When you always create a happy environment for your customers, the likelier they are to buy from your business. With that in mind, here are some strategies you can apply that can help make your customers happier with you.
Why is Customer Happiness Important?
Before we cover some strategies for improving how happy customers are with your business, let’s discuss briefly why customer happiness is essential.
There’s a reason why the adage “the customer is always right” has been famous for a long time. Although many more businesses have begun to understand where this kind of attitude applies, it still bears knowing that when you keep your customers happy, they keep being your customers.
So, investing in their happiness is about good business. Unless they’re not the kind of customer you want to entertain or cater to, you can pivot your customer acquisition strategy to target the audience you want to consider.
Now that you know why caring about your customer’s happiness is essential, let’s cover some strategies for achieving that.
1. Understand Your Target Audience
Whether you’re crafting an affordable and effective marketing plan or developing a business plan that serves as the foundation of your business, one step included in both would be identifying and researching your target audience.
You need to do this step to ensure that you have a good understanding of who your target audience is as well as what they need from you.
After all, your business relies on your target audience, so if you’re going to make new strategic moves for your business in any way, you should use your audience research to inform them.
Sometimes, though, as you look for ways to market your product or service, you can find that the target audience you’re trying to attract might not be the actual people who comprise your audience.
At this point, you either pivot to the customers with you or make changes and dive deeper into the research around the customers you want to attract instead.
When you do that, you can service your target audience to the best of your abilities based not on predictions but on what you know they like and dislike.
2. Deliver Fast Yet High-Quality Support
When your customers encounter an issue with your product or service, your customer support should be there to deal with it as soon as possible. And that’s a when, not an if.
Even if your business fails your customer through the product or service, sometimes, because of the prompt response of your customer support, customers won’t hold that against you. Instead, they’ll appreciate that you were able to answer their issues promptly.
The other side is if your customer has a minor issue with your business. Still, the customer service response was negative, which can aggravate what was an otherwise benign issue.
That’s why trying to have high-quality support in place to attend to your customers is essential. Having a customer resource base or knowledge base can also be helpful on your site, especially if you have a complicated product or service. For example, having a FAQ section is essential for some of your customers’ questions about your business.
3. Offer Discounts, Sales, and Freebies
If you’re struggling to get eyes on your products or services, consider doing some discounts, sales, and freebies wherever applicable. This may be a massive ask for smaller businesses, but doing some sales now and again can help get more customers your way.
Adding a time limit to when potential customers can enjoy these discounts is one way to prompt and push them to buy. Another strategy is adding freebies to their purchase depending on whether they reach a certain threshold.
Free shipping strategies are another popular way to get more customers to buy from you. Again, you can add a purchase threshold to get more customers to add more of your products to their cart to get that free shipping deal.
4. Ensure Product Quality Without Compromise
There’s no better way to promote your small business or even a large company than by consistently providing your customers with a high-quality product (or service). No amount of strategic and mindblowing business or marketing strategy will overcome a lousy product unless you already have a big budget to support that.
When your product works well and goes above and beyond what your customers ask of you, they will promote your product. They’ll become advocates of your brand without you paying them to do so or giving them anything free in exchange for that promotion.
With a great product, you can make your business achieve longevity since it will be the foundation of your business success in the first place. If you couple that with carving out a specific customer base for your products, your business will have the longevity many companies crave.
5. Build a rewards and loyalty program
Some businesses make the mistake of only focusing on attracting new customers as much as possible; they don’t consider their customer retention strategies.
However, the key to a long-lasting business would be not only happy customers but customers who are happy to stay as your customers. So, aside from focusing on ways to get new customers constantly, you should also think of different ways to retain your customers. You can do that by building a worthwhile rewards and loyalty program.
These initiatives will incentivize customers to return to your business and support it. If you’re interested in figuring out what the best rewards are, then you can try out some of these ideas:
- Free products after a certain number of purchases
- Member points that they gain after specific purchase amounts can be redeemed
- Free upgrades
- Exclusive events, products, and discounts for partner stores
You can use these ideas to attract people to sign up for your business’s membership program and, in turn, entice them to stay and buy products from your company.
6. Ensure a Seamless Experience Across All Channels
Aside from traditional marketing avenues, your business should have a social media presence, like billboards.
Just make sure that all of your marketing channels are consistent with one another. Also, the transition between your marketing and sales funnels should be seamless.
For example, ensure the code works if your marketing materials have a QR code.
7. Establish an Effective Resolution Process
Formalizing how your customer service representatives will deal with customer complaints is essential.
Emotions can get high, and you don’t want your customer service reps to get swept away by it in one way or the other. By formalizing and recording the customer problem resolution process, you can better the experience for your customer service reps and customers, regardless of their complaints.
8. Collect Valuable Customer Feedback
Your potential customers will feel more compelled to try out your business if they see that other people have tried out your business and enjoyed it.
Even if they’re willing to buy products from your business, they might be wary of other products in your store. And in that case, a customer review will still be valuable.
Just ensure that your customer reviews are correctly formatted. Some happy customer review examples usually include the review itself, a picture of the customer, and their name, and if it’s relevant, they add their job title, too.
Conclusion
These customer happiness strategies should inform what your future business moves are. Whether it’s your sales or marketing process, these tips should help keep your customers happy, so make sure that you try these strategies out.
