Retaining your customers
Customer loyalty is something that many businesses take for granted. Working in many different sectors, the LHM team always have an eye on our clients rewarding their customers for their devotion to the brand, product or service.
Word of mouth is one of the most powerful tools your marketing strategy can adopt, and it all comes down to your happy and successful customers championing the service they receive. If you get it right, your pipeline of customers gets larger, your online visibility increases and your sales go through the roof.
Many businesses fall in to the trap of spending all of their efforts in marketing to new customers, whilst forgetting the actual people who drive the business. And this is usually the element of the business that requires the most work.
How can you increase loyalty in your business from current customers? Firstly it doesn’t have to be expensive, but it does require some thought.
A marketing strategy that focuses on loyalty will provide a natural focus on better service, helping to increase satisfaction and remind all teams from the IT department through to the sales department that a plan is in place.
A buy in from all company employees involved in your loyalty campaign is crucial, and you’ll find everyone will up there game, especially if a form of motivation is in place.
It is very easy for companies to launch services without full training being given to staff meaning that the overall effect is watered down and filters out.
You can adopt print based or email newsletters that are personalised to your client base, that keep them informed about your business and potential opportunities for them to save, attend events or even simply share your content.
Content is a great way of enticing new customers to your brand, especially through Social Media networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter. It enables you to reuse quality content in bite size chunks, and provide good value and visibility to both your business and the customer.
Sometimes a simple get together and a coffee goes along way, but in a time of austerity companies are looking to stay in the office more. This surely offers those that get in front of clients, to seek feedback and build the relationships an even bigger chance of success? I certainly think so.
Furthermore, always try to gain your customers opinion of your service. How it can be improved, what they would like for the future and what would make them refer you to their suppliers and customers. This adds even more confidence in your business, but only if the customers actually see a response to their business needs.
In 2000, Lynne Parker’s production took two of the great comic set-pieces to new heights. David Tennant and Ian Hughes had established a particularly well-imagined relationship between master and servant, with Hughes playing not a clown, as many Dromios have done, but a slightly fussy, moustached ‘gentleman’s gentleman’. When they came to the geographical description of fat Nell in Act 3 scene 2, they performed it as a piece of vaudeville, a hilarious double act played directly to the audience featuing, among other things, a retractable tape measure and often reducing the actors themselves to helpless laughter. The cinematic influence on the production was anarchically exploited in a Keystone Kops chase around the theatre, which has become legendary. Not only did it feature a camel and a nun, but increasing numbers of the cast of Henry IV Part II (playing at the Swan Theatre next door and conveniently breaking for the interval as the chase took off), filling the streets of Ephesus with English lords, knights in armour, Desmond Barrit as Sir John Falstaff and even, on the last night, Will Houston as Prince Hal.
