Four ways to contact your customers without annoying them

Customer relationships help create ongoing sales and profits for your brand. Effective communication helps you grow these in ways that streamline all marketing efforts and build customer loyalty effectively. 

This all sounds great, and you may be ready to jump on to a wide variety of communication channels and send out tons of messages with product recommendations, special offers, and more. The problem with this enthusiastic strategy is that you will end up annoying customers more than you create positive interactions that foster long-term relationships.

Over-communicating or using inappropriate methods irritates customers and greatly increases the chance of them unsubscribing to your messages or putting your brand on their ignore list. Under-communicating means you will miss opportunities. So how do you strike that balance?

The following four ways to contact your customers fall into the sweet spot of respecting their time and gaining customer trust for life.

1 – Tailor your communication for each customer

How you communicate with customers is one of the most important decisions you can make. With a main focus on avoiding annoyance, irritation, and negative outcomes, the simplest marketing rule applies: Give people what they want.

The overwhelming importance of personalized options means that you should offer multiple communication styles and ask individuals how they want you to contact them. Opting into email lists, providing their phone number for calls or text messages, or following the brand’s social media page is their decision, and one you should respect. You can get great results with all of these and more, but they only work when the customer defines the right technique for them.

Text messages (SMS) top the list of preferred communication styles.

People these days don’t want to get phone calls from retail brands interrupting their lives and forcing them to engage in some fake social behavior. In fact, 91% of customers prefer text messages above all other forms of contact from the businesses they buy products from. With such an amazingly high number, it simply makes no sense to avoid SMS marketing and communication in your overall customer relationship management strategy.

As mentioned above, other methods can still work very well. Phone calls are especially helpful for personal questions about orders, for example. Direct mail, including postcards and letters, still gets a good response for seasonal promotions or special announcements. Email lists will probably remain effective, and social media interactions are not going anywhere.

2 – When should you reach out? Timing customer interactions right matters.

Timing messages has a lot less to do with specific days or hours than it does with the expectations of response time in relation to previous communications. Unless your brand offers virtual assistance through a live chat system, no one expects real-time interactions. However, quick responses and timely follow-up marketing messages do help boost customer retention.

Respond to questions and concerns immediately

Nothing puts off potential customers or causes dissatisfaction with existing ones more than ignoring their questions or avoiding negative interactions. While a 24-hour response time used to be standard, these days, customers expect quicker attention. They want to know that you care about their concerns.

Follow-up on recent purchases as soon as possible

Post-sale communication skills matter just as much or even more than interactions beforehand when it comes to building customer loyalty. A few days after they make a purchase, send out a follow-up email or other message saying if they have any questions and asking for feedback to make their interactions with your brand better. This is a highly personalized form of communication that will never annoy anyone—unless you push future purchases to- strongly.

Make personal product recommendations in time to retain interest

If someone buys an engagement ring from you, follow up shortly thereafter with offers related to wedding jewelry. If a customer takes advantage of an early winter holiday sale, send another message reminding them of other products that may be perfect for other people on their list. Personalized recommendations can create a more seamless experience that takes away a lot of the stress of buying decisions.

3 – Communication with customers must offer a personalized experience.

Building trust depends on personal communication without constant sales pitches. Customers respond better and more frequently when they receive a personalized message that actually helps them in some way. This is why segmentation of your list matters so much. Collecting data about individual buying habits, interests, and tastes make annoying people much less likely.

A huge part of this focus is on making personalized product recommendations that give them clear value. Why would somebody get annoyed when the message they receive gives them exactly what they want or need? 

Can you automate a personalized strategy?

Absolutely. In fact, it would be a bit silly to try to send out effective communication to your customers without a lot of automation these days. No one writes personalized letters with a pen and paper, and even the most dedicated administrative assistant is not going to text every past buyer individually.

Sending different direct messages matters based on where they are in the whole buying journey. Customer segmentation using smart criteria can streamline your strategy and make automated messages more personal than ever before.

4 – Ask about the customer experience. Get feedback to improve.

Your customer base doesn’t want to be talked at or marketed to. They want to form a positive, personal relationship with the brands they buy from. Proper customer relationship management involves so much more than collecting data and using it to make decisions like those outlined above. Give your customers the power to manage the relationship. Give them a voice.

Any retail brand can do this by asking for feedback regularly. This can come in the form of reviews and ratings, but things like direct questionnaires and introductions to comments on social media platforms and through other communication options often work better. Customer complaints are just as important as the things happy customers say when it comes to improving operations and interactions, so you don’t annoy them going forward.

Conclusion

Keeping in touch with your customers without bombarding them with messages is a fine line that jewelers today have to walk, but it’s a skill that’s worth mastering. And one that’s made even easier with the help of the right tools. With Clientbook’s sales assistant software, jewelers can send automated messages, collect and share wishlists with their clients, and send customized offers to a segmented list of customers. If you’re ready to see how Clientbook can help your jewelry business master client communication, book a demo today.