Running a business can be a very tough prospect, even if you think you have a good foundation for your business and start up a small customer base it can be hard to get it to the next level. When running your own business you rely on the customer to help elevate your business and make it more successful, but you cannot do this with only a small customer base you need to push and increase that customer base to be even bigger. Increasing your amount of customers is not always easy however, you need to make sure you are offering enticements to get them buying your product and make sure your business is clean and enticing whether that be online or instore.
If you are running your own business or maybe you are thinking of starting one and you are unsure where to start on building up your customers and attracting new ones then this guide should help you to gain an understanding of what you can do to attract and engage more customers which should help you enhance and elevate your business to a whole new level.
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Offer up incentives to shop with you
Most people these days are always looking for discounts and savings when they are shopping. So try and lure in some extra customers by offering different incentives and offers, this will help to drive them to your site or into your store, if they like the product then they are likely to come back and buy again even without the discount. The point of this is to get your brand out there and more people seeing it to try and get more customers to choose you and know you are there for next time. It will also help to attract the customers that have seen your brand but were unsure about it, however with discounts and offers are more likely to actually try it out. You can also target specific offers with your previous customers to keep them coming back and keep them interested in shopping with you.
Try and push for referrals
Customers and their loyalty can be a great way to get more customers through the door, using existing customers to get referrals is a great way to help increase your customer base. The thing with referrals however is that you cannot just wait for it to happen naturally it will but at a slow pace, so try and incentivise the referrals by putting schemes in place that will give discounts and offers if they refer people, or if they refer a certain amount that make a purchase they get a voucher. This will give people more reason other than just the products to actively refer friends and family to your business.
Reconnect with old customers
If you have the systems in place to get reports on what customers have shopped with you recently and the ones they have not then you can recontact old customers that may not have shopped in a while to see if they want to come back and offer them discounts to get their custom back. You can try and schedule to do this every few months so you can recycle old customers and try and get more people coming back to you.
Market your product
Marketing and especially digital marketing is the most popular way to drum up customers for your shop or site. By marketing to your target audience you are able to hit directly at those that want your product and are likely to buy your product. Marketing can be done through social media, online ads, tv ads and with marketing materials put around locally, it is all about getting your brand out there for people to see. The reason digital marketing is so popular especially social media marketing is because it is so easy to reach people and for your content to reach further a field as the originally targeted people will share it to their friends and followers and so on and this then takes 1 person to hundreds with just a few clicks. If used right then digital marketing can be a huge boost to your customer base and be the key to unlocking the overall success of your business.
Make your shop welcoming
Customers are not going to want to come into a shop that looks dark and dirty, so you need to make sure your shop is welcoming and inviting and makes people want to come in. Get a commercial cleaning service to come in and spruce up the shop and make sure it stays spick and span this will help to make sure when people do come in they find a lovely clean place to shop and feel comfortable in there. You should also make sure any signs or posters in the shop front are bright and enticing as this will be the first thing that your customers see, if it is not nice they will not come in no matter how nice the inside may be.
Update your website
One of the main ways that people will come across your business is on the internet, so having a great website is key to making sure you make a good impression on whoever clicks on it. You will rely quite heavily on your website to attract people into your business so if it is not kept up to date and does not look enticing then you are going to be losing lots of customers because of this. You also need to check your search engine optimization (SEO) . This is what search engines use to rank you based on what people search, so the higher up you are the better as more people are going to see your site based on keywords from your SEO. You also need to make sure that you have an adaptive website. This means that if someone looks at it on their phone or tablet that the website adapts to that device making it easier to read and navigate your site, if it is not optimised then that will put people off.
Partner up with other businesses
Running a business does not need to be a dog eat dog world, you can use each other to help with your businesses. If you find a business that is not a direct competitor but you could link up and send customers each other’s way, this is a really helpful way to build up customers and gain a working relationship with other businesses in the process. Say you sell flooring, your coils link up with a house building company who can help send customers your way for flooring when building houses. This is a great way to get more customers and also helps word of mouth as they can then pass it on to anyone who is also in need of flooring etc. By partnering up you can also save some money on marketing as you can pool in or join forces to market your products thus saving both businesses money while driving more business your way which is a win win situation.
If you are running a business or maybe you are thinking of starting one up and you are unsure how you can push your business to the next level and get more customers to enhance your business then this guide should hopefully, give you some ideas you can start to implement in your business and give you more of an understanding on how to attract more customers to your business.