Gaining and retaining customers has always been a challenging task for businesses. It takes a lot of effort and resources to acquire new customers, and even more to keep them satisfied.
Customers have high expectations and demand top-notch services. They are quick to switch to a competitor if they feel their needs are not being met. Businesses like yours must continuously work to improve their customer experience and offer exceptional value to retain their customer base.
It's crucial to listen to customer feedback and take necessary actions to address their concerns. Building long-term relationships with customers is essential for business growth and success but it isn't easy to do at scale.
Using the positive experiences of existing customers to increase sales might sound fanciful, but you can achieve it. Getting customers to return the next time they want a skip is possible even when it’s been a while.
Marketing Opportunities
Generally marketing refers to taking your services to a market which is a group of people who could use your services and importantly may reference each other when considering your service. Marketing requires two actions, one is to create your marketing collateral which is generally your website and the second is to get this collateral in front of the eye balls of potential customers. This can be done via Adwords, SEO, Facebook and other channels as you deem appropriate. The success of your campaign will depend on how you have positioned your company and how easily new customers can make their first order. With customers accessing your website outside of business hours and many not wanting to make calls at all having more than just an enquiry form has become essential. You can see my other resource on what your website should contain.
Once you have a customer hiring a skip from you, you need to keep them satisfied so that they will continue hiring from you. As soon as you remove the skip from the customers site they transition to being a previous customer. Do this too soon and the customer may choose to go back to market to find another skip bin company rather than do the easiest thing which is to order another bin. Having processes in place to ensure that you hire as many bins to your current customers is a must. Money and effort spent here will boost your ROI on the marketing spend to win new customers enormously.
Finally once a customer transitions from being a current customer to being a previous customer there are two opportunities. The first is to ask that customer for a review on Google. Again this will boost your marketing efforts as potential customers trust nothing more than the honest reviews of previous customers. Unfortunately just having a few old ones won't help as much as lots of current ones over time. This will really boost your standing on Google and the ROI of your marketing efforts. Generally less than 10% of customers will post a review, anything north of 5% is actually great. If you want to super charge these numbers you could try leveraging the rule of reciprocity by giving the customer something for free they weren't expecting. This could be some colouring in for the kids, a builders pencil, a fitted tarp for the bin (that you reuse), just an extra thing.
The second opportunity is to get those customers to subscribe to a medium in which you regularly post material. This could be to like you on Facebook, follow your company on linked in or simply join your email newsletter (the easiest). You don't have to post a lot and you don't have to make it a sales pitch as that's not what this type of marketing is about. Just sending out an email once an month with some news about a new truck, new bins, new staff members, a story about a break down and how you dealt with it. People don't want to be sent loads of marketing material but if you're sending them something lightly entertaining you'd be surprised by how many are happy to ignore it (seeing just "here if you need").
Over time the bucket of previous customers will get larger and larger and customers who haven't used you in years now have the means to remember you and use you again without going back to Google. Even if they do go back to Google this mechanism will improve your brand recall significantly improving your chances of being clicked on (click through rate) which will improve your ROI as well (Google is looking for this positive signal).
As you can see there is a basic framework for nailing growth which will increase the ROI of your Adwords / advertising spend over time but requires investment in processes across the customer journey to leverage it. While all of these can be done manually and by yourself having automation will allow you to put much of this work on auto pilot.