What's Your Plan to Win Them Back?
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the stock market went haywire, what did you do with your communications?
Some companies focused all their communications on crisis messaging to existing customers. Some went quiet while they tried to regroup. A few saw the opportunity to pivot their marketing messages and keep serving their audiences.
Whatever the response, most business lost customers in early 2020 and many will continue to lose them for the rest of the year. That’s bad news.
The good news is: most customer loss, especially due to circumstances outside of your control, isn’t permanent. Same with the “no thanks” you hear from many prospects during this time. What they’re all saying is “We’re going through the same uncertainty everyone else is, so we’re not buying right now.”
What will turn a “not right now” into a “not ever,” though, is if they stop hearing from you.
I forgot that you existed.
You probably didn’t lose business because of any fault of your own. It’s safe to assume that most folks paused contracts or stopped buying because of a universal tightening-of-the-belt. That’s a natural response to uncertainty.
Taking some time to regroup (and going quiet with your marketing messages in the meantime) is also a natural response to uncertainty.
But the worst thing you can do is allow that pause to extend so long that people start to forget about you.
You need to engage with your customers and prospects with the simple goal of letting them know they’re on your mind—and staying on theirs. Think about it like writing postcards to a friend who lives far away. You don’t text every day, you’re definitely not going to get together this weekend, but you want to touch base once in a while just to let them know you’re thinking about them.
We are never ever getting back together.
If you don’t keep talking to your customers and prospects, someone else will. Especially when the economy is down, the competition is fiercer. And if they deliver on their sales promises, you’ve likely lost your customer forever.
Even in the best case scenario, if the competition doesn’t swoop in, people are reallocating money right now. If they don’t perceive a project to be urgent—even if you’ve already started it—it’ll get pushed down the list of priorities and it may be months or even years before you can pick up again.
How can you prevent that from happening?
Blank space.
Even if you haven’t sent so much as a tweet out during the past three months, it’s not too late. Or if you’ve only done crisis communications, that’s okay too.
Right now is a really cool opportunity to reinvent how you message to your audiences. We’re living in a new world. Business leaders’ priorities and concerns are different. Relationships and values are more important than dollars and cents.
So toss out any tired, stale marketing strategies and wow your clients by being not just another vendor, but the partner they need during this time.
You belong with me.
Here are some ideas for showing up as a partner to your customers:
Send them a survey to find out what they need right now
Serve instead of selling: offer free resources like webinars and white papers that you usually keep gated or behind a pay wall
Write an email (or call) just to ask how they’re doing, and don’t mention business at all
Rework your offerings so they address extremely relevant needs and concerns
Surprise and delight them with a book in the mail—and a handwritten note
Banish business jargon from your communications and write to them from one human to another
Take them out to lunch to support local restaurants reopening
P.S. Yes, I did use Taylor Swift song titles for my four subheads. Yes, they came from four different albums. I have range.