How can you Hold on to your Existing Customers

June 15, 2010


As mentioned in previous post most businesses lose large percent of their customers on a regular basis. We identified several reasons why customers leave. In this post we want to give you tips on how to make sure you retain large portion of your existing customers.
Losing a customer can cost you lot more than you realize. Research shows that it costs multiple times over to get new customers than to hold onto existing ones. You have to spend money on marketing and advertising as well as offer them incentives to come to you again. Our advice to all business owners is this – DO WHATEVER YOU HAVE TO DO TO HOLD ON TO YOUR EXISTING CUSTOMERS.
Here are the steps that show how you can accomplish this:
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Filed Under: Customers, Management, Marketing, Sales Tagged With: , ,

Do you know Why your Customers are Dumping you?

June 14, 2010


If history is any guide; you will lose about 20% of your current customers by the end of the month and 40% by the end of the year. I know it sounds terrible; but that’s fact of life. While 30-40% of sales for any business come from existing customers; the rest comes from customers using revolving door. They will come and go for a variety of reasons.
This customer churn can be costly for your business. You need to constantly recruit new customers to fill the gap left by those customers who have dumped you. This costs money reducing your profit. It is said that it is 4 times more expensive to get new customer compared to retaining the existing one. We will look at the ways to stop customers from dumping you in a later post; but let’s understand why they leave you in the first place. The reasons are quite varied and some are easier to correct than others.
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What can you learn from Zappos.com’s $1.6 Million Mistake

May 27, 2010


If you are not standing by your core values at the time of crisis and instead take a myopic view of the situation you will miss out on building a long-term, thriving business. Just look at what Zappos, the popular shoe site, went through on May 23, 2010. It lost $1.6 Million dollars within matter of hours. But it’s what it did afterward that is the real story.
For those who don’t know Zappos; it is an online web site that sells shoes. In the process it has built a Billion dollar business!! It has done this by focusing on core tenets of providing exceptional customer service at any cost. Amazon.com just bought the company last month for $928 million.
So what happened?
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Does Your Business have Social Media Strategy?

May 24, 2010


If you don’t have a strategy to deal with Internet and social media you might be in a danger of losing lot of business. Just look at this article in Detroit Free Press past Saturday. To summarize the article – a student from Western Michigan University claims his car was illegally towed from his apartment complex by the tow truck company. He created a Facebook page to fight with the towing company and attracted 11,000 “fans” on the page; who joined him in the revolt saying they too had similar complaints against this company. The result was that that towing company lost half of its commercial accounts.
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