How to Keep Customers Loyal and Coming Back for More

By Stephen Robert Morse
The Hartford Small Biz Ahead | Originally published: August 30, 2016
Updated: September 8, 2023

When you own a small business, it can be challenging to differentiate your business from your competitors. For example, in many cities and towns, there may be a dozen Chinese restaurants, a dozen bakeries, or a dozen photocopy stores to choose from.

How do you convince your customers to choose your place of business, every single time?

You do this by going above and beyond. You must offer an everyday customer service experience that is so much better than that of your peers that your customers won’t think twice about where they will spend their hard-earned money again and again.

Here are five tips that you can use to retain your business’s customers:

1. Give your customers freebies.

In Dr. Robert Cialdini’s groundbreaking work, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, he writes about the reciprocity principle. In short, Cialdini’s theory, which he has substantiated again and again through his research, is that if you offer something to your customers for free, they will likely feel indebted to you, and thus spend more time and money at your business.

For example, if you own a food truck that sells falafel, cut up your product into bite -sized pieces, and stick a toothpick in each piece. Have them ready for potential customers to try. Then, they will be more likely to eat at your truck instead of at your competitors’.

Melissa McCoy, the founder and CEO of ConnectMed, a service that matches doctors with patients for e-consultations says,”We give customers a free health dashboard where they can enter and visualize personal information like their weight, BMI, sleep, blood pressure, and blood glucose levels, with easy integration with the most common wearable devices.”

This helps McCoy ensure that ConnectMed is top-of-mind at all times and promotes loyalty. In addition, she offers “a simple loyalty program where the 10th physician consult is free.”

2. Differentiate your service by thinking like your customers.

There is a barber down the street from where I live named Jimmy who is very talented with a pair of scissors. I feel like a million bucks after Jimmy cuts my hair. However, there is a major problem with Jimmy’s level of service: His shop is only open from 10am to 5pm on Monday through Friday.

I once walked into Jimmy’s shop at 4:55pm and there was another guy waiting ahead of me. Jimmy told me to come back another day. He wouldn’t cut my hair.

Now, I’m not sure if profit is Jimmy’s motivation, but one way to retain customers is to differentiate your service. For example, if I were Jimmy, I would open my shop from, say, 6am on Mondays, and I would stay open until 9pm on Wednesdays. This would give Jimmy many more opportunities to service people in the community whose working hours are from 10am to 5pm.

If other barbers don’t think this way, then this would give Jimmy a clear advantage by matching his service to his customers’ needs…[MORE]

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To read the entire article by Stephen Robert Morse at The Hartford Small Biz Ahead website, visit: How to Keep Customers Loyal and Coming Back for More