Understand Your Customers to Gain Sales

No matter what your end goals are — improve sales by 10%, increase your profit margins, or create long-lasting connections with customers, you need to do one thing: understand what your customers want. Once you understand what your customers want, you’ll be able to gear all of your interactions towards that end and while you’re increasing sales, you’ll be able to simultaneously keep your customers fully engaged in your brand.

Understand Your Customers

There are a variety of methods that you can employ to understand your customers better. Tracking customer involvement is one way to understand your client better. Many leaders like to track their clients’ purchasing decisions, while others like to go through the purchasing process themselves. Either way, when you can see how your customers make their purchasing decisions, you might be able to make it easier for them to check out products, add items to their shopping cart, or incorporate promotions and sales into their buying cycle.

Creating customer surveys can help you understand what your customers want. Do your customers prefer a fast shopping cart and weekly emails? Do they prefer to be contacted via social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook? Do your customers want ads sent directly to their emails? When you create customer surveys, you can receive accurate data that will help your company make stronger decisions and, ultimately, gain more sales.

Tracking email and social media involvement can help you uncover how your customers prefer to interact. Once you know your customers’ preferred method of communication, you can promote your brand and connect with your clients the way they want. 

Reliable Communication Matters

Once you understand how your customers function, you can start to communicate with them reliably and compassionately. Sometimes, an email isn’t enough— it could be that the single phone call or handwritten letter makes the difference. When you show your customers that they are important, and more importantly, that they are worthy of your time, they will be more likely to come back in the future. According to Gallup, when your clients are fully engaged with your product or brand, they’ll be more likely to stick with your company or product:

a customer who is fully engaged represents an average 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth compared with the average customer. In stark contrast, an actively disengaged customer represents a 13% discount in those same measures.