An article about marketing for eBay sellers offers this insightful statement:

By keeping customers informed about new deals, you stay in their minds and increase your chances of bringing in repeat business and creating loyal customers.

You have several opportunities to remind your customers that you are still around to help solve their problems:

• Television and Radio
• Direct Mail
• Email Newsletters
• Built-in Marketing

You most likely come in contact with the first two of these most often. By hearing a commercial or getting a reminder in the mail, your existing customer base may be prompted to return to you. Unfortunately, TV, radio, and direct mail may not be as personal as your customers would like. We’ve spoken before about quality email newsletters, so let’s turn our attention to the last point:

Built-in Marketing

Let’s call built-in marketing where your product or service includes up sell or marketing opportunities. By simply using your product, your customer is incentivized to return and do business with you again. There are many examples of this all around you:

• Magazines have postcards inside touting get deals on subscriptions
• The box of detergent you bought has a coupon on the package good towards your next purchase
• When you get your oil changed at the Quicky Oil Change Place, they’ll put a little sticker with their name in your car reminding you to come back after 3 months.

One of my favorite tools is 37Signal’s Backpack. This online organization tool gives a wonderful example of the built-in up sell. When you reach your limit on the number of pages you can have, they stick this little message on the screen:

They provide a subtle reminder that it is time to upgrade. They provide the method to upgrade, and they explain why it is worth your money. Built-in marketing at its finest. Always include those 3 key points in your built-in marketing: the reminder, the method, and why your customer should take action.

Find ways to invite your customers to return and do more business with you via the very product or service you just sold them. If you sell a quality product with built-in marketing, your customers will return without you having to chase them down and do additional work.

Take a look at your products or services. Can you add some built-in marketing?

Email newsletters are a great way to stay in touch with your customer base. If done correctly, they can be a big boost to your marketing efforts. Think about how you subscribe to newsletters and what you think of them upon arrival in your inbox. Your customers just may feel the same way.

Build a quality email newsletter experience

Your customers get lots of email. Your newsletter needs to stand out and be an invited guest in their inbox. Here are some tips for creating a quality customer experience with your email newsletters:

• You should always let customers opt-in to your email newsletters. Don’t sign people up automatically without telling them.
• Don’t sell out your subscribers. Maintain a privacy policy that keeps your customer’s email addresses out of third party hands.
• Easily allow subscribers to unsubscribe. Offer instructions or a link to do this at the end of every newsletter
• Let your customers browse older newsletters on your site before they sign up. This will help them decide whether or not your newsletter is worth their time.
• Explain how often you’ll be sending them emails and then stick to it!
• Give your newsletters proper titles. Include your company name or newsletter name in the title.
• Write good content. If your newsletter is nothing but advertisements, you won’t keep many subscribers.
• Ask for feedback. Invite your subscribers to send you comments, questions, or suggestions. This will give them a more interactive experience and will help refine your newsletter to better serve your customers’ needs.

Other newsletter helps

Here are some other articles that will help improve your email newsletter:

• Email Newsletters Pick Up Where Websites Leave Off
• Targeted Email Newsletters Show Continued Strength
• 4 Time Saving Tips To Reduce Your Email Newsletter Costs

Take a look at the 10 commandments Steve Rubel reminds us to obey when dealing with customers.

The recurring theme here is that you are engaging your clients in a relationship. There is give and take going both directions between you and the client. You need to be open and personable when dealing with your customer base. Treat your customers as your friends and they will respond in a positive way.

Your customers are people too and would like to receive personal attention to their needs. A North Jersey article highlights the woeful state of phone based customer service.

How turned off are we? In a U.S. survey by Amdocs, an international billing software company, 80 percent of respondents said they’d rather go to the dentist or sit in traffic than deal with an unhelpful customer service representative.

Despite the bad reputation of call centers, there are some who excel at quality customer service. The article provides a wonderful example of a company representative who is very personable and helpful. The customer experience can be summed up as:

A helpful, understanding voice easily accessed from the automated system. A quick resolution. A coupon for a freebie.

When customers call your company give them two important things:

• courteous service
• problem resolution

Courteous Service

Treat your customer with respect. If you need, take a step back and remember what the customer wants. You can diffuse a lot of anger and stress by simply being calm and understanding over the phone.

Problem Resolution

Your customers usually don’t call you just to chat. They want to place an order, return a product, get some support, or find an answer to their questions. You need to be prepared to handle these scenarios. Train your employees so they are empowered to solve customer’s problems.

Don’t go overboard!

