How to hold on to your best clients

Having long-term clients is great for businesses because they provide you with a long-term source of income and it is cheaper to hold onto long-term clients than it is to market to and attract new clients.

However, you can have a great product but have terrible service – customers will buy your product once, like it, but won’t go back to you again because they had a bad experience with your business.

Here are our top tips on how to hold onto your best long-term clients.

Get personal

Services are increasingly relying on technology and the internet. This is great for things like lower costs and increased efficiencies but it can come with the cost of being less personal.

Clients will remember the personal touches you make with your service because it shows that you really care about them.

Offer a better-than-expected service

People always remember when they get a service better than they expected. You have probably heard the phrase, “under-promise, over-deliver” before.

Before you make any concrete promises on delivering a service, do your research to work out exactly how much you can deliver, and by when. Then promise your clients slightly lower than these benchmarks, only to provide them everything you are capable of.

Lead your industry

If your competitors start to change and add new services which they know customers and clients want, your clients will go over to them. In order to retain your long-term clients, you need to be the business making the changes, especially when it comes to using new technologies. In a world when people upgrade their smartphones every year, they expect businesses to be using the latest technologies.

Keep in touch

Keeping in touch with your clients is one of the most important things when it comes to holding onto your long-term clients. So not communicating with your clients enough, or making it difficult for them to get in touch with you, will make them look elsewhere for what they need.

You should always be looking at new technology that becomes available and see possibilities of using it to provide a better service.

Use maths to show how great you are

Numbers are hard to argue with. Using data to prove how good your business is is a great way to hold onto long-term clients. For example, showing a client exactly how much more efficient your service is to similar services, or how your service makes their business more efficient will give them a reason to stay with you and not look elsewhere.

Hopefully these tips have been useful for you. Retaining long-term clients is one of the best ways to build a strong and stable business so you should think carefully about how to keep them.