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How to Turn One-Time Buyers into Repeat Customers for Your Retail Business · The Resilient Retail Game Plan - retail insights, retail trends and best practices

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  Do you ever feel like you're constantly trying to convince people to buy?
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  Like you're always explaining, justifying, or pushing a
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  little harder than you'd like? Today I want to talk about why that's
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  happening, why it's exhausting, and why it usually means that you're spending too
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  much time selling to the wrong people.
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  Welcome to the Resilient Retail Game Plan. I'm Kathryn Eardley, and in the
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  next few minutes, you're about to get powerful real-world retail strategies
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  from insights shared both from my guests and myself, backed up
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  by my 25 years in the retail industry. Keep listening to learn
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  how to grow a thriving, profitable product business. Let's jump
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  in with this latest episode.
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  I'd like to start with an analogy, if you will.
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  So imagine that you decide you're going to host a party.
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  You really want this party to be a success. You want it to be
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  as fun as possible, and you want to have lots of people at your
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  party. So you stand outside the venue and as people walk
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  past, you say to them, come on in, come on in. We are having this
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  great party in here. You really want to join this. You don't wanna miss out.
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  And so they come into the party, but then you don't go in.
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  You just stand outside all night and you're trying to get more and more people
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  to come in through the door instead of coming
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  into the venue and actually talking to the people that you've invited in and making
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  sure that they're having a good time. And making sure that the
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  party's really a success. And businesses can be like that too.
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  The majority of time when I talk to people about their businesses, if
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  I ask them what they want, what they want more of, they will often say
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  to me, I want to grow my audience. I want to grow my online
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  presence, or I want to grow my customer base.
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  I want to get more eyes on the business. They say things like that. And
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  that is really effectively the equivalent of wanting to get more
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  people into your party. But what people often don't realize
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  is that it can be exhausting to constantly
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  be looking for new people, people who've never heard of your
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  business before, because that's the bit where you have to do a lot of explaining.
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  If somebody has never seen your business before, then you have to
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  explain who you are, what you do, why your products are amazing,
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  and you have to win their trust. Imagine if
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  you are selling at a Christmas market, for
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  example, imagine the difference in the experience. If you've got
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  somebody who walks up to your stand, which I'm sure happens all the time, walks
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  up to your stall, and you're having to explain to them everything about who you
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  are, what you do, why the products are great, versus somebody who bought
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  from you last year, they come back to the stall and they say, oh my
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  goodness, you're back this year. I'm so excited. Right, I'm going to buy 10 of
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  your candles or your jewellery this year because I know how great
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  it is. And that's really the difference between a new customer and
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  a returning customer. So one of the fastest ways to burn
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  out as a small business owner is to be only talking
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  to the new people, only standing outside the venue, trying to get people to come
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  in and not going inside the venue and making sure the
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  party's really happening inside, or otherwise known
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  as talking to your warmest customer. And it can be
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  a really exhausting feeling because the hardest thing to do
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  is to make people who've never heard of your business
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  want to buy from you, whereas when people have bought from you, they're much more
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  likely to buy. So one of my favourite phrases is nobody's more likely to buy
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  from you than someone who's already bought from you. So most
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  retailers overspend their energy, time, and effort on their cold
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  audiences.
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  If we think about the concept of a sales funnel, or a
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  customer journey is another way of thinking about it, we go from
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  cold, which is people who've never heard of you, to red
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  hot, which is people who've bought from you previously would be
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  primed to buy from you again. And the customer goes
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  through this journey. So if you think about the fact there are
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  over 8 billion people in this world, the vast majority of them
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  have never heard of your business. So the first thing that you have to do
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  is you have to make those people who have never heard of you before, you
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  have to make them aware of you. So they go from the unaware to the
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  aware stage. Then you have to move them down other stages
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  to the point at which they purchase from you. So they become a buyer.
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  And at that point, you have moved them all the way from someone who's
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  never heard about your business, all the way to somebody who not only has heard
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  about your business, but liked it enough, trusted it enough to purchase from it.
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  Those are the group of people that often get ignored by
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  the small business owners because what they're thinking in their head is, right, I
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  need more sales. I need more people coming in. And
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  yes, of course, every small business needs a stream of
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  fresh customers coming in, new people taking a look at the business,
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  new people having interest in it. But if you spend all of
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  your time and effort talking to those people, then
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  you will very quickly burn out compared to
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  the people who are already with you, who you can communicate with.
