Competing against bigger players in your market can be tough. The usual marketing tactic used is just lower prices which are not a healthy option for your business.
One way to beat the big guys is to be creative with the marketing of your products or services and this is the story of how a small business went up against very powerful competitors.
Two of the keys for marketing success is to keep your key customers happy and the way you give customer service.
This is obvious, however many of you are missing a simple opportunity and you may not realise it.
It all has to do with customer complaints and how you manage the experience for your customers.
Whether you sell a product or service at one time or another a mistake will be made. It could be in a production batch of a product, or when you are delivering a service. As human beings we are not perfect.
How you handle the complaint via your marketing activities can mean a big difference to your business and customer relationships.
No one likes to have customers leave as it doesn’t do much for your ego or the marketing of your small business.
Unfortunately, the reality is that some of your customers will go to your competitors and for a variety of reasons.
When customers leave the instinct is to replace that business with new customers. Often little thought is given to get feedback as to the reasons. Your lapsed customers are actually a big source of information that your current or potential customers cannot give.
Here are 10 benefits of understanding why your customers leave:
Have you ever filled out a contact form on a website or sent an email and weeks later you are still waiting for a response?
Unless you have been extremely lucky you probably have experienced this and felt a little frustration or even felt angry.
This issue is not restricted to large companies. It seems from reading a number of small business blog posts, especially the ones that are enjoying healthy growth, responding to emails appear to be lessening in importance.
I have even seen contact pages that say please contact me and fill out the form; however we receive so many emails it may take some time to get back to you. I asked the following question on Twitter – “Do you always answer emails especially those sent from your contact page on your website (scammers and spammers aside)?
