DMNews.com and ReadWriteWeb both published articles about the subject that you may want to read in conjunction with this post.

You may wonder why I feel it necessary to expand on the all the information already in circulation by writing yet another article on the subject.  In contrast to most of these,  my article is directed to the small and medium sized businesses that are looking for some practical ‘to do’s’ rather than an intellectual commentary.  Particularly businesses that cater to other businesses or have a product or service that’s not immediately perceived as ‘exciting’.  These businesses often flounder when it comes to exploiting social media because they perceive it as being either ‘too gimmicky’ or too consumer orientated.

Most marketing experts are agreed that use of social media has a positive effect on client loyalty.  If you’re just starting out in this territory, you may have some doubts about this.  I don’t blame you.  It’s simple and yet not easy to actually implement.  The logic is irrefutable, yet it requires considerable faith to go through the process required to actually begin reaping the rewards you’ve been hearing about.

I’ve covered the logic behind social media in other articles on this blog, so I’ll simply gloss over the fact that social media is the perfect tool for businesses with limited budgets.  Let’s just leave it at ‘you can’t get better than free’ in terms of publicity.

The key to getting good results is knowing how to use it effectively.

The basis of an effective social media strategy is to use your venue, or combination of venues, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on, to gather a community sharing a common interest to which your product or service contributes and to position yourself as a trusted friend in this community.

Your community may be large or it may be small.  What really matters is that it comprises people who are likely candidates for your product or service and that they are active.  Make it easy for these people to interact with you:  if you set up a blog, you want to have an RSS feed that people can subscribe to in order to keep them up to date with your latest posts.  You want to encourage interaction by means of attracting comments and providing information that will keep your audience engaged.  You also want to have a feed attached to the blog that disseminates the posts to your Facebook page and Twitter and LinkedIn profiles.  In this way, you can cover several venues with minimal time and effort.

Setting this up is just the beginning.  What you’re really aiming at is actually connecting with people who may buy your product and service.  You have the venues, now you need the traffic.  Mechanics of generating traffic is a huge subject. I will deal with this in more detail in upcoming articles.   In this article, I’m going to concentrate on things you can easily implement to engage your audience and which will help you be found by qualified prospective customers once you implement a traffic strategy.

One of the primary things you can do to create a lively and effective social media strategy is to offer your audience, who you want to convert to ‘friends’,  something they perceive as having a high value.  This would be something that they want and will use.  The easiest thing to offer is information.  Information can be created, offered and downloaded with minimal technical expertise or cost and can be made available in unlimited quantities for an unlimited period of time.

With the rapid changes in society and in technology, people are always looking for useful  ‘how to’ information. By offering the information they want, you are able to attract people who are potential customers.  Giving them value before they buy gives them an opportunity to experience your expertise and builds credibility.   They then see you as a trusted mentor rather than as a vendor.  This immediately raises your relationship status with them and heightens the purchase potential.  People prefer to buy from people they know and trust.

You don’t need to confine your offerings to your own work.  By offering other experts in the field an opportunity to share information on your venues. you not only benefit from their credibility and follower base, but you also create an additional level of activity on your social media site.

Another effective way to generate interest in your venues is to hold competitions which require readers to participate by commenting on posts on your blog. It’s an easy, practical and effective way of encouraging activity and fostering ongoing relationships.  Readers post their comments and come back over the course of the competition to check what other people are saying.  Publishing winners as soon as the competition is over enhances your credibility with all participants and ensures that next time you hold a competition, you’ll have a ready made audience willing to participate.

If you begin working this very basic social media strategy,  you’ll find that although results may take a little while to become apparent, once they do begin, they will continue – provided that you are diligent about posting regularly and offering what your target audience wants.

Whether your business is an industrial, commercial or even scientific, this strategy will work for you.  After all, if you have any market demand at all, there will definitely be information you can share with your target audience that’s of value to them and ultimately positions you as the expert of choice.  A quick search of the groups on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter will allay any doubts you have about whether your audience is engaged in social media or not.

If you’re in an information based business, you can offer useful giveaways without endangering the actual information products you are selling.  It can be a little tricky, but still, very effective.  After all, if you’re offering a great quality and quantity of very useful information for nothing, your audience will automatically assume that what you have for sale must be of an even higher caliber and well worth the investment.

The key is to understand both your product  and your audience. The most successful social media strategies revolve around a balanced offering of high value giveaways, great information and a subtle entertainment factor.  Your audience is more likely to return on an ongoing basis and purchase from you if they find interacting with you to be a pleasant experience.

In upcoming articles I’ll discuss details on  how best to get in front of a targeted audience and drive traffic to your social media venues.