On a trip to Target this weekend, the checkout clerk went a little too far in being personable. As she scanned every product, she’d pick it up and make a comment or two about it before proceeding. This delayed our departure from the store and made my wife and I feel a little uncomfortable.

In your efforts to add that personal touch, don’t over do it. If you go too far, you’ll have the opposite effect on customers. Instead of endearing them or making them feel good, you’ll alienate and annoy them.

Be Golden

Remember the golden rule: treat others as you want to be treated. Combine this timeless rule with a friendly personal demeanor and you’ll keep your customers happy.

Each of your customers is different. However, the odds are that they share characteristics that can group them into certain segments. According to Fool.com, Best Buy

… identifies key customer groups within the trade area of each store and tailors the merchandise assortment and service offerings to those customers’ individual needs.

The company divided its customers into five groups.

the affluent professional looking for the latest technology with top-notch service, time-starved suburban moms, small-business customers looking for integrated solutions, the family man who wants proven technology, and the early-adopter social customer.

Characterize your customers

Think about your customers. Do they easily fall into different segments? Maybe you could group them by:

• frequency of purchase
• purchase amount
• level of service provided
• types of products purchased

Depending on your business, there are numerous ways you can segment your customers. By taking the time to evaluate your customer base and identify recurring characteristics, you can gather valuable information to improve your bottom line.

Customize your service

Once you’ve identified in which segments your customers belong, you need to develop a strategy to improve sales in each of these categories. This is essential because as we know, current customers are your best prospects. If one of your segments is the one-time purchaser, think about how you can incentivize the customer to return for more. For larger more frequent clients, how can you make doing business with your company so easy that they’d be crazy to go somewhere else?

What kind of customers do you have? Don’t know? You’d better find out before your competition does!

Do you want return customers? Sell a product that is better than your competition!

I went to Chick-fil-A over the weekend to pick up what just might be the best chicken sandwich on planet earth. I made a conscience decision to return to Chick-fil-A to buy this sandwich because I enjoyed it so much the first time. Is this sandwich such a novel and unique product? Yes, but only slightly. They use wheat bread for the bun and green leafy lettuce. These two things alone make this sandwich unique and better than other fast food chicken sandwiches.

A little difference makes all the difference

That sandwich made it on my A-list simply because of a few improvements over the competition. You don’t have to bang your head on the wall trying to think of a totally new idea or product. You can improve the product or service you already sell. The little differences between you and your competition will often be the deciding factors for your customers.

Innovate what you already have

Chick-fil-A has been making chicken sandwiches for years. Nevertheless, they have made improvements and additions to their offerings over that same time frame. When is the last time you upgraded a product you offer? When did you last introduce a new service to the public?

Take a fresh look at what your business offers your customers. What are some improvements that could be made to distinguish yourself from the rest of the pack? Look hard enough, and you’ll find that there are some easy things you could improve that would lead customers back to you.

The Cosmetic Site reminds us of six essential things you need to master to make your company successful.

Positioning

It is crucial that you do some homework to find out just how you are, and could be, perceived and how to turn this perception into something positive, distinctive and emotionally relevant to your audiences.

We’ve mentioned before that you need to put on your customer hat to understand your customers’ needs. Take a step outside of your office and see how others look at your company. Does the outward perception reflect the inside reality?

Packaging

Good packaging conveys who you are and why a customer should choose you. It should clearly convey your “personality”Â? and also the benefits your product or service offers.

This comes down to keeping up your appearance and clearly communicating your services to customers. If your message isn’t clear, your potential customers will never know that they should be doing business with you.

Promotion

Revisit your selling message to ensure it clearly articulates who your audience is, what problem you can solve and the solution you can offer.

Clear and concise communication is the key to gaining your customer’s business. You need to find out what they need and then outline how you can solve their problems.

Persistence

Once you’ve made a commitment to your core marketing message, avoid wavering from it. … Changing your tune confuses your audience about who you are and often does more harm than good.

Would you recognize Target without the bull’s eye? How about Nike without the swoosh? When your brand starts clicking, don’t change it for changes sake. Keep what works and rework what doesn’t.

Persuasiveness

Train yourself and your staff to understand how your brand addresses needs, and whenever you speak about your brand, be clear on how it can help the right prospects.

Performance

Make a commitment to delivering everything you promise and you’ll create loyal, repeat customers.

This is absolutely essential to a successful business. You must set the proper expectations with your clients and then deliver! I’ve had recent problems with Office Depot not delivering on their promises. This has severely undermined my confidence in that company. If you fail to deliver what you promise, you’ll scare away your current customers and many potential prospects.

Work on these 6 P’s of marketing and your return customer base will surely grow.