7 Brilliant Ways To Stay In Touch With Your Customers During The Lockdown

When there is a big gap in communication, the connection you have with your client can be lost. It is crucial to keep reminding them that your business is still available to cater to their needs. You must work on developing a good and long term relationship with your previous and existing customers. If you are in touch with the customers through different ways, it will help you in getting repeat business, your customers will refer you to their friends, colleagues and family members and you will also get online reviews about your business.

This is a good thought! But the highlight here is that you need to stay in touch with your customers without sounding too pushy! Your approach should be subtle yet impactful!

The motive is to create a genuine and eloquent relationship with your clients. The best way to do this is to ensure that you provide something useful, relevant and productive to your clients through various ways!

This is a period of lockdown and this is also the time to put in more efforts to stay in touch with your customers. When you adopt smart online ways to stay in touch with your customers, you will be able to create a great connect by keeping the social distancing intact!

Here Are The 7 Brilliant Ways To Stay In Touch With Your Customers During This Lockdown:

Newsletters!

You might know that sending newsletters is important and you might be implementing it as well. But it is also important now more than ever to get more creative with your newsletters. You need to work on having prolific subject likes and headlines as well to capture people’s attention quickly.

Select an impressive newsletter design and format.
Decide who your audience is and create the newsletter accordingly.
Add headlines to different sections of your newsletter.
Use attractive and custom made images.
Add video and infographics to your newsletter if possible.
Plain content will not get the best response; you need to support your content with media.
Add social media icons.
Add call- to-action in the footer along with other contact details.
Create curiosity for the next newsletter.
Test your newsletter before sending so that you can make improvisations if required.

You can send newsletter for holding contests, for product launches, for giving out general information, for giving blog or knowledgebase updates or for any other topic that is appropriate for your customers.

Invite Your Customers To Online Webinars

Schedule a webinar for all your customers that they can watch from the comfort of their home.

Plan a time and a day and send emails to your existing customers or prospective customers or both for attending the webinar.
Send confirmation email. When the attendees register for your webinar, they should get a confirmation email from your behalf.
A day or two prior to the webinar, the attendees should get a reminder email as well.
Tell them what they can expect out of it.
Give them an introduction about the professional speaker(s) who are going to conduct the webinar.
If possible, you can create a video yourself for giving out an invitation for the webinar and the subjects that will be covered.
Provide them with registration links to register for the webinar.
You can allow the attendees to post their opinions live while the webinar is going on.
Allow them to drop their thoughts and suggestions about the webinar and ask them if they would like to see a webinar on some other topic as well.

Through webinars, you can create a cumulative brand value for your target audience. If your audience loves the way your webinar was conducted and if they receive some useful information that they were looking for, they will surely want to sign up for your next webinar.

Setup A Referral Program

If a referral or loyalty program is setup perfectly, it goes a long way in keeping in touch with your existing customers and getting new prospects. For referring people to your business, you can offer bonus, you can offer discounts or you can offer free products. When you set up a referral program, make sure that it is marketed well. People should know about the benefits they get by being a part of your referral program.

You can easily set up a referral program irrespective of whether your business is product based or service based, just the nature of the referral program changes according to your business model. You can also design a referral program where you tell people to leave reviews on social media websites, follow and like your social media accounts. Your existing customers can get loyalty rewards when they start following your social media accounts. The rewards you choose matter a lot and they should be beneficial for your existing customers. Keep in touch with your customers by telling them about the benefits they can get by being a part of your referral or loyalty program.

Keep In Touch On The Special Occasions

Make your customers feel special on their birthdays and anniversaries; they will remember this for sure. Send them wishes on festivals as well. The best way to wish your customers on their birthdays and anniversaries is by creating a customized email. While you can wish them on the general festivals through newsletters, by putting up a banner on your website or through your social media accounts. This is one of the most impactful ways of staying in touch with your customers, they will really appreciate the effort and they will remember your business brand if they need your products or services in the future.

Harness The Power Of Social Media

Social media is your strength when it comes to keeping in touch with your customers online. You can do a lot on social media! Hoping that you have added most of your customers to your social media networks, here are some interesting things you can do to keep in touch with your customers:

You can start polls and ask people to give their votes on some important topic.
You can create informative product videos and post them on your social media accounts.
You can create and post some funny and interesting videos or images as well that are not related to your industry or business, post them just for fun.
If any of your customers have given testimonials, display them on social media.
Go live.
Ask your team members to shoot a virtual video that can be addressed to the people generally and to your customers.
On Instagram, create Instagram stories on a regular basis.
Create competitions where your customers can participate and win, you can create them on any of your social media accounts.
Surprise your customers with something unexpected!

Be social! Always give an opportunity to people to connect with you and communicate with you and being active on social media is the best way to do that.

Send Personalized Emails

A newsletter is addressed to all the customers but a personalized email has a greater impact as it is created for one particular customer keeping his/her needs in mind. It is a good idea to create and send a personalized email to your earlier clients for catching up. Wish them the best and find out how their work is going on and ask if they are facing any issues which they need advice on.

You can make this email a lot better by adding a link to a helpful blog post, an article or a video that you have created. If you are going to host any online event or a webinar, you can talk about that as well. This way your email is both friendly and professional.

Go Digital!

In this time of lockdown, many companies have made their business operations online, you need to go online as well! Digitizing your business operations can allow you to serve your customers even though they are staying in their homes. If you are a fitness instructor, therapist or teacher, you can make videos on a regular basis and make use of online tools like Zoom, Skype and Facebook Messenger for staying in touch with your customers.

If you are not able to put up live videos, you can make pre-recorded videos as well. No matter in which profession or business you are in, you can create your channel on YouTube or Vimeo and post videos that your customers can easily access. If you are into the food and culinary industry, you can upload videos about some easy and quick recipes that the customers can try at home. If you have an online store, nothing like it! even though you can’t deliver some products now, you can encourage your users to keep browsing your website and they can select the products that they want to purchase and they can place the orders.

Let your customers know that they will get the products to their door step when the products are deliverable. Irrespective of the type of business you have, there is always a way to digitize your business operations and reach out to your customers, figure them out and do your best!

Over to you…

The COVID-19 outbreak and the lockdown has been difficult for everyone. No doubt this is a tough time but your creativity and presence of mind can get you through this. It’s a time to learn and retrospect as well; it’s time to think about new ways to reach out to your customers so that they remember your business brand. Your strongest point is that you know your customers well and you know what they would be interested in, and only you can create unique and creative solutions for your customers so get going, let your customers know that your business brand is around should they need anything!