The 3 Steps That Will Save Your (Small) Business
It is been a year working on MMF ( a management software that helps beauty businesses to run their business better) as a market operator. We have to admit that currently every kind of business is growing fast and people are becoming sensitive about products and services because they have more options for their needs. Just image how many times you try to buy just a cellphone case and then get drowned in thousands of relative products in your face. People are pickier than we expect, and it is definitely not a good sign for small business to grow bigger, especially for those which are dying. To solve the problem and save your business once for all, there are 3 must-do steps that you should implement, and your business will be better only after you overcome those challenges one by one: maintain the relationship of the existing clients, attract new clients, make accurate decisions. Sounds familiar, right? Because everybody is talking about them, they are common in all kinds of business. The point here is, How? Now we are talking. How are we going to do it, specifically and practically?
Maintain The Existing Clients
Attracting new clients is meaningless when you can not maintain the existing clients, and it makes the operation of your business harder. That is why we decide to put customer retention in the first place. Moreover, making existing clients happy plays an important role in attracting new clients too, because they would like to talk about you and your business to their friends and families only if they are happy with your services/products, word of mouth is amazing! If you have been running your business for years, you should know how hard it is to keep existing clients even though your services/products are good as hell. The most useful way to remain high customer retention is sending messages to clients to remind them that you miss them and it’s time for them to come back, of cause messages you are going to send are always along with some valuable bonus, like special discounts, deals, and campaigns. Before you start it, there is something that you need to prepare: client’s contact information, the time you send messages, the contents of messages. Collecting clients contact information is not hard, the hardest part is what to send. Based on our experience, it will be great sending greetings to clients on holidays, even at weekends, just don’t forget to attach your business information to it. However, it is a nightmare for businesses that have tons of clients that you need to contact with, and it is impossible to send them messages one by one manually. In this case, working with a management tool can save you a lot of time, spend a couple minutes to set up and they will do the rest automatically.
Attract New Clients
There are two ways that you can gain new engagements: online method, and offline method. Let’s start from online method first, let’s open a business page on Facebook and Twitter to make people know about you and your business better. It might not bring you a lot of conversions if your business is operated locally, but it is extremely helpful to do branding that improves business reputation, brand awareness on the internet. Posting some new things along with amazing photos of your business several times per week is able to bring you more traffic, even some likes, and shares. On the other hand, make it as easier as possible for people to access your business, for example, embed the business website (if you have one) to the social media pages, or ask them to make deals directly on your business social media pages, like selling on Facebook. It is not easy to get people to follow you at the beginning, so don’t hesitate to follow them first, sometimes many of them would like to follow you back and check your business profile. And don’t forget to update your information on some famous third-party platform like Google business and Yelp if you are running a local business. Talking about the offline method, we mainly need to go out and do some physical works to spread the business, such as joining events, meetups, sending flyers, giving away coupons, etc. To be honest, the offline interaction with clients is capable of building and growing your business reputation in a very short time, because people trust real people speaking more than a virtual content on the internet. Make it real, and make it trustable.
Accurate Business Operation — Make Better Decisions
Currently, the society is driven by data. Any conclusion without data support means nothing but just an unreliable statement, data makes everything reliable and objective, because people lie but data doesn’t. In our perspective, businesses with a higher skill of data analytics growing faster than those who don’t care about their data. Collecting and analyzing data are must-have skills to make accurate business decisions, for example, you want to know how the business sales performance is to predict next year’s increase in income. You would like to know what kind of product is the most popular among your clients, what is the best pricing for the product to gain the largest profit while sales are not declining. These are all about data. As a data science-focus guy, I would recommend you to collect and analyze at least some basic information from clients transactions history, such as each client’s name, purchase time, item/service name, quantity, last time purchase, item price, personal preference, and order canceled history, etc. There are some types of normal goals that you can do for your data, like find out the best-seller product every week (or month), the most-value clients who has the largest total spent, rate of change on sales for each product each month, and percentage of each product based on sales performance, etc. In addition, you can also use some software and tools to do all the data jobs for you so that you can save your time and focus on the other important works. Do your research and be clear about what you want before making the final decisions.
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