Loyal Customers

If you’ve ever had a client that tells everyone how wonderful you and your services are, then you know how valuable this can be to your business (and your self esteem). Past client referrals are not only quality leads but they don’t require you to do any work!

“So, how do I create these kinds of customers?” you ask.

Start by reading Creating Customer Evangelists by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba. I highly recommend buying this book and reading it cover to cover. But for now I will share with you their six tenets of customer evangelism.

The authors studied Southwest Airlines, Krispy Creme Doughnuts, Build-A-Bear Workshops, Dallas Mavericks, O’Reilly & Associates, SolutionPeople and IBM and discovered that they all shared these common approaches to creating Customer Evangelists:

Customer Plus-Delta: Continuously gather customer feedback.

Napsterize knowledge: Make it a point to share knowledge freely.

Build the buzz: Expertly build word-of-mouth networks.

Create Community: Encourage communities of customers to meet and share.

Make bite size chunks: Devise specialized, smaller offerings to get customers to bite.

Create a cause: Focus on making the world, or an industry, better.

Now you’ll have to read the book for further explanation but the point is that marketing to your past clients, your possible “Customer Evangelists”, has the potential for a much greater return than marketing to strangers. So don’t forget about the clients that already like you and keep in contact with them. They can turn into your best sales people.