Gold marketing principle 9 Customers come first
Too many entrepreneurs focus on making sales, sales, sales. But what they should be focused on is making customers, customers, customers'. Because when you concentrate on customers, the sales take care of themselves.
What exactly am I talking about here? It's not rocket science - it's the common sense idea that if you strive to make people happy, they'll buy from you, and better yet, they'll keep buying from you.
A lot of less-than-scrupulous marketers are playing the game of 'Gotcha'.' What they do is put together a marketing message that is loaded with hype, which promises the moon, and then they deliver an inferior product. The vast majority of customers blame themselves for believing an ad that sounded too good to be true. They lick their wounds, say good-bye to their money - and they never buy from you again. Some sellers even make a lot of money this way, but eventually, their business runs out of fuel. That's because they constantly need to find new prospects whom they have not ripped off before. That's expensive. Each new customer means having to buy more ads, send out more mailers, and all the rest. Even that gets more difficult because all those unsatisfied customers out there are spreading a negative word-of-mouth advertising campaign against you.
Even in a market with millions upon millions of people, it's amazing how fast a single seller can gain a widespread reputation as being less than nice to deal with.
But when you do the opposite - when you bend over backwards to guarantee customer satisfaction - the payback is absolutely enormous. A happy customer will go out of their way to buy from you again. Happy customers ignite a positive word-of-mouth campaign about your business, which piles on even more sales. That positive word-of-mouth advertising costs you nothing, but gains you everything.
Sometimes you lose money in your attempts to make a customer happy. For example, you may have to give a full refund. You may even have to send a customer to a competitor if you can't sell that person what they need to solve their problem right now. But never be short-sighted about this. When you make a customer happy in this way, the payback is incredible. This is a solid marketing fact! If you lose money on a customer the first time by solving a problem, it's an iron-clad guarantee that this customer is going to come back to you and buy again - they will even be willing to pay a lot more just to do business with you. And don't forget the lifetime value of each customer. That's the amount of money they will spend with you over a period of months or years. A customer is more than just one sale - they are a potential string of sales that keep coming month after month. When you take time to calculate how much a customer is worth to you based on repeat sales and future business, it makes perfect sense to keep that customer happy in the long term, and not be overly concerned about only that first sale.
Continue reading here: Never underestimate the intelligence of the buyer
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