It’s Not Just Fiction: Use customer information and communities to increase frequency, NOW

Frequency is a critical element for Best Customers. Are you taking the time to do more and create more frequency of contact to earn your customers’ commitment?

In the spirit of creative approaches to this challenging economy, here is a story of “olden days” with some learnings to use today:

For years, Harry had made money running his bar like the many other bars in neighboring towns – “keeping the music goin’ and the drinks flowin’.”

Lately though, hard times had fallen on the town and Harry noticed that people were coming into his establishment less and less. He started to fear that they would stop altogether.  Harry didn’t know why the townspeople weren’t coming in anymore, but he did know that the same old approach to running his bar wasn’t going to cut it.

The next night Harry sat and talked to one of his best customers, Robbie, a local blacksmith, about why he wasn’t coming in much anymore.    Well, you know,” he said, “I don’t know ‘bout everybody else, but my missus doesn’t let me spend very much money nowadays. The only time she lets me out is once in a while to see you, and to go to our monthly merchant’s meeting.”   Harry’s ears perked up, “Merchant meeting, you say?”  “Problem is, we’ve had trouble finding a location for the meeting, and I wonder if we’ll even be able to keep the meetings going at all,” explained Robbie.

“Now, if I let you meet at my bar, do you think you get more merchants would come?” Harry probed.  “Well, I reckon they would, yes.”

So Harry started volunteering his bar for the meetings.  He sent notes to the merchants offering a night of half-priced drinks. He made sure to visit the largest merchants and invite them in person, to make sure they would come.  He knew that if the most powerful merchants attended, then the rest would follow.  He offered free meals to those merchants prior to the meeting, to help insure that they would attend.

And they did.

In only a few weeks time, merchants in other towns had gotten word of the meeting night at Harry’s bar, and attendance began to pick up, which resulted in greater sales.  Word spread like wildfire, and by spring, the merchant meeting had grown to include merchants from towns as far as 20 miles away – and for Harry that meant sustaining his business.

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Now, we live in a different time and a different place.  So what can we take from the story of Harry’s bar?

In a year when budgets are tight, here are the three lessons to help you differentiate your offering:

1. Reach out and touch someone. Don’t sit back and do the same marketing as last year. Ask your customers about their behavior and develop new ways to insert yourself into those patterns. If Harry had just gone about his business, he would have lost everything.  But he asked a Best Customer about his needs and identified an opportunity to add value and fill a need.

2. Tap into communities to build value for everyone. Harry discovered that customers still need community in tough times, perhaps even more than in the prosperous ones.  By tying into those needs, he was able to build value for his customer and himself.  He connected to his customers and build traffic, frequency and revenue for himself.  Identify what communities your customers participate in, and see if you can connect and add value.

3. Differentiated treatment for differentiated customers. Harry made sure to invite high value customers in person and offer them free meals before the meeting.  By making sure that Best Customers and advocates came, he made sure the rest would follow.  Offer special treatments to your Best Customers to help them through the recession, and they will both increase their frequency and bring their friends as well.

The prototype for this strategy is Archivers, which holds scrapbooking days with free tools and space, for groups and individual scrapbookers.  In that way, they build community as well as provide services for frequent customers.

Remember that frequency is a critical element for Best Customers. Creating a community of like-minded customers to share insights on their own can be just the thing to differentiate yourself from your competition.

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Tagged as: build community, Community, Customer experience, customer relationships, Customer retention, customer value, Marketing, Scrapbooking