3 Golden Rules of Developing Customer Loyalty on a Tight Budget

Every company clearly benefits from customer loyalty. However, your business may not have the millions of dollars that the leaders in your industry have to put towards endless layers of advertising to attract those customers. Fortunately, there are many ways that you can develop customer loyalty on a tight budget. Here are some of the top ways.

1 – Respond more quickly to customer queries than anyone in your industry

Social media, citation aggregation software and customer management software give you the ability to access everything that your customers say about you almost in real time. Never before have businesses been blessed with the ability to not only sell across oceans, but provide customer service across those same oceans without spending a great deal of money.

Nine out of every 10 people believe that companies have a responsibility to answer queries on Facebook. However, only one in four businesses actually does this. Is it any wonder that customer loyalty has dropped in the past 20 years? Use all of the information that have on your customers to create a great customer experience for each of them. From this kind of service, your business will certainly build and maintain more customer loyalty.

2 – Get to know your best customers

The Pareto rule, or the 80/20 rule of buying and selling, says that 80 percent of your sales will come from 20 percent of your customers. These 20 percent of customers are the ones who are most likely to become loyal if given the chance. However, you should know never to take anything for granted in the modern business landscape.

In order to convert the customers who are supposed to become loyal to your company, you need a consistent and wide-open two-way line of communication. This can be created through social media very easily; however, there is another level to this endeavor. Your loyal customers deserve personalized service, and no matter how small your budget may be, you can definitely afford to give it to them. Maintaining a customer costs a business around 15 percent of what it takes to build a relationship with a brand-new customer.

Hold events and contests for your best customers. If you are having a sale, incorporate location-based technology and opt in demographic lists so that your best customers truly have the first opportunity to take you up on your offers.

3 – Create programs that naturally develop customer loyalty

The first program that you can incorporate into your business is a product that requires customer loyalty. If you constantly have iterations and improvements on your product, then people will be inclined to come back for more. This is one of the basic tenants of the automobile industry – the best brands are the ones that are always announcing new features for next year’s model. For instance, if you have a product that requires listening, incorporating closed captioning services into the product is a great way to engender customer loyalty.

Aside from having products that are consistently being improved, you can also create programs that will help to engage your customer base. For instance, getting involved in the communities of your good customers is a great way to keep them engaged with your business. This does not have to be a physical location; it can very easily be an online community as well. This is why message boards and niche forums are actually more important for a small business than the major three search engines.

If your business gets involved with a charity, this is another way to ensure that you will always have customers will rally to your cause. Even if you end up giving a great deal of money away, you must consider that you would not have brought in this money if you did not have the offer in the first place. In many cases, doing business with a charity ends up being more profitable for both ends. Never mistake the nonprofit industry for an unprofitable industry – there is definitely a great deal of money being made that you can pick up on.

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Business Finances: 5 Quicken Tips for New Entrepreneurs

When you start your first small enterprise, you might realize just how difficult running a business really is. You’re going to be doing all the bookkeeping, paperwork and other clerical duties while learning how to simultaneously prevent mistakes and correct any that you might have already made.

Keeping track of your business and all the related numbers can be made significantly easier simply by employing software like Quicken.

The only challenge is learning to use Quicken efficiently. That’s where these tips will come in handy with mastering Quicken for new entrepreneurs.

1. Configure Quicken for Small Businesses or Entrepreneurs

Depending upon the version of Quicken you’re using, you will need to configure it for small businesses or entrepreneurs. This needs to be done after setting up Quicken and installing it to ensure that Quicken can configure itself properly for your needs.

When you do this at the start, the right categories, sheets of information and other necessary parts will be set up in ways that logically make sense. You’ll be able to find everything from your expense sheet to your income without having to tab through overcomplicated sheets of data.

2. Start a Business Account

A separate banking or checking account will make everything you do in Quicken significantly easier. The best part is that some banks will allow you to have these things at no additional cost.

If they do require you to pay a fee, then it will both be nominal and something you can deduct as a business expense.

The reasoning behind having a separate account is that it makes organizing your finances significantly easier. You can learn with a glance how much you paid for office supplies as it pertains to your business or how much you’ve made from your latest entrepreneurial endeavors.

3. Get into the Habit of Reconciling Accounts

You may quickly find that you have to balance multiple accounts in addition to your business account. You may need to utilize PayPal as an intermediate account for some of the entrepreneurial things you’ll do, which means that you’ll need to get into the habit of reconciling your various accounts.

Routinely reconciling your accounts will allow you to keep a more accurate total of your expenses and your income. This will allow you to make smart business decisions using Quicken that protect you from spending too much.

4. Use Quicken to Budget

Budgeting is one of the most important parts of running your business. Spending too much now could hurt you just as much as spending too little could prevent you from growing your business.

Some experts even consider budgeting for growth as one of the most important activities that successful businesses perform.

The latest version of Quicken comes with a tool that entrepreneurs will love. The budgeting tool allows you to see your immediate budget, projections and interest. You can then look at the 12-month projection to see how well your business might grow.

5. Keep a Backup

Quicken is an amazing piece of software, but it’s still vulnerable to catastrophic failure because it utilizes technology. You don’t want all your receipts and balances to be kept on just your computer, as something as small as one hard drive failure could result in a complete loss of your records.

Keep offline backups of your records. Print out your expense and income sheets. Keep them in a box together with copies of any personalized checks that you might make out for your business.

You may even want to take it one step further and continue to balance your business account within your checkbook, which is something you can do with the QuickBooks check printing with the help of websites like Checks SuperStore. This can give you a reliable backup if Quicken ever fails.

Using Quicken to Simplify Accounting While Growing Your Business

Quicken is just another tool. While you could do your accounting and finances without it, Quicken will make your job significantly easier as an entrepreneur.

When you employ the above methods, you’ll find that your experience with Quicken becomes significantly more efficient. You’ll be able to use Quicken as a tool that makes your business more efficient, which in turn will allow you to focus more on strategies that grow your business and allow you to profit.

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