customer relations | The Genuine ScLoHo aka Scott Howard

How Are Your Reviews?

by Scott Howard | Feb 16, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

People are talking about you.

You probably don’t know half the things they are saying.

Unless you are diligently monitoring online social media, review sites and chat rooms, you don’t know unless someone tells you what they saw.

How important are these reviews?

According to a consumer survey made public by MarketingCharts.com, 19 out of 20 people read reviews.

But, it’s not just reviews that consumers read — close to three-quarters also read the businesses’ responses to these reviews.

Nearly 80% of consumers trust online reviews, it’s the new Word-Of-Mouth that can make or break a business. The study also says over 90% of the readers of the reviews use them to make a buying decision. A review often determines the likelihood of a consumer using a local business. This can be seen with 94% of consumers agreeing that positive reviews make them more likely to use a business. Even more telling, 92% also said that negative reviews make them less likely to use a business.

What can you do as a business owner with this information?

Be proactive.

Ask your customers to review you on Google, Yelp and the other online review sites including Facebook which is still the king of social media.

Respond appropriately to the reviews online.

You can even use these online reviews in your advertising. I have a client that has been doing this for years, it’s the heart of their radio campaign on WOWO Radio.

Contact me for more ideas by dropping me a line to Scott@WOWO.com

Staying Connected in 2021

by Scott Howard | Jan 13, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Sound ADvice, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

Depending upon your business category, acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. Knowing this, it only makes sense to do everything you can to maintain a relationship with your current customers, better known as Core Customers.

So, what exactly is a Core Customer? A Core Customer is someone that has done business with you in the past “X-period of time” and has the potential to do business with you again.

The “X-period of time” depends upon the purchase cycle or how often purchases are made within each business category. For example, in the automotive category: A typical person purchases a vehicle every 3-½ years. In the plumbing business, less than 20% of the population uses a plumber every year and 50% of the population only needs a plumber every 4 to 6 years. In the hardware business, it can be 1 time per month or more.

If your current customers have purchased from you within your “purchase cycle” time frame, these people should be considered a “Core Customer”. As a business owner, you want to connect and reconnect with people between purchases until, at minimum, they are out of the “purchase cycle” period.

The other important question is, how often do you need to keep in contact? It can vary to some degree depending upon the buying cycle, but the rule of thumb is 3 to 5 times a year, with a minimum of twice.

The first thing you must do is identify your business’ buying cycle. Then, identify who your current Core Customers are.

If you do not have a list of your customers and their contact info, start to create one. The only info you need is the name, mailing address, email address, date of purchases, and if possible, what they purchased and the transaction amount.

Having this information is useless unless you USE it!

Statistics show that the success rate of selling to a new customer is somewhere between 5-20%. The success rate of selling to a Core Customer is 60-70%.

Keeping your current customers is one key to success, but we must understand that regardless of what you do, you stand to lose 20% of your customers each year due to attrition in one form or another. Therefore, it’s paramount that you continue to attract new customers that turn into Core Customers. Once you’ve created the relationship, do everything you can to stay connected!

Click here to read 8 Tips to Keep Connected with Your Core Customers and protect them from predators (your competition).

What I just shared with you is from my weekly Sound ADvice newsletter that you can get delivered to your email Wednesday mornings free of charge by signing up in the form below.

Yesterday I met with a business owner that understands the value of staying appropriately connected with his customers because he knows the lifetime value of his clients. He’s looking at doing something that perhaps you should do to.

I also have another way to help you keep connected with your core customers and invite people who are not your customers to become one this year. It’s an advertising and marketing program with WOWO radio.

Whether or not you do the steps I mentioned to keep connected in a personalized manner, by staying in front of your customers with marketing messages on WOWO radio, you are continuing to connect with them every time they hear your business on the radio.

Contact me, Scott@WOWO.com , and I’ll connect you with someone from my team that can show you how it works.

Caring For Your Customers

by Scott Howard | Dec 15, 2020 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Sound ADvice

Do you appreciate your customers? Think about this for just a minute and then answer it honestly.

I’ll ask you again, do you appreciate your customers? I mean REALLY appreciate them!

We’ll assume that you answered yes. Now, here is the most important question. Do they KNOW that you appreciate them?

Appreciating your customers is one thing. Making sure they KNOW that you appreciate them can be the difference between keeping them as a customer and potentially losing them to a competitor the next time they need the product or service you offer.

There are 4 main reasons why customer retention is so important to a company’s success and growth.

Affordability: It’s 5-25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing company.
ROI: A 5% increase in customer retention can increase your revenue by 25% or more.
Loyalty: It goes without saying that retained customers buy more often and spend more than new customers.
Referrals: Word of Mouth is still the BEST and cheapest advertising.

This concept seems very logical and so simple that we would think every business would be doing it, right? Wrong! The truth is that most don’t.

Another truth is that making sure your customers know you appreciate them takes effort, and effort often-times means time and money, or both. But it’s worth it.

