The 11 Best Ways to Keep Happy Clients & Customers
Making sales isn’t enough.
In fact, the first purchase from every customer is only the beginning of a long journey.
To build a business that not only stands the test of time, but thrives in any market condition, you need to ensure that keeping happy clients and customers is one of your top priorities.
And luckily, you’ve come to the right place.
In this guide, we’ll teach you just how you can ensure client satisfaction in any industry for a more profitable business going forward.
Customer Retention: Why Happy Clients are Critical to Long Term Business Health
The reason client and customer happiness is so critical comes down to one concept.:
Customer retention
Customer retention is the basis of business because it multiplies your marketing efforts by magnitudes.
Why?
The probability of selling to a consumer who’s already bought from you is somewhere between 60 to 70%. And the probability that an existing customer will try one of your new products is around 50%.
Compare that to the probability of selling to a new consumer: only 5 to 20%.
Which is all to say:
To maximize each customer’s lifetime value, make sure that they’re 110% satisfied with every interaction they have with your business.
What Are Clients Actually Looking for?
To maximize customer satisfaction, it’s important to know what customers are looking for in the first place.
Here are our top 11 tips for keeping clients and customers happy.
#1: Add a Personal Touch to Every Interaction
At the end of the day, people don’t want to work with and purchase from businesses- they want to purchase from people.
Everyone feels better knowing that there’s an actual person at the other end of a business exchange, and that’s why it’s critical to add a personal touch to every business exchange.
For businesses with large consumer bases, this can be as simple as including a thank you message with every purchase and utilizing real people in your support lines instead of letting bots do all of the work.
After all, we’ve all had at least one experience with a dead-end chatbot while trying to contact customer support.
Let customers know you care with loyalty programs (more on that further down), real human interactions, and attention to detail when it comes to pain points.
For businesses that work with clients on one-on-one terms, this is where it’s vital to build a real connection with each of your clients. You’re both humans, so every interaction shouldn’t be purely about numbers.
#2: Keep Regular Tabs on Clients & Follow Up
Working to stay at the top of consumer minds is one of the most powerful tactics you can implement.
For client-based businesses, this means keeping regular tabs on your existing clients and following up with prospects regularly.
For businesses with larger audiences, follow up where possible to make sure your business is the first that comes to mind when a consumer has a problem that needs fixing.
Great ways to do this are with abandoned cart emails, sending out newsletters, and creating a content flow on your website.
And speaking of content, that leads us to our next point:
#3: Provide Value During Every Step of the Customer Journey
Customers expect that each exchange is a back and forth, if you will.
You give them a product or service in exchange for some sort of payment. That’s how business has worked for, well.. ever.
But one of the best ways to build a following of loyal customers is by providing value without asking or anything in return.
But why would a business give away value for nothing?
Giving away free value is what separates the customer-centric brands from the crowd.
And becoming a customer-centric brand is the golden ticket to a higher customer retention rate across the board. Not only that, but providing value is a great way to bring in new customers too.
Providing value can even be as simple as creating a blog full of customer advice like the one you’re reading from right now.
Here are some more ideas on how you can start to provide more value to clients and customers:
- Create a weekly email newsletter
- Send a guide on how to get the most value from your product to each new customer
- Offer complimentary onboarding services (if it’s applicable to your product)
- Create a pool of free digital resources for new prospects
- Share short & actionable tips on social media
#4: Quick Communication Makes for Happy Customers
No one wants to wait a whole day for customer support to respond to their ticket.
But unfortunately, that’s the reality for far too many online stores.
One of the biggest factors that separate good businesses from great businesses is customer support.
To ensure customer satisfaction, ensure your business provides multiple communication channels and ways for customers to get in contact with a rep quickly and easily.
Call centers, live chats, and email ticket systems are all non-negotiables for businesses that intend to scale.
#5: Be Proactive
In client relationships, always aim to be proactive towards pain points rather than reactive.
Solve problems and craft solutions before the client ever has to bring them to your attention, and be vigilant about discovering those pain points in the first place.
#6: Show Your Niche Authority
Customers and clients work with your company because it has authority in its niche, so don’t take that for granted.
In client relationships, this means taking initiative and being decisive when developing plans. No client wants to work with a business that doesn’t have a clear idea of what comes next.
You can also provide resources to explain relevant topics in-depth so customers and clients aren’t in the dark. Blogging is one excellent way to do just that.
#7: Ask for Feedback, Collect Data, and Adapt Accordingly
Acting on whims isn’t a reliable strategy to keep customers and clients happy.
The only way to know what does keep clients happy is by collecting data and acting on it.
Consistently profitable companies use data as the cornerstone of their whole business.
Data and customer feedback are as good as gold, so collect it wherever you can. Ask for feedback, offer rewards for post-purchase surveys, and keep regular tabs on your metrics to see what’s working and what isn’t.
#8: Develop a Paint Point Plan
If you’ve done your due diligence and have a list of customer data and pain points, it’s time to develop a PPP, or Pain Point Plan.
A Pain Point Plan helps to efficiently solve customer problems by giving you a road map to follow.
#9: Be Transparent
Clients and customers don’t want to get kept in the dark.
Make sure to keep everyone in the loop when it’s needed. If there’s a delay, let them know you’re working to fix it and why. If someone in the company makes a mistake that affects your audience, be clear about it and work to fix it out in the open.
#10: Reward Your Brand’s Loyal Followers
Loyal customers are the lifeblood of any business, so make sure to reward your brand’s followers to let them know they’re seen and heard.
And loyalty programs aren’t just a way to give back to the people who support your brand the most- implementing referral and loyalty programs can also encourage those loyal followers to bring more new customers into the fold.
#11: Let Go of the Short-Term Profit Mindset
The businesses that thrive aren’t focusing on making the most profit they can today, tomorrow, or even within the month.
They’re focusing on how they can build a model that sustains and flourishes for years to come.
Short-term profit mindsets aren’t only detrimental to your business’s long-term health, it’s also hazardous to customer satisfaction.
Placing customer happiness higher on the priority list than short-term profit might not make you the most money immediately, but it allows you to grow your following at a much faster and more consistent rate.
And the price of a loyal following of brand advocates is priceless in the world of marketing.
Unhappy Customers Mean More than a Lost Sale
Unhappy customers aren’t just lost future sales. They’re your competitors’ strongest advocates.
Bad reviews, word-of-mouth, and negative press are disasters for any brand- and depending on the severity it could be a business’s downfall.
Your business is only as strong as its online reputation, so make sure to do your best to keep a strong presence offline and online.
Wrap Up
Want to increase client & customer lifetime value?
Make sure to keep clients happy.
And after reading this guide, you should be a bit more equipped to do just that. If it helped, make sure to read the other content on our blog for more advice!
Think we missed anything? Let us know in the comments below
