Shift Your Growth into the Fast Lane by Engaging Your Customers
by: Dave Free
Do you feel like you have the “pedal to the metal,” spending all you can on advertising but still can’t get the growth of your business into the fast lane? The fact is, if your customers aren’t engaged, it may not matter how much you spend on advertising. Just like a car in neutral isn’t going anywhere (no matter how much gas you give it) until the transmission is engaged, your business isn’t going anywhere until your customers are engaged.
What does engage mean? Here are three definitions you might find in a dictionary:
1. To attract someone’s attention
2. To establish a meaningful contact
3. To move into position so as to come into operation
Combine the three of them and it provides a pretty good working definition for engaging your customers:
Attract your customers’ attention with the intent to establish a meaningful relationship and move them into position to help your business grow.
Without worrying too much right now about how to engage your customers (we’ll get to that) let me propose multiple levels of possible customer engagement as represented by this pyramid model.
At the base of the pyramid is your total available market. That is, all of the potential customers in the world. They have potential, but at least at this point no level of engagement with you or your company.
The next level derives its name from a term we have all used when asked by a sales man if we need help, “No, just looking.” The fact that we are looking means we are more engaged than the masses, but we’ve yet to make any great commitment.
Just beyond Just Looking is Just Buying. For most companies this is the height of their ambition. Get a sale, book the profit and move on to the next customer.
Above just buying is buying again. This is a level that in general assumes that the customer was pleased enough with their first purchase to be willing to come back and purchase again. I say in general, because it is possible that they have no other options and therefore they have no choice. For you as the business owner, this is a very good level. Serving a repeat customer costs less because you don’t have to pay to acquire them and they are less expensive to serve in most cases because they are already familiar with you and your operation. The more customers you can get to Buying Again , the more profitable you will be.
But there are customer engagement levels even higher than Buying Again. The first is Giving Feedback. This refers to customers that are willing to invest more of themselves in your company than just their money. They do this by making the effort to tell you how you can improve your offerings. In effect, they go beyond the typical definition of customers and become co-producers, helping to ensure that your offering is exactly what the market wants and needs. Two great things happen in the process: 1) As your offering improves so will your sales and, 2) As the customer invests their ideas in your company they will become even more loyal and move to the next level.
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Shift Your Growth into the Fast Lane by Engaging Your Customers
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About The Author
Dave Free is president of Zeryn, makers of PromoterZ(tm) (http://promoterz.com), a customer care system for small business growth. Mr. Free received an MBA from BYU and has worked as an Intel executive domestically and internationally, at a Washington think tank, and entrepreneur.
wdfree@gmail.com
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