In the meantime, if you’d like to discuss how you might implement a practical and inexpensive social media strategy for your business, either leave a comment or email me.  If you’d like to share your social media strategies or experiences, please post a comment below.

You know what I’m talking about… it’s the experience that makes your day.  You have some problem or question and although the person you approach may not be the correct one to solve the issue, they go way above and beyond the line of duty to ensure that you find your answer.

We all come across instances of where this highly effective client loyalty building mechanism can be applied virtually every day in every area where we interact with a business.

Think about the last time you were in a department store looking for something specific and you asked for help.  Did the person you approached vaguely wave in a direction saying, “Ailse 10″ or did they stop what they were doing to lead you directly to the product?

Or how about the time you called a company with a customer service query? Were you treated as an interruption and run into a brick wall, or did the person you spoke to take responsibility for ensuring you received the answer you were looking for?

Businesses that focus on treating every customer as important, valuable and respected find their customer loyalty statistics improve significantly over time.  People love to be treated well, and when they are, they love to reward the business by telling others how well customers are treated.

Finding ways to treat customers well in every transaction is vital. Some of the ways are pretty obvious, others more nebulous.  But by adopting a corporate philosophy of “How can we improve your life today?” both staff and customers will quickly feel the effects of improved relationships.

If you have any doubt at all about the value of doing all you can to establish and maintain customer loyalty, take a few minutes to go through the following exercise.

Look at the top 10% of your customers and plot on a spreadsheet:

• frequency of purchases
• value of purchases
• length of their ‘lifetime’ with your company

Once you have these figures you can quickly see how much on average a customer is worth to you per month and year.  Multiply this by the number of months or years that a customer stays with you and you have their lifetime value.

Chances are you’ll be amazed at just how much money your best customers spend with you and how long they stay with you. By treating all your customers well, you’ll find that the other 90% of customers tend to move closer to the top 10% in spending and longevity.

Much of the difficulty in adopting this strategy is removed by creating a series of behavior models which staff can practice in commonly encountered situations.  Role playing can assist staff to become comfortable with these perhaps new behaviors, as can pre-written scripts based on real life examples.  The scripts are useful to give examples of how to communicate more effectively and in line with the end goal of increased customer loyalty.

This aspect is one of the most misunderstood and badly used business components.  It’s called ‘customer on the phone service’.

Stick with me now.  I know you probably want to yawn and click away because you already know all about  – and maybe even provide – fabulous customer service on the phone. But truly, in all my more than 20 years of working with clients on improving their profitability, this is a key area I see them failing at time and again. Even when they’re convinced they have it aced.

As my husband loves to say, “In business, EVERYTHING counts.”  Another of his favourites is, “The fish stinks from the head down.”  Invariably, everyone in a business takes their cue regarding customer service from the guy (or lady) at the top.

And truly, everything DOES count.

Let’s begin with the basics. How do your staff answer the phone?  From reception right through to the sales and shipping department, each one whose hand lifts a receiver is responsible for the service they deliver by phone.

Obvious no no’s are allowing the phone to ring endlessly before it’s answered.  Once again, this applies whether it’s at the first point of contact or the last.  Using voice mail to screen calls is also just plain bad customer service.  Both these practices are guaranteed to elevate the customer’s blood pressure significantly as a result of the feeling of helpless frustration in not being able to get help when it’s requested.

I’ve come across many companies where the receptionist may do a reasonably good job of handling incoming phone calls, but when they are directed to the intended receipient, they’re handled as if they’re a complete annonyance.  When a caller is greeted by a gruff, “Yeah?” undergirded by obvious irritation at being interrupted, it’s like a slap in the face to the caller, even if the tone lightens up once they announce who they are.

What many people tend to forget is that when a customer takes the time and trouble to phone you, it’s because they are willing and desirous of interacting with you.  That’s good news.  The more willing and desirous of interaction with you that they are, the more likely they are to spend money with you.  Never, ever allow anyone in your business to treat incoming phone calls lightly.  They are important and a botched call can easily mean a lost customer – and leave you none the wiser as to why you’ve suddenly lost their business.

Here are a few tips to elevate your customer on the phone service to help you maintain maximum client loyalty:

1. Always have a live person on reception.  And I mean ‘live’.  Someone whose enthusiasm to talk to customers is obvious.  Someone with a smile in their voice.
   
2. Provide them with a specific way to answer the phone – something engaging and easy on the ear.  Personally I like to use phrases such as, “XYZ Ltd., this is Shelley.  How may I direct your call?”  It immediately alerts the caller to the fact that the business is friendly and willing to assist them in reaching the correct person.
   