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  And persuade to buy again. And of course they'll want to buy again because your
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  products are fabulous. You've got great customer service. Overall,
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  buying from you is a wonderful experience. So of course they're going to want to
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  repeat it. And it's much, much easier to get somebody to move
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  from being a buyer to a repeat buyer, for example, than it
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  is to get someone who has never ever heard of you
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  to become a buyer. It's a much shorter process.
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  It's like pushing against an open door, as opposed to
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  really trying to go through this whole process of
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  convincing somebody. Now, of course, we've all met
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  customers who just appear out of nowhere and are immediately ready to
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  buy, but they are the minority.
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  Now, of course, we've all met customers who just appear out of
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  nowhere and are immediately ready to buy. But they are the
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  minority. So in terms of what that might look
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  like inside a small business, if somebody is doing this,
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  if somebody is spending too much time trying to talk to their cold traffic and
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  not enough time talking to their warm, then it might look something like this.
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  You are spending time on social media. You are
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  spending time, effort thinking about the kind of content that would draw people
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  in. And yet you are not having
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  conversations or not trying to start conversations in your stories
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  with people who are already following you. And you might even
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  have a list of people, maybe it's not the huge list, but it's some
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  people on an email list who've previously purchased from you, who've opted
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  in to hear from you, and you're never ever emailing them. For example,
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  it could be that people buy from you one time. And you
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  never go back and talk to them about what they might like to buy next.
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  It might be people who are coming to
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  your website, but you're not spending enough time actually thinking about
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  or examining the conversion rate of your website to see if
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  you're giving those people enough information to actually help
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  them buy. Instead, what you're thinking about is
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  solely, okay, well, how do I get my message out in front of
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  more people. And I've even seen it where people have put a significant amount of
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  money into paid advertising to reach more cold traffic
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  and to bring people into them instead of looking at their
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  warmest part of their audience and actually optimising that, selling to that
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  part of the audience before they spend any money going out to try
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  and get more new people. And it all works together in a very
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  symbiotic relationship. So for example, if somebody is spending
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  money on paid advertising, one of the things that I'm always really keen to
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  explore with them is, are they maximizing all of the other touchpoints
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  in their business? Are they, for example, really happy with
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  their email marketing, making sure that's fully optimized so that
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  anybody that they are paying to acquire, they know that they are actually going
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  to be nurturing, talking to those people correctly all the way through, as opposed
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  to just bringing people in as cold traffic and then selling to them once and
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  that's it.
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  So that's really the essential that I want to leave you with is that nobody
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  is easier to sell to than somebody who's already bought
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  from you, because those are the people that you've already gained
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  their trust, and you want to keep them moving through that sales
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  process until we end up with them as a superfan. So super
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  fans— there's this concept of 1,000 true fans,
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  which is all about how a lot of small businesses, if they had
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  1,000 people who bought everything that they ever put out,
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  that was super enthusiastic about the business, that were always promoting it to their friends
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  and families. If more small businesses had 1,000
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  of those true fans, it would be enough to move a lot of people out
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  of the small business category and more into the medium business category.
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  So we think about trying to reach thousands or hundreds of thousands
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  of people through our content, through our marketing, but if we're ignoring
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  that warmest part of our audience, then we are seriously leaving
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  a lot of money on the table and not just a lot of sales, but
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  a lot of profit, because it is always more profitable to sell
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  to your existing customers because you don't have to pay to talk to them.
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  Whereas a lot of the time, if you're trying to reach more of a
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  cold audience, you have to actually pay to talk to those people. So
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  this is something that we really delve into in the Retail Sales Game Plan. That
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  is my course, my 4-month course. Kicking off at the end of
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  February. The waitlist is open now. You can go to resilientretailclub.com/retailsales
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  and get on the waitlist. We're going to be delving into everything from
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  getting planned out correctly so that your sales feel calm and
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  consistent, to really delving into this idea of the
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  customer journey and how to create the content that moves
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  somebody from one stage to the next, and also how to build the rhythm of
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  your business around this warmest part of your audience. It's all
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  about working smarter, not working harder, and putting some
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  of that structure and support into place so that your sales
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  feel really calm and consistent. So if sales
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  currently feel exhausting, it's probably not because you hate selling. It's more likely
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  because you are focusing on the wrong part of the journey.
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  Keep listening because next week we're talking about the crucial secret
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  to sales success that most people completely avoid. See
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  you next week.