- the “frenzy” is when a new customer really likes you and then proceeds to order frequently until they burn themselves out and fade away back into old habits. Gotta reconnect with them when they are ready to come back!
Wow, I never knew this had a name! Yes, this is me quite often. I never realized I had my own category (blush).
All great ideas.
… I am in my 9th month of being open, and my sales have dropped by 50% compared to our first month. I am baffled by this because we hear nothing but good things and positive feedback.
That can be very frustrating, especially with good feedback from your customers.
Here are the two most important keys when building any business:
[]Make sure you are making the very best, most consistent product / service you possibly can (which I’m sure you’re doing).
[]Build a community around your business.
Often business owners assume that the community will build itself, as long as you build the best product / service possible. Sometimes that’s the case but to be sure it always helps to make sure you are encouraging, and even promoting it.
For the sake of this post, lets define a “community” as a group of customers that interact with you, your business and each other on a regular basis. Greeting your customers by name with a big smile at the counter is only the beginning. To build a community, you will sometimes have to contact your customers directly through means like email, text-message and/or social media, especially when you have a great deal of competition. There are great automated tools to perform these kinds of contacts for you, but if cost is a concern at the moment you can achieve much of this using some guerrilla tactics like:
[]Creating a social media page of your choice.
[]Go to an online QR code website and print one that links to your social media page
- Place a sign at your counter that says, "Scan this code, check-in at (social media page name) and earn a (reward here… it doesn’t have to cost you money to be of value to the customer, so get creative).
By doing so, you’ve given yourself at least one way to reach out to your customers inexpensively. This will work, however I liken this to putting on a spare tire. It’ll get you out of a tough situation, but it shouldn’t be considered a final solution. Once you’re in a position to do so, look for and test several Customer Loyalty engagement systems. Find the one that works best for your needs. Some such services come with a marketing team that works with you to implement all of their available tools at no additional cost to you. Ask questions and often they’ll teach you more than you really wanted to know in the first place.
Using the same idea above, you could replace #3 with “Take a ‘Selfie’ eating your pizza and post it on your own social media pages and earn (reward here)”. This allows you to get exposure to the friends and family of your patrons.
If you’re using some kind of technology at the counter, be it a Point Of Sale system or an independent Customer Loyalty service, you can track when your customers were in last and for those that haven’t been back in a certain period of time you can automatically send them out what I call a “We Miss You” offer, intended to bring the customer back into the store.
More ways to build community, if your store is big enough for it, offer it as meeting space for local groups, sports teams and more. It rarely costs you anything and those that come may end up ordering.
Ultimately, you want every customers possible to willingly provide you with contact information, such as email address and/or cell phone number, so you remind them of how much they love your pizza, lol. “Happy Birthday, Bob, from (Pizza Store name here). Come in today and get a free personal pizza pie on us!”. If your customer base is small enough, a phone call works even better, but an email or text-message is better than nothing at all.
Hope that helps!