Tip #11 in the 11 Ways to Show Your Customers You Appreciate Them is “Create a Thank You Video”. Tip #6 is “Sending a Handwritten Note” and #7 is “Make a Personal Phone Call”. While both #6 and #7 are more personal, creating a video is unique and different and it can save you time. Create one video with one generic thank you message, and the rest is as easy as sending an email.

As competition continues to grow bigger and stronger, making sure your customers KNOW they are appreciated is key to continued growth. To see all of the 11 Ways to Show Your Customers You Appreciate Them, click here.

Ask The Right Questions

by Scott Howard | Oct 27, 2020 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

9 months is the usual length of time it takes a baby to develop from conception to being born.

During those 9 months, the new parents are preparing for the future, the changes that will be occurring in their lives, especially if they are first time parents.

While each pregnancy is unique, just as each of us human beings are unique, there are several predictable events and circumstances that will be occurring and we have plenty of wisdom from our family and friends along with healthcare and other experts.

You want to know what to expect when you are expecting? You ask. You ask the right questions to get the right answers. It’s pretty straight forward.

I’m going to apply this to the past 9 months or so. We were a couple months into 2020 when we started hearing about what has become the Covid-19 Corona Virus Pandemic. At first we believed it would have a limited impact on a very small number of people in our country and most of us would live our lives as normal.

By April, multiple states had stay at home orders that closed down parts of the economy, led to panic buying of toilet paper and created something that nearly no one in business had ever lived thru before. 100 years ago was the last pandemic of this magnitude and even if a business has been around since that time, the actual people are no longer here to tell us what to do.

So questions were asked about the virus. How serious is it? What are the risk factors? A great political divide was created over the precautions that we should be taking and all of this in the midst of a dozen other political and social battles.

We were learning as we went along and none of us wanted to deal with a deadly virus pandemic that would upend not just our physical health and well being but also mental health, business health, and the well being of our friends, family, co-workers and neighbors.

We also thought that the impact of the virus would be short-lived. Weeks, not months. Hopefully not years.

It all boils down to this.

Ask the right questions.

While we rely on the health care experts to work their butts off to find the answers and solutions to halting the spread of the virus and lessen the impact on individuals health, I challenge you to ask the right questions regarding the future of your business.

This fall as the weather changes in Indiana, local restaurants are closing for two reasons.

They can no longer offer outside dining spaces like they did in the warmer weather, so they have limited capacity for social distanced seating.

They are being impacted by people in the midst, either on staff or patrons who have tested positive for the virus which means everyone needs to get tested, the building is shut down and scrubbed clean and they lose even more money.

Here are some of the questions you need to ask yourself for the future of your business:

If the business environment with strict lock-down restrictions were to return and stay in place for all of 2021, how would you adapt the way you operate to provide goods and services to customers and be profitable?

What operating procedures have you changed this year that you will continue, even after the pandemic restrictions are eventually lifted?

What can you improve upon to provide goods and services in the months and years to come that benefit you, your customers and your employees?

What can you do to invite people to spend their money with you no matter what the future holds both health wise and politically?

I know, that last question is an advertising and marketing question. All three questions are extremely important. In the near future I’ll help you with a refresher on timeless advertising and marketing principles. and in the meantime, if you need help evaluating those first two questions, reach out to me.

I started out talking about the 9 months of pregnancy that new parents go through in joyful expectation. Believe it or not, even though 2020 has not been as predictable as the birth of a new baby, we are all going to be better in the long run, no matter how many months it takes.

[wd_hustle id="sound-advice-sign-up" type="embedded"]

Do Your Customers Trust You?

by Scott Howard | Oct 20, 2020 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Sound ADvice

Trust… It’s not just for personal relationships. It’s a MUST in business too!

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Do you trust the vendors that you do business with? Are they providing you with or doing things for you that consciously or subconsciously earn your trust? If you stop trusting them, do you continue to do business with them? Your customers and prospects make their decisions based on the same criteria.

Trust is never given; it is something that must be earned!

Regardless if you own or run a B2B or B2C operation, trust is the cornerstone of your brand. It’s not enough for you to know that you are trustworthy. The key is getting your current customers and future customers to know that you are trustworthy. There is only one way, and that is to “prove it”.

The author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey, said, “Trust is the glue of life. It is the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships”.

Simply said, the more people trust you the more they will buy from you, and the more they will recommend you to others.

In today’s competitive world, you can no longer assume people trust you. You must prove it, every day. No one thing is more powerful in building and growing a successful business than TRUST!

Rule #1 to building trust has always been Under-Promise and Over-Deliver. In the year of COVID, the new #1 rule is Safety, creating an environment where your customers are safe to shop. According to nearly every recent survey, being safe while shopping is a top concern.

If you would like to see 10 Ways to Build Better Trust within your business, click here.

We suggest you gather a group of trusted employees or friends and discuss ways to build trust within your company and then, exploit them. If you would like help implementing this in-house workshop, contact me. I will be glad to help.

And if you would business tips like this delivered to your email inbox every week, subscribe to my Sound ADvice newsletter in the box below.