Make Your Customers Fall in Love with You

All this week on The DOZ Blog we’re celebrating love. It’s nearly Valentine’s Day so we’re in the mood for roses, chocolates, candlelit dinners, and romance generally – who isn’t, right? But we also want to share the love, and that’s why we’re curating some of the best content this week on the subject of love.

Today we’re looking at strategies for getting your customers to love you, tomorrow we’ll look at how holidays like Valentine’s Day appear in search queries by diving into Google Trends, and come Friday we’ll be revealing how the DOZ team will be spending their Valentine’s Day this year.

Business used to be about basic equations of profit and loss. Buy low, sell high, and profit. What could be more simple, right?

But in this age of 24/7 coverage, social media, connected consumers and an increasingly engaged audience, business is no longer a simple landscape for the entrepreneur to negotiate.

Consumers no longer just want the best price, they also want to make a real connection with the person selling to them. They no longer want the best possible price; they want the best price from the best vendor. It’s not enough that your product works, it needs to be a product that the customer will feel good about buying, and your company needs to be the sort of company a customer feels good about doing business with.

In short, while it might be It is a Valentine’s Day truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife, it is also the case that a business that does not make its customers fall in love with it won’t be competitive in the long term.

But how do you make customers feel this way about you? How do you avoid leading them on? And how do you make sure that their love is for real and ensure you aren’t just some one-night stand?

Here are the nine ways you can make sure that your customers fall in love with you.

1. First Impressions Count

Let’s face it: we live in the world of Tinder where swiping away a bad first impression is all too easy.

When a customer visits your website for the first time you need to present your best face. Your copy? It needs to be perfect. The images? Engaging, well-chosen, and in line with expectations.

No one likes being sold to on a first date, and neither should your customer encounter buy now buttons begging to be clicked on your landing pages. Be cool, reveal enough to get them interested, and get them smiling. Your mother was right: you’ll never get a second chance to make a first impression.

2. Don’t Just Talk About You

Me: it’s everyone’s favorite subject, right?

But if you spend your time talking yourself up while ignoring the person across the table, you’ll be heading home alone. In business, if al you are talking about is how great you are, you’ll lose the customer before you even have a chance to break through.

Make sure you are communicating how their life is going to get better, how their problems will be solved, and how their pain will be reduced. Sure, you’ll be talking about yourself as an integral part of that better life, but the focus should be on them.

3. Make a Small Investment

It’s how the game is played. You meet someone in a bar, you buy them a drink, you engage in some conversation and maybe get a phone number. But what’s the equivalent move online?

You can’t buy a visitor a drink, but you can offer them something for free to show you’re interested. Premium content like an eBook, a white paper, a slide deck, an infographic, a webinar or some audio content ready to download can all be used to pique the interest of visitor.

And what do you get in exchange? For the moment you won’t get the pleasant conversation or the phone number, but you can ask for an email address to follow up with later.

4. Don’t Forget to Call

It’s one of the biggest and most common complaints in the world of romance: they seemed so nice, they seemed so interesting, I gave them my details but they never called!

Don’t be the guy or girl who doesn’t call. If you ask for someone’s email address and promise to subscribe them to your newsletter, make sure you do exactly that. Start the communication soon, and make them feel like you care about them. Auto-responders have their place, but a little bit of personalization goes a long way.

Don’t leave your new catch hanging – reward their interest by reaching out before they forget about you altogether.

5. Organize a Date 

You like them, they like you – it’s time to take things forward.

Organizing a date in real life means picking a locale, thinking about some activities, and working on your communication. When it comes to making a sale online you need to get the ground game right, too.

When you reach out to your potential customer, make it friendly, act interested, and make your outreach no-risk. If your doing the inviting, you should be paying. You want to dazzle on this first date, not disappoint, so have you’re A-game ready to go and turn on the charm.

6. Keep in Touch

So your first date went well. When do you call again? You don’t want to appear too desperate so calling on the way home is out of the question. You also don’t want to play it too cool so a week is too long to wait.

Once a customer is in your sales funnel you need to keep in touch with them. Tools like Intercom make this easy, as do automatic emails triggered when you haven’t heard from someone in a few days, a week, or longer. Don’t ignore the person who took the time to try your demo, hear your sales pitch, and interact with you in the professional equivalent of a date. They might have reasons for not getting back to you straight away, but you have no reason to ignore them.

7. Make Your Pitch 

There’s competition everywhere these days, and especially so if you’re looking for love in your life. All that competition means that the chances that your crush is only being sought by you is slim. She’s likely got others interested, and he’s likely got a couple of different numbers in his phone next to yours. If you want to win their attention, you’ll eventually have to make your pitch.

When it’s time to lay it all on the line, be honest about what you can offer and what you both can achieve together. Don’t over promise – that’s only going to drive your customer away when you fail to come up with the goods – but show confidence and avoid under-promising, too. Explain why you are the best solution to what ails them, why together you’ll be so happy, and – most importantly – get set to take the next step.

8. Pop the Question

You’ve made your pitch, now it’s time to get serious: it’s time to pop the question.

Yes, you have to ask for the sale.

Depending on how things have gone to this point asking for the same might be scary and nerve-wracking and the hardest thing you’ve ever done. It might also feel like the most natural thing in the world.

If things go well then this is a day that you’ll both remember forever. It’s the day when you decided to form a team and work together. It’s a commitment, hopefully a loving one, and maybe even for life.

We all can dream…

9. Work on the Relationship

Fall in love? Easy.

Stay in love? That’s harder.

A relationship – whether personal or professional – needs work. A customer who buys from you one time isn’t necessarily going to make a second purchase if you don’t seem to care about them anymore. You need to be checking in, keeping contact, sharing and caring for your customer. If you don’t give then they won’t either.

Long term relationships do take more work than a ‘hit it and quit it’ encounter. But they’re better for you, better for the customer, and ultimately more satisfying for everyone concerned.