what information people are looking for.
Using this information you can create pages that will help solve your customers problems. Most customers would rather search your site, and find an answer to their problems on their own.
Create a Knowledgebase
One way to help your customers find what information they need, is to create a knowledgebase. A knowledge base is like an online library on your site of common problems and issues along with practical solutions and step by step instructions provided by your IT department.
Here is how to create a useful knowledgebase:
- Understand what phrases your customers are searching for, and make a list of the most commonly asked questions, or issues.
- Create pages with clear keywords that directly answer these questions
- Create step by step instructions to address each of these problems.
- Also include pictures and videos to help explain the problem, and the process.
With a well thought out and planned knowledgebase, not only will your customers feel listened to and valued, they will feel satisfaction at being able to solve their own problems. It will also give your help desk a much needed break.
Make use of Chat or help desk pop ups on your site
If a customer is visiting your site looking for help, navigating to the right area can sometimes be frustrating if it isn’t completely obvious. Offering real time help can also turn a new visitor into a customer and help an existing customer with their problem or issue.
Pop up chats can give visitors and customers who need it a little personalized help. As you help them along you can get their information to offer even more personalized customer service. Most customers are more than willing to pay for heightened personalized service.
Use The Web
You can also find out what your customers are searching for in other areas of the web, and on social media. Go beyond your own website and help desk queries. The easiest way to do this is to set up a Google alert for your company name, keyword or industry.
These alerts will send you an email every time your keywords appear on the web, so that you can respond quickly.
Social media is often the place that customers will go to complain about a problem. Most customers also expect a response within an hour so it is important to stay on top of things. Social media is an excellent place to turn a bad customer experience into a positive one.
You can also use social media and alerts to track your competitor’s unhappy customers and take advantage of the situation to offer assistance.
By creating the best possible user experience for your existing customers, you will keep them happy and loyal, which will also boost your sales.