It is often true in sales and marketing that it is easier to retain existing customers than attract new ones. Yet in most business plans I’ve come across, the biggest focus is set on gaining new clients!
When you look at the cost associated with finding and generating new business sales, compared with the costs of customer retention, there are some simple and cost effective ways of increasing your existing customer loyalty (whilst at the same time improving your marketing) by using labels on your product or packaging. Labels can be an important communication tool.
Here are 5 of the best ways we’ve found to increase loyalty with labels:
1 Go back to your roots – Share your product or company story.
In recent years, this has become extremely popular on food packaging, but can also extend to almost any
industry type. If you are providing a product or service, use a label to add your name, brand or origin
to your product, or even your unique sales benefit – i.e. ‘handpicked by Jim’. It could be the fact your
product is ‘100% recyclable’, ‘comes all the way from Maggie’s farm’, or gives ‘10% of all profits back
to a chosen charity’. Sharing your positive business attributes can make people form a connection with
your brand that keeps you in the forefront of their minds.
2 Excel at customer service
This may seem like an obvious answer, but labels can go a long way in helping to provide good
customer service, especially when keeping customers abreast of company developments. Add a small label
to your order acknowledgements or invoices with details of new product launches (cross selling), or add
small news bulletins which can be changed when needed. Get people actually looking out for your
correspondence!
3 Give a personalised thank you
It can be challenging for smaller businesses to find an edge over large corporate organisations, but a
special thank you with a personalised gift label will set you apart from the competition.
4 Offer private
labelling & branding
By private labelling, I do not mean licencing your product to another company to sell under its
name. This does not have to be a complicated or expensive task. I am talking about using labelling to
offer a service to your customer which will help them market in an easy way! Add a bespoke sticker to
your product with your client’s logo, perhaps with their telephone number, and let them reap the
benefits of repeat sales of your product.
5 Make it easy
for people to find you
QR codes can be great on labels as a marketing tool, directing people back to your website, encouraging
repeat orders and also marketing your business as a forward thinking, technologically advanced leader.
Websites such as http://www.createqrcode.co.uk/ can create your codes for free.
For an added cost, barcode labels can be a great way of streamlining your product lines internally and
externally, saving you (and your clients) time and money.
Just recently, a client approached me and said they were finding it hard to sell a product as whenever they introduced it to an end user they couldn’t figure out how to open the unit. So was this a simple oversight? Or a huge design error? Well either way – the one thing that was apparent was that if they wanted to sell the product then it needed a product modification. The easiest and cheapest way to change it was by adding a label.
Labels not only allow you to improve delivery of your product whilst increasing customer loyalty, but also allow you to try ideas out that perhaps you wouldn’t usually. By perhaps opting for a removable label for your product or business, if you change your mind or business strategy, you can change your label. Be more daring!
This label transformed a standard feminine hygiene bin into a great marketing tool for a great cause, whilst increasing customer loyalty and support for the charity from its partners.
