Wanna know the secret to getting repeat clients? As a business owner you sell a product, a service or an experience. I will argue that you need to sell all three. Why, because selling a product or a service isn’t enough.
Let's say you're not there yet, no worries. Start with focusing on the customer's experience. By creating an experience you are evoking emotion you create a more thoughtful, lasting impression. You are already passionate about the people you serve and what you can offer, now take it a step further.
By curating an intentional client experience that your customers see as thoughtful, inspiring, educational or whatever your aim, you cultivate a new level of customer loyalty.
Let’s walk through the ways you can incorporate what you are selling into a full blown customer experience that is both memorable and impactful.
Building Soulful Connections
As a person that works 1:1 with clients everyday I find that building connections is what this business is all about. I'm not talking about the day to day networking, I am talking about building a connection with your audience that resonates with their soul.
WTF does that mean? It means that it brings your customers joy to communicate with you because they love what you represent. It’s all about building a client experience that brings your passion forward, connects to theirs, and creates a reciprocal relationship.
Here are three ways to build that connection with your client:
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Know what they want
- Dig deep into understanding the wants and needs of your customer. You can do this in a couple of ways.
- Identify your perfect customer by making a mood board. Get really specific on they type of person you want to attract
- Identify their gender
- What is important to them in life
- What their interests are and what they are passionate about
- How do they spend their free time
- Market Research: Find out what is missing in the market and fill the gap and determine the adjectives that you use and ensure your customer relates to these words by asking them.
- Identify your perfect customer by making a mood board. Get really specific on they type of person you want to attract
- Dig deep into understanding the wants and needs of your customer. You can do this in a couple of ways.
- Create a conversation with them. Connections happen when you communicate. Be intentional about the content you put out there with the aim to build a conversation with your customer.
- Meet your customers where they are and interact with them. By responding to them, asking them questions, and creating a 1:1 discussion you are building trust and putting a human behind your brand.
Create an Emotional Sales Process
You're selling a service or product that creates a benefit for the customer. Turning it into an emotional buying experience is so much more impactful to you and them.
People largely buy based on emotion and then justify with logic
PersistIQ Sales Blog
Here are three ways to build that emotional connection:
- Take a closer look at what you are selling and create a brainstorming map of the emotions you want your customer to feel in the buying process
- These may be: Demand, Familiarity, Social Acceptance, Status, Achievement, Affiliation, Power, Convenience.
- Take your top three emotions and then create another brainstorming map that identifies the ways to create that emotion
- IE) sparking a sense of achievement through learning, creating a sense of self-worth, or wanting to have that because it will elevate their personal motivations.
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Based on that emotion decide what is most important to explain to your customer. IE) If your selling based on Achievement then you will want to incorporate the following into your strategy:
- ROI - Return on Investment...what will they get, be or know and be able to do
- How will it benefit them...how will it make them better, how will they be able to make more sales, how will it elevate their business.
Brand Voice & Communication
Think about it this way, most people remember the way you made them feel, not necessarily what they bought from you. It is all about being intentional with your voice and carrying through your personality into your communication.
It all starts with knowing how you want the customer to feel when they meet your brand. This starts with knowing yourself first and then being able to identify how you want to bring those ideas to life.
By getting really clear on your brand voice and tone you can immerse your personality into your every interaction. Below is an example of my brand voice words that I feel reflect my brand and what I want people to believe when they work with me.
Step One: Write out your three descriptive brand words that you want your brand associated with.
Thing about your company’s personality and emotion that you want infused into your communication.
Step Two: Create additional descriptive adjectives that web off of your brand voice characteristic.
Example below.
Step Three: Now use your words above to describe how you will transcend this in your brand. Identify what those brand words mean, what you will do in your brand to incorporate those values and what you will not do.
Step Four: Create your action plan on how you will incorporate your brand voice across your brand channels, IE) social media platforms, website, in person calls and so forth.
