Everything about the contemporary way of doing business is centered around information. Your customers won't choose you instead of your competitors if they haven't heard of your brand, your service, and the effectiveness of your customer support team.
Naturally, the quality of your offer plays a vital role: It will determine whether you can retain customers. However, the initial part of the whole process is strictly connected to sharing information. Before we get into strategies, you should understand that an average customer is used to being swamped with ads. Hence the need to learn and apply strategies that add the wow effect.
SMS the Right Way
The power of SMS is often neglected by many companies. For some reason, they consider it outdated. It's actually right on the contrary. Short Message Service is a direct and a highly personalized way to contact customers and share precise information with them.
Apart from the usual methods (sharing promotional texts, offering discounts, etc.) companies should also implement a new system of texting called geomarketing. By using customers' locations effectively, there are significant chances of making a sale and increasing it as well.
Let's see how that works in a practical example. If you run a bakery, every time there's a customer close to you in a certain radius, they will receive a text containing a list of freshly baked goods. And reaching out at the right time and place could ensure that they could be tempted and at the same time feel connected.
Share In-App Data
Instead of going all-in by investing into social media advertising, an investment in developing the mobile app could be worthwhile.
Basically a sure thing—someone who knows and has your app is already your customer. So, making suggestions at the exact moment customers are using the app increases your chances of making a sale.
Predict Their Needs
Dormant customers can be a very profitable resource if you use them properly. By paying attention to individual purchases, you'll be able to easily predict their future needs.
Besides, this is a great opportunity to upsell and cross-sell. However, you should do it cleverly. Instead of just directing customers to your list of products or services, you should refer them to a guide.
For example, if your business sells hair color, the obvious thing to do is create a blog post that instructs your customers on how to dye their hair by themselves. But, they will also need a good shampoo and a powerful conditioner, which is your chance to recommend other products that you offer.
Take Advantage of Chat Bots
Chat bots are a form of highly intelligent software that can automate part of your task when it comes to overall communications with customers without decreasing the quality of your service. Depending on the question at hand, a smart chatbot can even alarm an agent with expertise in a particular area.
For a while, chat bots were considered a passing trend, but taking a careful look at the websites of several world-famous brands, one can see chat boxes popping up and offering their assistance.
Send Highly Personalized Newsletters
Similar to SMS, many businesses just gave up on emails and marked them as a thing of the previous decade. Well, it's certain that your company is using email platforms, meaning that everyone who uses the internet also has an email address.
So, it all comes down to how you use it. Sending out emails in bulk is a one-way street to being marked as spam. However, if you introduce highly personalized and informative newsletters to the way you do business, you'll see that emails are a great platform for developing profitable knowledge-sharing strategies.
Make Your Content Simple to Share
You need to understand that you're not the only one sharing your content. There's a very fluent network of customers who share content between themselves. So, by making your content simple to share (by introducing a share bar containing at least the most popular social media networks), you'll do yourself and your customers a favor.
Build a Quality FAQ Page
While we're on the subject of doing favors, building a proper customer support knowledge base will save a lot of time and energy for both you and your customers.
This means you should take your FAQ page to a whole new level. The majority of website visitors prefer exploring by themselves instead of getting in touch with an agent right away. So, by creating a powerful support knowledge base that's simple to navigate, you will be able to provide customers with answers before they even start experiencing serious issues and save a significant amount of time your employees would spend answering repetitive questions.
For something like this, you'll need quality FAQ software. If you want to build an extensive page, you need to make sure that your visitors can jump from one section to another with ease. Besides, a knowledge base such as this needs to be properly formatted. Chances are you'll also want to incorporate multimedia content, and without proper software, the FAQ page would look messy.
Post Engaging Social Media Content
The simplest way to share information is through social media. But, like we already mentioned, it's necessary to find a fresh approach that won't drive customers away. To attract audiences via social platforms, you'll need to learn to build engaging content. And one of the best ways to do this is to ask for feedback, again an effective measure of sharing knowledge and knowing what should be done.
The future of your business basically depends on your efforts to put your brand on the map. However, quantity isn't the answer here. Even if you're going a step further in trying to reach out to your target audience, chances are it won't work if you don't do it properly. Suggestions listed in this article will undoubtedly enable you to gather the attention of your audience, so make sure to implement them in your business.
Robin Singh is a technical support executive. Currently, he is a resident knowledge management expert at ProProfs.