7 Ways To Get Your Customers To Work For You

Your regular customers have always been a key to your business' success, just by the fact that they repeatedly buy from you. But there are so many other ways to make this core group help your business. Some of them require their active participation to various degrees, some ways they won't even know they're helping. And thanks to today's uber-connected world, they can help you in more ways than ever. Here's a look at seven different ways you can put your customers to work for you.

New product development. If you're built up a community within your customer base, you can ask them how they would tweak your product or services and use that feedback to improve what you're offering. Or, in the case of our client, Kolache Factory, you can have your customers come up with completely new products. Kolache Factory is a healthy fast food chain and every year they hold their Koloche Olympics where teams of their employees and teams of customers come up with new ideas for both sweet and savory kolache products. If you'd like full details, I outlined it here, in an earlier post.

Determining your product mix. Here's one they don't even have to know they're helping to help. If you have multiple locations, you may find that customers in different areas have different preferences. You can use your transactional data to see what's selling well in each store and adjust your product mix accordingly. If you're giving each location more of what they're looking for, you'll get higher sales in each location, meaning higher sales overall.

Help spreading promotions to non-customers. There are a number of ways to get your customers to share your promotional offers with others. One wey we've found effective is to simply add an extra coupon for a friend in our direct mail pieces. Basically, one for you and one for a friend. The friend offer doesn't even have to be as good as the customer one. Just the fact you gave them a coupon deemed to be for a friend entices a number od customers to do just that. But it has to have good perceived value. As long as it does, then the customer feels like they are providing something valuable to their friend or family member they pass it on to.

Referring friends to your store. This seems like it's similar to the above idea, but the difference here is you're providing an incentive to refer a friend. This works particularly well in digital formats, where you can track referrals via codes. You offer to give the customer something for each time they refer a friend and that friend buys. You can give them a certain amount or percentage off, a free item, a free service or points towards a loyalty program.

Sharing their experiences. Research has shown time and time again that peer recommendations are one of the top purchase influencers. Now, between review sites such as Yelp and social media there are a lot of ways for customers to share the experiences they have with your store or brand -both positive and negative. You want to do things to encourage them to share the positive experiences. There is nothing wrong with asking someone, if they've had a great customer experience, to write a review for you. Conversely, when you see a bad review – make sure you address it quickly and as politely as you can. Sometimes your best evangelists are those whose bad experiences were then changed to a positive one.

Sharing your product. You can also get your customers to share your product with their communities. We have created Facebook contests for clients, where they've posted pictures of the products they bought from us on the client's Facebook wall – thus sharing it with both our community and theirs. We've also had Pinterest contests where the customer pin boards contain not only pictures of our product but links to that product on our website.

Customer generated content. The previous two idea were examples of customer generated content, but you can take the idea of customers creating your content for you. Doritos and others have gone as far as having customers create their Super Bowl ads for them. It's easy to create a contest to have customers create ads for you. You can also encourage them to do things like write blog posts in exchange for free product.

Well, there you have it. Seven ways to put your customers to work for you. It is by no means a complete list. I'd love to hear some ways you've put customers to work for you!

Mike McClure, looking for customers to write these blog posts for me. 🙂