For Retail businesses, you get hundreds or thousands of customers visiting your business on a weekly basis. It’s very easy to hit a database of 3,000 to 5,000 customers over the time, but it’s definitely not easy to stay in touch with all your customers once your database gets this big.

Naturally, out of sight out of mind, businesses lose customers over time because they fail to keep in touch with all their customers.

For this article, we will be sharing 3 simple ways to keep in touch with your customers without appearing too aggressive.

1. Birthday Promotions / Rewards

This is the best way to connect with your customers if you have their birthdays. Everyone celebrates their birthdays once a year. So it’s a great opportunity to share the joy with them by extending a simple perk or reward to them on their birthdays.

How will you feel if you receive a gift on your birthday?

Generally most people will feel happy to receive something. Even if they don’t redeem the promotion or reward, you have already achieved your objective. That’s to remind them that you’re still around and ready to offer your products and services if they need.

2. Notifications & Reminders

• Do you have something to announce?
• Do customers have any appointments with you?
• Or do they have anything that’s expiring with you?

These are good times to connect with your customers too. Imagine every communication with your customers is about you sales and promotions. How would you feel as a customer? Or if their package just expired without notice, how would you feel as a customer?

Reminders are a good form of communication to show that you care for your customers, and not just about sales.

3. Seasonal Promotions

Pick some meaningful occasions that relates well to your business to send a simple promotion to your customers. Example for female oriented businesses like Spa or Yoga, Mother’s day will be a good occasion. For male oriented businesses like Tailor, Golf, Father’s day will be good occasion.

Additionally you may also pick 1 or 2 generic occasions like Christmas or Chinese New Year to fill the gap within the year to run some promotions. Spread them out so you don’t appear to be running promotions too often.

The Strategy

The whole point of such communications is to consistently stay on top of your customer’s mind so they remember you if they ever need your products and services. This is a form of reminder marketing to stay in your customer’s mind.

More too often, businesses lose customers because they fail to stay in touch with their customers. Even if customers really do like your products and services, you never know when they will want it again. If a competitor shows up at the right moment and time, you’ll most likely lose the customer to your competitors.

To Conclude

Every business is different, so there’s no rule as to how often you should be communicating with your customers in a year. So decide on a frequency you would like to engage your customers and start finding suitable occasions for your promotions.

Example if you want stay in touch every quarter (3 months), you can pick these occasions:

• Chinese New Year – January / Febuary
• Mother’s Day / Father’s Day – May / June
• National Day – August
• Christmas – December

And the gaps within the quarters will be filled by your birthday perks and reminders. This way you will stay consistently in contact with your loyal customers throughout the year.

SoVou is an affordable Cloud Loyalty System that uses SMS to engage your customers and encourages them to share your promotions on WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter & Email.

Our Loyalty System’s is specially designed for Small Brick & Mortar (Offline) Retail Businesses that requires customers to come down to buy or use their services. We have stripped off the complex features to ensure that you and your customers have pleasant experience with your Loyalty Program.

Feel free to contact me at jay.li@sovou.com find out more about our Loyalty System!

Everything expressed in this article is my personal opinion and might not be applicable for all businesses. Please share with us your ideas and thoughts too so we can grow & learn together!

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