3. On the second leg of the phone journey, make sure all staff are trained as to how to answer their phone in order to continue the good impression.  A good way is simply, “Hello, this is Joe.  How may I help you?”
   
4. Never let the phone ring for more than 3 to 4 rings before it is answered. If it must go to voice mail, make sure that the message the caller hears is very specific and definite about what information is required to return their call and how long it will be before that happens.
5. If your caller has to be put on hold, ensure that someone live gets back to them every 20 seconds or so to let them know they haven’t been forgotten or abandoned.
   
6. Even if a caller is aggressive and annoyed, a calm, sympathetic and friendly approach can often turn the situation around and prevent loss of business.  The easiest way to do this is to simply be on the caller’s side and sympathize with them while doing what you can to resolve their problem.  For instance, saying something like, “Mr Jones, I understand how upset you are.  Let’s see how we can sort this out to your satisfaction.”  You then become their advocate instead of their adversary.
7. Deliver on your promises. Return calls timeously.  If you cannot deliver or are delayed, be sure to call the customer and explain the situation as quickly as possible.  Provide them with time lines and expectations.

These simple customer on the phone service techniques will go a long way to creating a level of customer service that your customers love and your competition cannot easily duplicate.

Although they are really very easy to implement, it does require that you ensure all your staff are on board and fully subscribe to the philosophy that guides this approach.  It’s often helpful to bring in an outside consultant who can help you script a variety of appropriate telephone answering scripts that are easy to say and sound natural to the caller.

When you consider what a client is worth to you over the days, weeks, months and years that they could potentially do business with you, it becomes very obvious that looking after clients and encouraging them to be loyal  is absolutely essential.

Depending on your particular business, a client could be worth thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars to you.

Statistics show that at least 68% of client attrition can be attributed to vendor neglect. Less than 10%  of clients stop doing business with a vendor because they’re unhappy with the service or product provided.  What do I mean by ‘vendor neglect’?  Simply that vendors forget, or neglect, to stay in touch with their clients on a regular basis.

As a business / marketing consultant and copy writer, this has become one of my top priorities for my own business as well as for my clients.  Without regular client communication, no matter how good your service or product and no matter how happy your client, you WILL find them drifting away very quickly once the communication slows.

How do you maintain client loyalty?

There are several easy, inexpensive and effective ways to do so.  This means that you can ‘layer’ different approaches so that you’re constantly in contact without seeming pushy or aggressive.  The best way to tackle this is to plan communications for at least a year in advance using an old fashioned calendar to achieve consistent timing and precision frequency.

Some of the vehicles you use for your communication strategy are:

• customer service phone calls
• thank you notes
• email updates
• newsletters
• event invitations
• postcards
• service or purchase reminders
• personalized seasonal event letters e.g. sale notifications, new product announcements

Planning your communications strategies using a variety of vehicles allows you to operate on a rotation schedule where some strategies such as emails my be on a monthly or even weekly basis, while other strategies are implemented seasonally – perhaps four times a year.

The point is that whatever strategies you use, it’s essential to maintain the communication on a regular basis. It’s very similar to how friendships operate.  If you stay in touch with a friend on a regular basis, say daily or weekly, you’ll find you have a closer bond than if you only talk every few months.  Once you’re communicating with a friend on a very infrequent basis, you’ll find it quickly becomes less and less frequent until it ends up being maybe a once a year Christmas card.

The less frequent the communication, the less you know about each other and the less likely you are to spend time together.  You simply stop having as much in common, though you may still like each other.

Client loyalty operates in exactly the same way.

However, although implementing these strategies will definitely dramatically lessen your customer attrition and boost profits, you won’t maximize the benefits unless your communications are worded strategically.

Creating a ‘friendship’ with a client won’t happen with impersonal ‘mass’ communication. It requires that the client feel that

a. you know them and
b. you care about them

This is where good copywriting can be one of the best investments you’ll ever make.  The correct message and wording can mean the difference between a ‘failed’ communication and one that produces significant profits.

If you’re planning on writing your own communications, I’d suggest that you study the craft.  Follow the work of people who are known for their results in this arena. Copywriters such as Gary Bencivenga, Drayton Bird, Gary Hulbert and Clayton Makepeace.  Read material from the ‘greats’ in the industry such as Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, John Carples and Robert Collier.

Copy writing is an entire discipline on it’s own, so you have to really love writing to want to put the extreme effort into learning this discipline.  If you do, then another tip is to get a professional copywriter with editing skills to critique your work.  The investment will pay off handsomely in increased response.