“The purpose of business,” said the father of management science, Peter Drucker, “is to create and keep a customer.”
If he lived in today’s fast paced world — which moves at the speed of the Internet across all continents and in all time zones– he might have added that it is far more cost-effective to keep a customer than to acquire a new one.
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The reason why customer acquisition is more expensive and customer retention more challenging is because the Internet is no longer a novelty. In the early days of the Internet, when e-commerce was climbing out of the primal sea of a world built on zeros and ones, most of the best keywords were easily available for pay per click customers. Moreover, only early adopters were building company websites.
Today, it’s a completely different scene. Almost every company has a web presence and it’s not uncommon to be paying in dollars for keywords that once cost pennies.
However, it’s still possible to outperform most of the companies in your marketplace by using a fulfillment center, which expedites drop ship orders, content marketing, and old-fashioned customer service.
Leaving the Competition in the Dust
Here, then, are three things you should do today to grab the brass ring:
1. Use a Fulfillment Center
As the name implies, a fulfillment center is about fulfilling your orders.
You should think of rapid fulfillment of orders as core competency. If your company is a little slow in getting those packages out of the door because of inadequate staffing, insufficient mechanisation, or other reasons, the first thing you should do is to hire a business that specializes in handling orders quickly and well. Once customers hit the buy button in their shopping cart, they expect to get their package fast. If you don’t fulfill their expectation, they will choose another vendor the next time they plan to purchase that item.
Nine times out of 10, a fulfillment center will get things done better than an in-house order fulfillment system because they have excelled in doing three things:
- Cost efficiency. They handle order fulfillment at a lower cost per unit than your in-house services can hope to do.
- Warehousing and Inventory Management. They have huge warehouses and have refined the process of inventory management. Logistics are a way of life and few challenges intimidate them.
- High tech order processing. They use the best technology to keep track of orders coming in, including the best fulfillment software, serial number processing, and expiration date tracking.
Using FIFO logic, your products will not age on shelves and using proprietary logic you will pay the lowest possible cost on shipping around the world.
2. Create a content marketing schedule
Content is something customers have come to expect from leading companies. This content can come in the form of blog posts, video tutorials, or social media updates on industry trends. Companies that have not caught on to the advantages of this inbound marketing strategy fail to attract, convert, close, and delight customers.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these four elements:
- Attraction. While a carefully scripted Google PPC ad or Facebook ad might drive customers to your website, they will quickly click away if all they experience is a catalog website and nothing but sales letters and videos. Since they have nothing to engage their interest, they click away. Alternatively, if you have lots of fascinating content, they will not only tarry awhile, but bookmark the page to come back to read more. Many will even subscribe for your newsletters because your ethical bribe now looks much more tempting and they would like to stay in touch.
- Conversion. Conversion happens over time. While a few people might become customers right away, it’s estimated that it takes an average of seven marketing messages (usually via email) before they decide to buy something.
- Close. If you deliver or showcase excellent content on a regular basis, then closing is actually only the first step in developing a long-term relationship with your company.
- Delight. You delight a customer by giving them what they want. Your content may delight them by offering ideas on how they can find solutions. Your products may delight them because they provide the solutions.
3. Practice Old-Fashioned Customer Service
Customer service is not an esoteric science. It’s as simple as having someone pick up the phone when customers call rather than forcing them to go to voicemail. It’s as simple as responding rapidly to email queries or complaints. It’s as simple as being concerned and proactive about getting their questions answered before they make a purchase or having after their complaints addressed or misperceptions corrected by a knowledgeable phone rep.
And a little friendliness and good humor doesn’t hurt either. Here’s a true story mentioned in Forbes about how the founder of CD Baby wrote an ingenious order confirmation email: “Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow . . .” Derek Sivers later sold CD Baby for no less than US$22-million.
Customers Love Efficiency
You’ll build a fabulous repeat business if you can amplify your efficiency ratio, and you’ll more than make up for the rising cost of advertising.