Surprise and Delight
Remember the last time you purchased something and received something a little bit extra from a company. Those moments are what we call, "surprise and delight".
I’ll never forget when I signed to work with a photographer for my wedding and after signing she sent me a package in the mail, a small box with a locally made chocolate bar, a coffee cup and a handmade note expressing her gratitude.
It made a lasting impression on me because it made me feel special. Because I was completely surprised, all I wanted to do was talk about her to my friends and family. After that I became so much more excited to work with her and looked forward to our interactions 10 times more.
This is what creating an experience is all about. She did the big three:
- Emotion: Sparked an emotion of surprise and delight
- Gratitude: Evoked a sense of gratitude based on her offering
- Affluence: She created a sense of validation that I made the right decision by going through her.
If you can land this type of feeling in your sales process, you will definitely create word of mouth marketing and a loyal customer.
Share your Brand Story
Another way to create a connection with your customer is to share your story.
Be raw and authentic. Describe where you came from, the problem you saw and how you overcame it. When you tell your brand story, do not hold back the bad or the ugly as those are the elements that define your brand and how it came to be.
Those elements you may consider to be ugly actually help you to be more relatable to your customer. Being authentic and honest about your truth is a great way to continue to build an experience.
Click below to get your free brand story mini-course!
Show Face
Put your face out there. People remember faces more than brands so when you put your face first they begin to associate your person with your brand.
Social Media
It can be very easy to just post business collateral on social media, but try to push yourself to get your face out there a bit.
Some great ways to do this are to use and inspiring quote and then have a picture of yourself or you working. If you know your customer loves nature, take pictures of yourself and your dog out hiking and post. Find the common interest that aligns with your brand and get your face in the picture.
Video
Get comfortable on video (I know it sucks), but people want to hear what you have to say, create a short and engaging video on a topic your business covers and promote the heck out of it.
Success Stories
Another great way to show face is to explain how you work with other customers and highlight their success stories. People connect even more when you show them what you offer provides actual real life success.
How to Get Repeat Clients
Just as we talked about in the beginning, if you are only offering a service, you are missing out on another revenue stream. Go through the exercise of brainstorming the experiences you can create or the products you may be able to tag onto your service sale and vice versa if you offer the others. By tagging an additional upsell on, you are exposing more of your offering to the customer...
and if you sell a great service along with other great offerings, they will most certainly keep an eye on what else you have to offer.
Another great way to have your customers come back time and time again is to provide them with incentive.
Let's say they have taken your course in the past and now you have a new offering, as long as you have captured them on your email list you should be able to promote your new offering when it is ready. The same goes if you add on an additional layer of service.
Always be thinking, what would the upsell be as you are establishing your line of offerings.
Collaborations
Many times you may see some of your favorite brands collaborating with other brands taht you admire, this is because they know what their customer likes and it adds another level of upsell and excitement.
Search for other like-minded brands and you may just have a new collaboration on your hands.
Final Thoughts
Bottomline: you should always be thinking about what you can upsell and how you can make the buying process an emotional experience. The more positive emotions you can associate with your brand, the more likely you will gain a loyal customer.
No matter what you sell, always be thinking about the customer experience and how you can make it better.
When you look through the eyes of the customer and know what they want, you will gain more than a sale, you will gain a connection.
If you want to take your client experience to new heights and really make a lasting impact then you gotta invest the time and energy into curating that plan.
I'm Kristine and I help service-based entrepreneurs like you create epic change in their business through establishing their brand foundations, building strategies that meet their needs and helping them to create a plan to meet their goals.
I would love to talk to you about how we can make repeat customers a real thing in your business and create a road map of how to get there.
Click here to schedule a call with me and if you aren't inspired and super jazzed about what we can do for your brand in 45 minutes, feel free to walk a way with some damn good ideas and a new perspective. No pressure. No hard sale, just two people having a conversation! Click here to schedule a time that works for you.
