How to Attract and Retain More Customers To Your Business Lesson 1 - Attracting Clients To Your Shop/Office All rights reserved ISBN: 9781476224893 Author: Peter Adams How to Attract and Retain More Customers To Your Business By Peter Adams Copyright 2012 Peter Adams Smashwords Edition Smashwords Edition, License Notes No part of this book (publication) may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or by information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the publisher. Published by Swell Accounting Services. For further information, contact: Swell Accounting Services, PO Box 4184, Elanora, Qld 4221 Telephone - 0452395519 Fax – 61755224593 Financial and Legal Notices Disclaimers All attempts have been made to verify information provided in this publication and any attachments, neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for errors, omissions or contrary interpretation of the subject matter herein. The recipient of this publication and any attachments assumes responsibility for the use of these materials and information. Adherence to all applicable laws and regulations, including federal, state and local governing bodies, business practices, etc is the sole responsibility of the recipient. INDEX Welcome Introduction Problem Areas for Not Attracting Clients Step 1 What can you do for your Customers? Step 2 Identify your Customer Step 3 What do your Customers want? Step 4 Are you better than your competitors? Step 5 Develop your USP Step 6 Networking Step 7 Removing your Customer’s Fear or Perceived Risk Step 8 Cross Promotion Step 9 Referrals Conclusion WELCOME Thank you and welcome to our mini series of lessons that will help you with getting more customers to your business. Our mini course is a 4 part series and will cover the following topics: Lesson 1 – Attracting Clients to your Shop or office Lesson 2 – Attracting more clients via Social Media Lesson 3 – Call to Action Lesson 4 – How to Retain Your Customers. Even though the ideas expressed during the series of the mini course have been tested, some of these ideas may not be suited or work with your business. The idea of this mini course is to pass onto you, our valued member, the opportunities for you to gain and retain customers to your business. It is up to you to determine which ideas you are willing to take, measure this opportunities. Please note that we have listed only some of the opportunities, not all, that will work for you. It is important to keep reviewing these steps regularly so as to attract more customers to your product or service. Please have a look on the last page as we have included our special offer to you. INTRODUCTION New customers are the lifeblood of most businesses and if you were to ask any business owner, and they were truthful, their answer would be – they do not have enough of them …. How do we attract new customers? How do we attract those new customers for a reasonable cost? And it really can cost less than a postage stamp to contact a potential new customer. If you know how. The table below shows the profits earned by retaining your customer. This subject will be explained in more details in Lesson 4. The single most important thing you must know before you begin: To attract a new customer you must understand one very important concept – customers do not care about you. What they do care about is what you can do for them! You can spend lots of money on advertising with little return on your investment. In this lesson, we will show you some ways on how to attract customers to your business without a lot of cost. If you adopt some of these ideas, keep working on these ideas, we are sure that you will gain customers. There are thousands of people out there offering new ways to attract customers. These include coaches, consultants to advertising companies and advertising sales people or DIY marketing courses Equally there are a thousands of ways (or more), of attracting new customers to your business which are wrong and will waste your hard earned money and time. Businesses have been told to advertise their product or service using social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Unless you social media correctly, you will be wasting your time and money. Our next lesson will cover attracting more clients using social media. We need to look at new strategies for advertising as the old methods such as Yellow Pages and Trade Shows are starting to fade. Have you noticed that Yellow Pages and White Pages advertising are now online? Who wants to fumble through a thick book of telephone names and addresses to find someone’ telephone number. It is so much better to search online. When was the last time you went to trade show? Most advertising for trade shows are done online. Take a good look at the issues raised in the article below regarding decline in traditional advertising. This article lists how we are not getting new customers through the traditional forms of advertising. Hence, we have to look at alternative methods (and keep looking) of gaining more clients. The facts are shown below. (Source - http://www.goldcoastsocialmedia.com/statistics-on-traditional-advertising/): Statistics on Decline of Traditional Advertising March 31, 2010 at 3:32 am by Cam Tags: advertising, marketing If you are an small to medium sized Australian business it may be time to think about how you spend your advertising dollars. Why, well the statistics speak for