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| Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, January 2020 |
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| This Month’s Tip: How to Keep Them Coming Back for More |
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| Welcome to another decade! New possibilities, challenges, and transformations. At the end of the year, I posted some reflections on my personal 2010s in my Facebook Gratitude Journal, which I’ve been writing daily since March 2018. Here’s the link: https://www.facebook.com/shel.horowitz/posts/10157911298299919
Oh, and if you’re feeling old in the face of a new decade, it’s also a new decade in the Hebrew Calendar. We entered the year 5780 in September. By that standard, even older folks like me are still very young. Of course, in geologic time, all of human history is an instant.
Recently, a journalist asked some questions about keeping the customers you have. I kept you in mind as I answered:
- What should you do if you keep losing customers? First, ask them why they haven’t returned and what it would take to win them back. Second, fix any problems that come up from more than two or three people. Third, if your answers are mostly that they got the task done and don’t need you anymore, ask what else they need and develop new offerings that address this gap. Don’t forget to notify them once you’ve done so! Fourth, announce what you’ve done to fix the problem and ask them to try you again. And fifth, announce a special for returning customers and contact your whole customer base to spread the word.
- Why do businesses typically lose customers? Either they’ve found someone to do it better/faster/less expensively/more pleasantly—or they no longer need that product or service (or still need it but are no longer conveniently located to you)—OR you’ve simply dropped off their radar because you didn’t make the experience special, so you didn’t develop brand loyalty.
- What are some customer retention tips? Make the customer feel valued and special, and like they are visiting a friend when they come to you. Overdeliver—throw in something unexpected and wonderful (and not the same thing each time). Continue regular communication (e.g., email newsletter, well-targeted) so you stay in their minds.
- How can you gain new customers? The very best way is to actively solicit referrals—not just from existing customers, but also from people in complementary businesses that you partner with (that second part is the big success secret of many Internet marketing millionaires). These are both pieces of marketing yourself as an expert. Other ways to demonstrate expertise include speaking, being interviewed in media, networking the RIGHT way, and collecting solid testimonials.
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Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available. |
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Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!
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| Another Recommended Book: Purple Goldfish 2.0 |
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Purple Goldfish 2.0: 10 Ways to Attract Raving Customers by Stan Phelps and Evan Carroll
Back in December, 2008, I reviewed The Customer Delight Principle by Timothy Keiningham and Terry Varva, all about winning and keeping customers by sprinkling in unexpected moments of joy. But that book was really for academics, and it was published in 2001.
So it’s nice to take a fresh look at the same subject, in a book written for ordinary business owners—especially when it dovetails so well with this month’s main article. This second edition adds Carroll as a coauthor and updates the original 2012 work, which achieved enough recognition to spawn nine other goldfish books of different colors.
The authors say there’s no such thing as meeting expectations; you either fall short or exceed them (pp. 4-6). And the work you to do retain existing customers pays off far more than the work to bring in new ones (as I’ve advocated for many years).
The book hinges on “lagniappe,” the concept of something extra popularized by New Orleans retailers for generations. In Phelps’, Carroll’s and my own view, that something extra should be unexpected and genuinely wonderful—and of course, it’s best if it costs little or nothing to implement. Think about the first time you heard one of those now-famous Southwest Airlines goofy flight announcements. Weren’t you thrilled and amazed? Didn’t it make you want to fly with them again? And if you heard a second one, then you realized it was acceptable in the corporate culture. Only 1.5 percent of Southwest flights have a humorous announcement, yet that tiny fraction triggers $138 million per year in additional revenue from happy returning customers (p. 38).
The authors see two broad categories of purple goldfish: increasing value and reducing friction—which you find out by identifying 1) opportunities to create wow experiences, and 2) fixable gaps or errors in the customer experience (p. 196). Within those two big tents, at least 10 subsidiary categories fill the fish tank: adding gifts, personalizing the service, reducing wait times or making them a lot more fun, etc. Sometimes, one purple goldfish crosses many categories: Disney uses RFID wrist bands to greet restaurant customers by name and have their orders ready when they walk in, dispense with line-waiting for tickets and photo IDs, and eliminate several other customer annoyances (pp. 123-124). This sets a pretty high bar for the theme park industry.
Once your purple goldfish becomes the norm and everyone else grabs your idea, you need to do something else to keep the appeal fresh.
My favorite section is toward the end, with detailed lists of questions and implementation steps to:
- Help you choose the right purple goldfish for your business using first divergent (out-of-the-box) and then convergent (analytical, narrowing down) thinking, win over internal stakeholders (pp. 204-215);
- Market your innovation internally, seeking buy-in from all stakeholders (pp. 222-224);
- Run a pilot, measure the results, implement fully if it’s working (pp. 218-219, 226).
- Final and very wise advice: NEVER take away an existing purple goldfish (p. 237)!
- And my very favorite insight: a purple goldfish doesn’t have to be for the direct benefit of a customer or prospect. Helping a cause is also a purple goldfish (p. 92).
Two quibbles: First, I have to question why authors as concerned about customer delight would let this book go to print without an index. I went looking for a specific fact I wanted to retrieve in this review, couldn’t find it in my notes, and had to get myself over to Amazon to search inside the book. NOT a purple goldfish moment, and one that an index would have eliminated. And second, what “genius” came up with this awful subtitle? I’m sure they were pulling from Ken Blanchard’s Raving Fans, but this is a really unfortunate word choice. When I see “raving customers,” I think “angry.” We don’t want furious customers raving at us! We want delighted customers raving about us!
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Accurate Writing & More
14 Barstow Lane
Hadley, MA 01035 USA
http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
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About Shel
Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good–creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
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