How to get loyal-er customers

If you want loyal customers who keep running back to your pet biz again and again, wallets held aloft, then this story might spark some ideas:

Once upon a time, I bought an ebook on Amazon.

The ebook was called ‘Overdeliver’, and it was by a man called Brian Kurtz. Brian is a bona-fide legend of “direct response marketing”. But if you don’t know who he is or what direct response marketing is, then that’s okay. It doesn’t actually matter.

What matters is that when I bought Brian’s kindle ebook, he gave me a link to a surprise bonus:

Thousands upon thousands of doll-hairs worth of courses, seminar recordings, toolkits, and rare books. Not just from Brian, but all his direct-response buddies.

I am generally a very cynical and unenthusiastic person. A genuine “Eeyore”. And yet even my mouth dropped agape when I first saw everything I got extra because I happened to grab this dinky little ebook.

The result?

I instantly became a huge fan of Brian and recommended him and his book to every marketer I knew. And yes, I’ve also bought some (much more expensive) things from him over the years.

But, you may be thinking…

“So what, James? I can’t afford to give away stuff worth thousands to my customers. This doesn’t help me.”

Aha…

Well the thing is, the monetary value of the bonus was NOT the reason why Brian made such an impact on me. Sure, it probably helped. But the big thing was that it was an unexpected SURPRISE.

When a bonus is a surprise, that is a huge force-multiplier. And suddenly even small things can instil loyalty.

For example:

For years, my second-hand online book seller of choice was a company called ‘Book Depository’. And I chose them purely because the first time I ordered a book from them, they also gave me a surprise bookmark.

The cost to them?

Probably less than a few cents to make that bookmark.

Yet the result was that they probably made hundreds from me over the many years I was their loyal customer. And I still have a big stack of their bookmarks sitting on my shelf.

So there’s your pet biz boosting idea for the day.

Whatever you sell, there’s probably something small you could give to your customers as a valuable surprise bonus. Whether that’s a little product sample, a helpful info guide, whatever.

And when you start doing this, watch what happens to your customer retention… how often they return to you… and your bottom line.

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