How Effective Are Your Strategies to Increase Customer Loyalty?

(This is the text to the video “How Effective are Your Strategies to Increase Customer Loyalty.”)

I’m thinking about one of the problems that almost every business runs into when it comes to Customer Retention.

As a rule, almost everybody I talk to has a very detailed, explicit and broad plan for capturing – for attracting – customers. Getting new customers.

In other words, they’ve got a Marketing Plan.

“How are we going to get new customers in the door? Well, here’s all the ways we’re going to go about doing it.”

But once those customers are in the door, almost none of them have a Retention Plan that’s as remotely specific as their Acquisition Plan.

So they work really, really hard and put a lot of time, attention and detail into acquiring a new customer. But don’t apply the same amount of thought and diligence into keeping the customer.

Now I think there’s a very significant factor in this very common choice – and here it is.

When it comes to marketing, most of us who’ve been involved in marketing understand that you attract people – your marketing efforts have to be aimed primarily at the psychology of the human being.

We have to appeal to them emotionally. They’ve got to feel something inside about whatever our offering is. It’s gotta resonate with them in order to attract them.

But then once we have ’em in the door – once we’ve made that first sale and they’re now officially “customers,” we forget about that aspect. We forget that loyalty is – in fact – an emotional response to the appropriate kind of stimulus.

And so we don’t have a plan to engage with our customers on an emotional level, so that we continue to capture their heart, to capture their affections, so that they continue to be our customers.

So as you think about your customer retention plans, ask yourself this question:

“Am I appealing to my customers with the same level of emotion and passion to keep them that I used to attract them and acquire them?”

Talk to you next time.