Keep them coming back for hard shell tacos.
Turning one-time customers into lifelong customers is important for any small business. This includes those of you in the food truck and restaurant industries. Ready to take your customer loyalty to the next level? Check out these ideas.
Strategy #1: Email marketing & coupons
I love email marketing. LOVE IT. It’s responsible for 27.86% of my sales. Every email I send generates at least $300 in sales some even close to $700 if they’re supertargeted.
Email marketing works because your messages are being sent to people who are already interested in your products. And if their out, they’ll order more. It prints money. Here’s a blog post I wrote about why email marketing is amazing.
You can get super complex with email marketing, but it doesn’t have to challenging. Basically, you want to include some personality and a promotion. Some of my best converting emails are plain text (like an email from a friend) with a blue link that has the promotion.
And I’ve found that 20% off worked the best (that’s my personal experience yours may differ!)
Strategy #2: Impress customers with the little things
As I’ve mentioned before, you’re a small food business. It’s to your benefit to use this to your advantage. Being small means you can do things that “don’t scale” if you had thousands of orders a day. Here are things I’ve done for customers to make them customers for life:
● Include handwritten thank you notes to every customer (superimpressive if you include a personal story from meeting them in person)
● Send shipments out using faster delivery
● Include an extra jar of mustard usually a seasonal we haven’t launched yet
● Send a handwritten followup letter to see how they’ve been enjoying their jar of mustard
(I just started doing this for fun hard to tell if it’s produced results).
The little things make a big difference. How can you wow your customers? Use one of my strategies or come up with your own try it out and see if it makes for happy customers. Happy customers buy more product. More product = bigger business!
Strategy #3: Get customers to think differently
It’s great if your customer are buying for themselves, but it’s even better if they buy for someone else or for another event. That’s because they think so highly of your products that the’d like to share them with other people. They are your very own salespeople!
How do you do this?
Bonus Strategy: Use farmer’s markets & events to drive sales on your website.
A lot of people write off events as a lot of work, expensive, time consuming, etc. But, really, where can you expose your company’s products to thousands of people? And you get to talk to them directly!
When they purchase from you inperson, let them know they can buy online and give them a reason to, like free shipping, bulk discounts, or onlineonly flavors.
Vending season is right around the corner for many of you. I’ve traveled to 6 states so far. And because we don’t have a retail presence everywhere we travel, customers who love our products purchase online. It’s a gold mine!
Pretty great strategies, huh? Implement just one of these strategies and you’ll get customers for life.
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