Customers are the lifeblood of any successful business. To ensure sustainable growth and increased profitability, it is essential to focus on acquiring new customers, fostering customer loyalty, and maximizing sales potential.
How To Attract More Customers.
Here is a comprehensive guide on strategies to attract and retain more customers, leading to lasting business success.
Give away products
Giving the product away might seem crazy but in some cases it is the only way to establish it in a new market.
Customers are drawn to businesses that genuinely care about their needs and desires.
When a product is revolutionary, few people want to be the first to try it, so asking them for money up front often simply creates a barrier.
The key to attracting more customers lies in offering value that exceeds their expectations.
In some cases, this is just something we have to live with, but if owning the product means that the customer will have to buy repeatedly, giving away something that creates a dependency is good business.
There are many examples in practice of products that are sold cheap, with the company making its money on the peripherals. Spare parts for cars are an example; the cars are sold relatively cheaply, but genuine spare parts are expensive, because that is how the manufacturer makes money.
There is no reason at all to be wedded to the idea that every product that leaves the factory gates has to have a price tag on it, and many companies have succeeded admirably by giving products away.
When King C. Gillette invented the safety razor he was working as a salesperson for a bottle-cap manufacturer. He conceived the idea for a disposable razor when his cut-throat razor got too old to be re-sharpened.
He fairly easily developed a way of making the blades and the razors to hold them but economies of scale meant that the blades could only be profit table if he could manufacture them in their millions.
He needed a quick way of getting men to switch over from cut-throat to disposable razors, so he decided to give the product away.
Gillette gave away thousands of razors, complete with blades, knowing that few men would go back to using a cut-throat razor once they had experienced the safety razor.
Within a few days they would need to buy new blades, so Gillette had created an instant market, limited only by his capacity to give away more razors. In time, once the product was established in the market and the first users had started telling their friends about the product; Gillette was able to start charging for the razors themselves.
However, the razors were always sold at close to, or even below, the manufacturing cost.
The company makes its money on selling the blades, which cost almost nothing to produce and which can be sold for a premium price. In time, other shaving systems came along (plastic disposables, for example) that superseded Gillette’s idea, but the basic marketing idea remains and is still used to this day.
How to apply the ideas:
- Identify products that carry a long-term commitment to buying peripherals, spares, or other consumables.
- Decide your target market; there is no point giving out freebies to all and sundry if they aren’t going to follow through and buy your product later.
- Make sure you have good intellectual property rights eg. Patents and more… so that nobody can enter the market with knock-off consumables that work with your giveaway product.
Make your marketing fun
Making your marketing fun for customers is what makes them tell other people about you. This is the basis of viral marketing, the word of mouth that ultimately generates more business than all the advertising campaigns put together.
Humor is good, but something that encourages customers to pass on messages to friends, business colleagues, family, and indeed anyone else will result in improved brand equity and increased awareness of what your company is all about.
The message need not be too serious, either, or indeed be an overt marketing plug. Just passing the brand name along, and having it associated with something entertaining and fun, is quite enough.
Your other marketing promotions will fill in the gaps, and anyway no single promotion will ever cover all the communication you want it to.
The best you can hope for is that one communication will sensitize the customers to receiving a later one. The idea Radisson Hotels serve a predominantly business clientele.
Business travelers typically spend a great deal of time in their rooms: they tend to use the time to catch up with work rather than go out sightseeing or to entertainment venues, since this allows them to spend more time with their families.
Radisson hit on the idea of supplying each room with a plastic duck to play with in the bath. The duck came with a note saying that the guest was welcome to keep the duck, perhaps to take home for his or her children: if the guest preferred, however, the duck could be mailed anywhere in the world in its own special crate, with a message from the guest.
Mailing the duck incurred a nominal charge that could be added to the guest’s final bill: the charge was, in fact, more than enough to cover the costs of the duck, the crate, and the postage, but in luxury hotel terms it was small.
The result of this was that hundreds of thousands of Radisson ducks were soon finding their way across the world. Children, girlfriends, husbands, wives, friends, work colleagues, bosses, and business associates began receiving the ducks, which no doubt raised a smile.
The effect was to raise the profit of Radisson, but more importantly it changed the brand personality, the formal image of the typical business hotel chain was modified, showing that even a top-class hotel has a sense of fun.
The shift in perception contributed to a growth in Radisson’s weekend family trade, and made business travelers more likely to stay.
How to apply the ideas:
- Do something that is fun.
- Ensure that it is as easy as possible for someone to tell others about the experience.
- Try to have something tangible attached to the experience so that there is a permanent reminder of the event.
- Be careful that the message (in this case, “We like to have fun”) does not detract from the rest of the brand image.
