10 Customer Strategies for the Downturn
With the credit crunch on everyone’s minds it is no wonder that businesses are developing customer strategies to cope with the downturn. Any business that planned ahead and had a contingency plan for this will no doubt be feeling less of the strain, but for any business who did not have a plan or a strategy here are 10 customer strategies for the downturn:
1.Find out what kind of a return the business is getting from its marketing. Doing this will help to streamline business costs and will prevent customers from feeling the impact of over priced and ineffective marketing.
2.Target pricing – this means looking at your pricing and targeting it more effectively. If your customers can no longer afford your rates (and this will show in your sale figures) it is time to think about carefully targeting your prices
3.Listen to customer feedback – this is always essential for a business but never more so than in a credit crunch, listen to what your customers want and take notice! Do this and it will make all the difference.
4.Be relevant to the correct customers – being too general in your marketing and casting your net too wide can have disastrous effects during a downturn. Businesses who try to do this will find that they rapidly lose revenue and customers in the process by trying to be everything for everyone.
5.Enhance the customer experience – make sure that you are using CRM software that will make every customer contact count and enable a business to get the most out of these every time.
6.Perform a ‘healthcheck’ on your business – see which customers are loyal even during a downturn and give them a little something back. This could be in the way of loyalty discounts, something which customers are always keen to use when money is tight. Remember you want to keep hold of loyal customers and not just the ones that buy from you when you are giving discounts.
7.Increase customer engagement – engaging customers with your brand or business will create loyal customers which is exactly what you are looking for.
8.Take a close look at your loyalty schemes – are they targeting the right customers and are you, as a business getting the most out of them? If not it is time to change your loyalty schemes and raise revenue at the same time.
9.Think about affiliate programmes – these can stand to make customers who know, understand and willing to commit themselves to an affiliate programme a fair amount of money, whilst driving more customers your way. If you don’t already have an affiliate programme maybe it is time to think about one.
10.Keep costs to a minimum so that you are not having to penalise customers by increasing prices – do this by trying to use just one software application to run your business through, such as S3 CRM – the one stop shop for all your business and customer relationship management needs.
Tags: Credit crunch, customer strategies, Recession, S3 CRM