Your Worst Enemy…Your Customers’ Memory!
02/13/2009 01:00 PM Filed in: Jeff Dostal
Never rely on the memory of your customer for the success of your business. I could and probably should stop right there because that says it all. But I won’t. Let’s explore this thought. My experience with too many businesses is that once they make contact with a consumer or once they get that customer in the door or on the phone, they feel they can move on to the next one. STOP! You can’t leave them hanging there, blowing in the wind of the unknown.
They don’t know all they need to know about your business. They don’t know the benefits of giving their money to you instead of your competition. Let me give you an example, my wife Kim and I live in Lincoln NE. There are some wonderful restaurants here in town. Many we have never been to. When it comes time to enjoy and evening out at dinner (and with four little ones that is not often enough) we go through that eating our right of passage:
Me: Where would you like to eat tonight?
Kim: I don’t know. Where would you like to eat?
Me: What would you like to eat?
Kim: I don’t know. What would you like to eat?
As we sit in our driveway, enjoying time away from the kids we are relying on our memory because few restaurants here in Lincoln do much to invite us to dine with them. They are relying on somebody’s memory. It doesn’t work.
What happens each time is we finally decide on a place to eat and while we are enjoying a few minutes to ourselves, one of us says, we should have gone…. Why didn’t we go there in the first place? We were not invited. We had been there once before and enjoyed it but with kids, work, church, activities, bills and everything else, we only have so much storage and recall capacity in our heads.
So please, don’t rely on the customer’s memory. You need to remind them, over and over and over and over, why they should do business with you. No matter how good you are.
Jeff is President of Marketing Firepower and an experienced marketing professional. He has helped many business become successful through the effective use of advertising.
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