For those of you who own small/local businesses - how do you make sure your customer keep coming back?

Hair salons, nail salons, dentists, etc. - I can imagine that all of these may largely rely on repeat customers to make recurring revenue. Are you able to track which customers are coming in repeatedly and how often they come back? Are there any marketing tactics that you are using? Are those tactics effective?

Full disclosure: I am doing research for my own small business that I am starting. If you’re open to talking, I would love to learn more about the problems you have around getting repeat customers.

  • vividtreks@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I run socials and ads for an orthodontic clinic (I’m an ads specialist and they’re my monthly client). I built their strategy from the ground up and a large part of getting returning customers is consistently asking people how their experience was and what they think the business could improve on. If they give feedback, take it and improve. If they say everything was perfect, always ask for online reviews especially on Google and Facebook without missing a single person.

    During my first consult with the owner, the clinic had like 0 reviews and had tons of slow days with literally 0 patients. Around 2 months after I set everything up, the business is up to almost 30 reviews on Facebook and 20 reviews on Google with a lot of return customers. Sure it’s not a lot but it’s much better than practically 0. The clinic also had close to 70 new patients in one month (25-30 patients for a small practice is already considered high performing.)

    Just earlier today I had a chat with the owner and they told me people keep walking-in because of all the good reviews (they always ask how they found the clinic during intake.) They also keep having return patients who attribute their return to the great doctors and a lot of the time the great customer service.

    When they first started asking every single patient how the experience was, they got a lot of honest feedback about things they could act on.