As small businesses, we’re all looking for the best ways to communicate with our customers in the most effective way possible. We know how important it is that our customers hear from us and that we develop strong relationships. Yet, when we think about “how” to do this, we might not know where to start. Or we believe that we must draw up these extensive plans and campaigns. And yet, it might be a bit easier than think.
Here are three ways you could begin communicating with your customer base today.
1) Just Reach Out To Your Customers
This is the best way to get a temperature read of how your customers are feeling. Make a list between 10-20 of your customers who had both good and bad experiences (don’t just strive for the good ones lol). Send each one a personal email simply saying you are reaching out to get their feedback and would like to hear from them. Let them know their importance and value to your company and that their input will help the future growth of your products or services.
Then listen to what your customers have to say. The good, bad, and ugly. Do not dismiss their feedback or become critical of it. They are the ones using your product and making an immediate decision if they will come back again or go to a competitor. Hearing what your customers have to say will only allow you to enhance the quality of your product and service that will ultimately build your community of faithful followers.
Once you hear back from your customers, the most important decision you face will come next. What will you do with the feedback you have received? Will you begin implementing it right away and making those changes. Or will you acknowledge it and put it on a to-do list that will get overlooked and forgotten by your day-to-day responsibilities? The decision you make will strongly affect the direction of your business and the trust you are trying to create with your customers. Understand the importance of your customer’s feedback and decide what changes or enhancements can be implemented right away and what would need some planning. But perform both! Even if it requires a bit of planning, get together with your team and work on a plan to implement those changes.
2) Education and Engagement
In what ways are you educating your customers with further knowledge about your product? Are you creating blog posts about it and then sending it to them in a newsletter? Are you sharing knowledge through social media channels with small micro-content? Are you creating a short video that shows your customers different ways to use your product?
If you are, great! What areas do you find has the most customer engagement? Then create more of it.
If you currently aren’t, no worries. You can get started today by creating a blog post, a Facebook post, or even sending out a tweet. There’s no right or wrong way to get started. But just get started!
Once you start educating your customers, how are you keeping up with engagement to ensure your customers are hearing from you? Here’s where you can start developing a plan with your team and getting creative on your communication efforts.
3) Tools (to make your life easier)
When considering what tools can you use that will help you communicate with your customers more effectively, ask yourself questions that will also help grow your community. Such questions might be:
- Will these tools help to plan out a monthly newsletter and inform my customers on updates?
- Will these tools allow a feedback survey to go out automatically a few days after a customer makes a purchase?
- Will these tools help to respond back to customer questions in a timely manner?
Whatever tools you decide to use, they should help you in actively engaging with your customers, while most importantly allowing you to build your community of followers.
Practice What You Preach
If you have been in contact with our team recently, you might have noticed that we used our own tips when we wanted to change how we were communicating with our customers. In reaching out to our loyal tribe, we heard your feedback (yes, all the good, bad, and ugly — see we did it lol) and started to execute what we could right away while creating a road map for future enhancements.
So we’re excited to announce some updates you can expect to see in the upcoming weeks.
- As you can see, we’re back at it with creating content for the blog and a monthly newsletter. If you missed our recent post, check out how to spring clean your marketing campaigns.
- We will be launching a new customer support system called Intercom. This will allow our customers a simple and direct way to reach out to us and get answers and further education and knowledge on their questions. This will be easily accessible from within your LXRGuide dashboard or you can reach out to us directly at support@lxrguide.com. We’ll be having a webinar to discuss more product updates so be on the look out for that very soon!
How are you currently communicating with your customers and what changes have you noticed? We’d loved to hear from you so drop us a comment below!