themselves: Traditional Advertising Channels are Fading Trade shows: Trade show attendances have decline on average 38% in the last decade, whilst costs to exhibit have risen 50%. (source: tradeshow magazine) Yellow Pages: Over 13.4 million Australians did NOT read the Yellow pages last year. (source: core data research report) Print: Newspapers advertising has fallen over 28% as people move to other sources to read the news. (source: Mediapost) Television: advertising is continuing to fall, with estimates that it will fall over 75% in the next decade. (source: contact magazine) Radio: advertising is continuing to fall with a further 15% decline predicted for this year. (source: mediapost.com) So what is working? Well Social Media marketing can certainly be effective as a channel. But we must be weary on how we do it. Problem Areas for Not Attracting New Clients Most people do not want to look at issues and face truths about their business. I was like that once but I have had to have my opened for me. Otherwise, I was going to be doomed. There are four possible reasons why you are not attracting customers to your business. Outlined below are some but not all, of the reasons why you are not able to attract customers to your business. Let’s have a brief look at what some of these problems are. Problem Area 1 – Your Investment Possible reasons: - Not enough money, time, and effort invested in promoting. - Promoting in the wrong places with low concentration of potential clients. - Your message is weak and can’t break through the marketing clutter your prospects are already exposed to. Problem Area 2 – Wrong market or customer Possible reasons: - Wrong target market - Wrong or unclear message - Unclear benefits - Low believability - Low credibility - Wrong offer Problem Area 3 – Lack of Understanding Possible reasons: - Poor sales skills - Initial risk is too high (credibility) - Perceived value is too low (believability) - Service/product is too expensive or too cheap for the target market Problem Area 4 – Product or Service Possible reasons: - Poor quality of product or service - Poor customer service - Lack of variety of services and products - No long-term strategy in place Now that we have identified the four problem areas, we will look at identifying some of these issues in our lesson. Topics to be covered in this lesson are: Step 1 What can you do for your customers? Step 2 Identify your Customer Step 3 What do your customers want? Step 4 Are you better than your competitors? Step 5 Develop your USP Step 6 Networking Step 7 Removing your Customer’s Fear or Perceived Risk Step 8 Cross Promotion Step 9 Referrals The life cycle of attracting new customers Let’s have a look at these steps and if you follow these steps, you will increase your customer base. Be mindful of ensuring that when you are increasing your customer base that these new customers will be profitable customers. You do not want this (or any) customer to be a “deadweight” for you. A “deadweight” customer is a customer who keeps hassling you about cheaper pricing thus reducing your margin, does not pay their bill and is generally a nuisance to you. Are you ready for your first lesson? Let’s jump into it. Step 1- What can you do for your customers? As mentioned in our introduction “To attract a new customer you must understand one very important concept – customers do not care about you. What they do care about is what you can do for them!” A few steps that we need to do in our business. 1. What is our business? Let’s ask ourselves some basic questions. What products or services do we offer to our customers? What benefit does our customer get from using our product or service? Is our customer satisfied with our product or service? Now that we have identified the answers to these core questions, let’s move onto the step. 2. What do our competitors do? Now that we have answered the core questions above, we need to understand what our competitors do. This is called Competitor Analysis. Prepare your own worksheet to write down the information about your competitors. The worksheet is designed to understand the S.W.O.T analysis, what they do best, which customer they are targeting and their various price points. Do this exercise, and regularly do this exercise (perhaps 3 monthly), you will then be well knowledged about your competitors 3. How can we be better? After you have reviewed the two points above, you can then work out how you can be better. You will need to develop your niche for your product or service or perhaps you may need to reshape your product or service to meet your niche. For example, (Service) all law firms in your area and the town concentrate on preparation of wills and conveyancing. You are a new solicitor to arrive in town which is predominately a mining town with the demographics being young families. What do you see as a niche to develop with your business? Answer – commercial law for the mining companies, family law (hopefully not to be used) for the families in town. Now let’s look at an example based upon a product. You are new in town (using the same features of the town and its people above) and looking at setting up a business selling electrical appliances. You already have two competitors in town – one competitor selling whitegoods and one competitor selling browngoods. None of these competitors offer extended warranty on their products just the standard 12 month warranty. How can we be better? Answer – we can develop two niches to our customers: a. We can offer our customers both whitegoods and browngoods in the one shop. How is this better for the customer? b. We will offer extended warranty on all of our products (you can consider introductory offers) so as to give you customers peace of mind for a longer period of time. Now it is exercise time ………. Exercise 1 – Thinking about the three points mentioned above, list down: What is our business? ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ What do our competitors do? ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ How can our business be better than our competitors? ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ Step 2 - Identify your Customer [...]... – (a) customer’s fear about dealing with your business and (b) the perceived risk with using your product or service Once we have identified the issues in both areas, we can address these issues and retain our clients and attract new clients to your business Ask yourself (or do research by asking your customers or potential customers) what are the: Fears Frustrations Desires Concerns our customers have... we have set exercises for you to do We highly encourage you to do these exercises so that you can learn how to attract and retain new customers to your business To those business owners doing this Mini Course, we are happy to receive your answers to each of the Lessons that you participate in If you would like our initial feedback to your answers, we will be too happy to do so Our costs for doing so... desires and concerns with dealing with your business You will need to be honest with yourself It is like doing a SWOT analysis on your business but from a customer’s view Use the table below to complete Develop your own table to look at the factors that affect your customer’s experience with dealing with your business Exercise – Establish an Action Plan to overcome your Customer’s Perceived Risk of your. .. researching your competitors’ activities, what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and where their strengths and weaknesses lie, you’ll be able to identify threats to your business arising from competitors' actions and opportunities for your business to exploit Let’s ask ourselves (another brutal question) – are we better than our competitors? In order to answer to this question we need to do a Competitor... will go to another retail outlet rather than your shop People identify the word FREE How do you identify what the customer WANTS? I like to do the following strategies to see what my customers want Try the out Please remember to test and measure each strategy a I like to do a Survey to my customers and potential customers I use a programme called Survey Monkey whereby I can design my own survey and ask... income into you However, is this your ideal customer? Exercise 2 – Identify your current customer? You may have more than one type of customer depending on the type of product or service that you are offering Objective is to identify the customers to your existing products/services If you have identified a niche from step 1, set up your own table in your own format to help you identify your current and. .. your competitors? You have almost completed the hardest challenges for you to consider with your business Keeping ahead of your competition can be tough, especially when staying on top of the dayto-day issues of your own business takes up so much of your time However in our slowing economy, where everyone is vying for the customer’s last dollar, it’s essential to know what your competitors are up to. .. you come to XYX Law firm we give you a fixed price for your work, you will know exactly how much it costs, no matter how long it takes us to finish your work This may not make sense to you as a lawyer but I bet if you asked 100 new customers, 99 would say they would like to work with a firm that did this Here are some simple and quick ways to help remove your customers' Perceived risk about your product:... my customers to complete the survey I tend to offer my clients something for free in return for their opinion Go to www.surveymonkey.com You can sign up for FREE b Speak to your existing customers Each customer will have a different want from you Perhaps you can tailor make your product or service or develop a niche around their wants so that you can track new customers c Telephone potential new customers. .. already have some customers These customers can be a handy tool for you, so let us use them You have already been delivering an exceptional product or service to these customers Let us now get some feedback from our customers There are two types of feedback that we want from the customer: (a) to see how our service was (you can change this template so that it reflects your product and (b) asking for . How to Attract and Retain More Customers To Your Business Lesson 1 - Attracting Clients To Your Shop/Office All rights reserved ISBN: 9781476224893 Author: Peter Adams How to Attract and Retain. work with your business. The idea of this mini course is to pass onto you, our valued member, the opportunities for you to gain and retain customers to your business. It is up to you to determine. there are a thousands of ways (or more) , of attracting new customers to your business which are wrong and will waste your hard earned money and time. Businesses have been told to advertise their