Customers are the heart of your business, so it’s important to keep them at the core of everything you do. When you embrace that relationship, you enhance your brand. An action as simple as creating a good flow of communication can turn drop-in customers into regular clients.
Keeping customer information organized can keep you in check and uncover otherwise missed opportunities. Failing to organize your customers and communicating regularly could be stunting your business from flourishing. It’s time to fix that.
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DownloadFind Out Who’s There
To give your customers the world-class service they deserve, you must know them. Who’s on your client list? How many of those people are leads, regular clients or VIPs? Having an organized client list is essential. Importing clients into a customer relationship management software, or CRM, takes minutes and once they’re in, those contacts are great resources.
Your client list should be able to filter out clients you haven’t seen in a bit as well as those rockstars who regularly frequent your business so that you can reach out to them accordingly. Surveying inactive clients is a way to reconnect, find out what went wrong and win them back.
Get Your Inbox Under Control
If we’re being honest, no one enjoys the flood of emails. Build a relationship by communicating with your clients in the methods that work best for them. Allow them to opt for emails, text messages or both.
If you’re concerned about having to sort through your inbox for both text and email replies to piece conversations together, no worries. Thryv allows you to see customer appointments, confirmations and customer-to-staff communications in one central location. You can also track any notes you may have on a customer, which leads to our next point.
Joseph is new to the area and scheduled an appointment at your hair salon. You send him a reminder text and in his reply, he mentions his scalp condition. You take down that information along with what treatment his last barber used and record it in the notes section within the inbox. Now, regardless of which barber at your salon Joseph goes to, he won’t have to explain his condition for the first 15 minutes of being in the chair because the must-know information is in his file.
Having the notes, tags and other customer details accessible in the messaging space means you can also remember to follow up with clients on prior issues easily. If you’re a veterinarian, that means checking to see if Fluffy is still biting; and for the landscaper, it’s checking to see if that client is finally ready to turn their backyard into an oasis.
The notes section is also where you can tag customers by their services. This is a great way to organize customers, and the segmented list is useful when making marketing decisions — we will cover that shortly.
Get Social with Your Customers
The best marketing is free marketing. When you’re a small business working on an even smaller budget, social media can be an amazing tool for you to get the word out on your services or simply engage customers.
Save time by setting aside a day to schedule out social media posts for the month. Doing so early on allows you to set it and forget it while still staying in touch with your customers. Linking your accounts to a social media calendar in Thryv is a great way to avoid having to open Facebook, Twitter or Instagram to schedule the posts.
For creatives, this is the fun part of running a business but, the truth is, not everyone is creative and we know that. Within Thryv’s Social Content Scheduler, you can use templates to schedule your social media posts. The system will populate unique text on the topic you’ve chosen and all you have to do is select a photo if you’d like to add one. With the wide library of posts, duplication isn’t an issue. Edit, add or remove as much as you’d like to make it your own.
Stay Ahead of Engaging Customers
If you truly want to improve communication with your customers, stay one step ahead of them. Tell your customers what they need before they know they need it. That may seem impossible but, those segmented lists we mentioned before that are beneficial to marketing? This is when they come into play.
Create various marketing campaigns with numerous triggers, especially for services. If you’re a grooming company, perhaps set a trigger for clients who haven’t visited in a month. That email campaign can mention that you miss their pet and suggest it’s time for a nail trim.
Personalize the trigger to pull in customer data. Don’t let the process of setting up campaign automation detour you from making it happen. Once set up, these campaigns require little to zero effort and can kick up your customer engagement.
The system is automated, but remember the relationship with the customer isn’t. Nurturing customers takes time and resources; however, it’s well spent to keep them happy and pleased with the services you have to offer.
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