Focusing on Customer Retention
These days I’m either working or thinking about why I’m not working. There’s this tremendous amount of pressure to keep improving, to keep increasing sales, to keep building momentum. The pressure is there because I know that growth cures all. I can attract investors, qualify for loans, even attract new customers by exhibiting growth. So far so good.
June is on pace to be a better month than May but never count your chickens before they hatch. I have to hustle to make sure that the sales get there.
One way I’m doing this is going back to older customers who haven’t ordered in a while and offering them a great coupon, $10 off their next order. I will be doing this through email. I wanted to use text message but I don’t want to become a nuisance.
One thing that really bothers me is when I have a customer that orders 2 or 3 times then stops ordering. I understand the one-and-done people because maybe that’s their style. But I’m dumbfounded by the ones that order multiple weeks in a row and then all of a sudden stop. Those are the ones that cut deep because it makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong to lose them.
My brother says I should just come out and ask them why they stopped ordering. I probably will after this coupon campaign. I want to see how many, if any, respond to getting a good offer to use the service again.
I think it bothers me more than it should.
I also need a better customer tracking system. Square does a lot of things right but customer tracking is not one of them. They are actually awful in being able to tell me how many of my customers are repeat customers and how much sales those repeat customers account for.
I think there is a system in the Square software that lets me manually write in each customer after each order and this is something I should do — I will start immediately. This information is important to me in more ways than one. I definitely want to reward my regular customers and incentivize the others to become regulars.
So this week I’m going to send out the coupon and see the results, and if I don’t like them, I may have to resort to asking those customers why they stopped using the service.
I’m making an effort to publish to this series every Saturday. My publishing schedule has been sporadic and I don’t like that. I want to get a routine down. Saturday is my slowest day so I have more time to write. Until next week, ciao.
This story is part of a series documenting the journey of a 2016 Dallas startup called Feather. For your reference here is the Table of Contents for the series.
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Next Story: The Road to Profitability
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