Thursday, September 26, 2013

What businesses can do to get customers? Why customer retention has become even more important

Here is the link to the recent story  http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/business/2013/09/23/exp-lead-intv-howard-bragman-crackdown-fake-reviews-yelp.cnn.html

I want to repeat one of the most repeated things in customer retention--staying in touch with your past, current and potential customers can increase retention by about 80%. That itself can make it amazingly inexpensive to run your business.

Internet is one place to get customers through affordable and long lasting marketing. It is very important for every business to build their presence online and take control of their online presence. There has to be one place where every business can login and see all their online assets (reviews, local listings, videos, asset sites, track their keywords, see their results over a period of time for keywords, store all their social media links and track their progress (and sometimes track the progress of the agency they have hired).

If businesses start with this, they will realize that they will build a long lasting source of customers they can rely on, which is always referrals from existing customers. Online reviews are a form of referrals. It is a public referral from a customer which makes other customers purchase from a business.