If there’s one goal that most businesses share, it’s the desire to increase sales. And that’s perfectly understandable since the survival of any business depends in large part on its earnings. But what if your sales are stagnant? Where should you start to get the greatest return on your investment?
Many companies focus almost exclusively on acquiring new customers. Inevitably, this is the only way to generate initial income as a company at the very beginning.
Even though acquiring new customers takes a lot of effort, you don’t have to do everything on your own. You can use tools like customer journey maps to solve most of the problems.
With a customer journey map, it is possible to design processes for purchasing products or services in such a way that the customer experience is significantly improved. Not only start-ups or e-commerce giants can benefit from this.
Before you invest even more time and money in attracting new customers, you should consider whether you could also improve your customer service and take care of your existing customers. The best way you can do it is by creating an empathy map and seeing how much you truly understand your customers’ thoughts and feelings.
In fact, if you focus on strengthening your customer relationships, your ROI (return on investment) is up to 7x higher compared to new customer acquisition measures. This is also because existing customers are more willing to pay higher prices than new customers.
In this article, you will learn how to improve your customer experience and thus generate more sales.
How to Increase Sales Through More Customer Loyalty
There are several strategies you can use to improve customer retention. And most of them don’t require you to work extremely hard. Even simple measures can strengthen your customer relationships and significantly increase your sales:
Use the Feedback From Your Customers
Responding to customer feedback is crucial. Customers may come to you of their own accord and tell you what they like about your products and services and where they see room for improvement.
Just by saying thank you for the feedback and making an effort to help your customers (e.g. by replacing damaged goods free of charge) you can strengthen your customer relationships.
What is the effect of a positive customer experience? If customers have a good experience with your company, 55% will continue buying from you, 44% will tell friends, family, and acquaintances, and 35% will give a positive online rating without being asked.
In the next step, you can use the feedback from your customers to optimize your products and services and adapt them to the needs of your target group. You can also use positive feedback for your online marketing.
Encourage Repeat Customer Purchases
The more actively you approach your existing customers, the more you can benefit from it.
For example, offer your customers exclusive discount campaigns that motivate them to buy from you again and again.
In addition, you can develop loyalty campaigns and reward each of your customers with further discounts or high-quality goodies if they buy from you repeatedly or inspire people from your personal environment to buy your products and services via recommendation marketing.
Improve the Customer Experience to Strengthen Your Sales Strategy
You can enhance your customer experience by carefully researching your target audience’s wants, fears, problems, and hopes.
Customer research is also a good way to transform occasional buyers into frequent customers, for example through upselling.
Once you have a clear picture of what interests your target audience, you can position your brand based on the results of your research.
To find out what moves your target group, keep an eye out for relevant groups on social media, comments on YouTube or Reddit, and reviews of similar products in various online shops (e.g. on Amazon).
Reduce Customer Frustration
Your customer service is the part of your business that has the closest contact with your customers.
With a courteous, professional, and productive customer service team, you can ensure your customer retention increases exponentially.
Your employees should have the necessary expertise and a positive attitude towards your customers.
Also, your customers shouldn’t have to wait for too long to reach one of your employees or to get an answer to their inquiries.
Build a Comprehensive Customer Resource Center for Your Online Store
A knowledge base can really come in handy. In addition to a FAQ page where customers can find answers to frequently asked questions, blog articles and other content serve as valuable reference work.
This not only helps out your customer support: a detailed FAQ page and a well-stocked blog simplify the training of new employees and help your support agents to get to know your brand better, which means they can competently help your customers. For the same reason, you should offer regular training for your staff.
Conclusion
This article outlines easy-to-use marketing tips that can help you increase your sales. Be sure to try them out over the coming weeks to see which ones work best.
