by Do you enjoy the convenience of receiving reminders from your mechanic when your car is due for a service? Or the vet reminding you that your dog needs its vaccinations? Or when the florist emails you to remind you of your spouse’s birthday?
These reminders are beneficial for both consumers and for businesses.
Why a reminder system is good for business
A reminder system is great for any business, as it means more repeat sales. Repeat business is desirable because it’s eight times cheaper than seeking new business. Getting existing clients back is a no-brainer if you want to maximise your profits!
But how do you implement a reminder system?
Implementing a reminder system might sound like a good idea – but where do you begin?
The best systems are computerised, rather than relying on human memory. The latter is just too unreliable – you need to systemise it. And the first step in systemising is to outline your after-sales process.
What’s an after-sales process?
Many business owners make the mistake of ending their sales process at the sale, but it’s what happens afterwards that impacts on whether that customer is going to come back to your or not. So make sure you do some of the following when a sale is completed:
- Courtesy call to ensure your client is happy.
- Feedback form (and acting on feedback given).
- Thank you card: hand-written and sent in the post.
- Newsletter sign-up: be sure to ask all customers to sign up for your newsletter.
- Referral card: make it easy for your customers to refer their friends and colleagues.
- Reminders: a-ha, yes, the all-important reminders! These could be phone calls, SMS messages, or emails – whatever’s appropriate to your business.
So how do you implement the reminders?
Unfortunately there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for this: you’ll need to do some research around software solutions that are suitable for your business. But it’s well worth doing, because of the extra sales and profit you’re likely to make.
The software solutions may be a generic CRM system (“Customer Relationship Management”), or there may be something out there that’s specific to your industry. Researching your competitors to see what they do can be a good starting point!
Of course, you may choose to go with a manual pen-and-paper system… the main thing is that you do implement some kind of systematic reminder process.
After all, not only is it good for your business, but most of your customers will be grateful for the reminder too!
