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Subject: Connect With Consumers To Establish Business Relationships

Author:
Dennis S Vogel

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Date Posted: 02:21:28 04/30/15 Thu

Retailers should take primary responsibility to establish & maintain connections with consumers. It's part of being professional & successful retailers.

How can you relate more deeply with a profitable niche or sub-niche? Can you do it without hurting your relationship with other sub-niches?

Since inventory can be like a zero-sum game, how many product units can you stock without risking out-of-stocks of a different product for another sub-niche?

By setting a priority on a niche or sub-niche, you can start to determine what you should do to attract & hold some consumers.

By testing messages & methods plus combining results with information & insights you gain, you'll learn what level of value is enough to maintain a connection.

Value doesn't have to be discounts. You can increase value by decreasing what consumers would have to do to get full value from what they buy.

You can package products & services together to reduce their time & effort of shopping.

You can assemble & customize what you offer so customers get what they want quickly instead of having to do the assembly & customization by themselves.

Offering as close as possible to a complete solution seems obvious, but a solution to what?

For optimal marketing, you need to know more than the problems people face. If you offer a solution to a low-priority problem, you could lose whatever resources you expended in your promotion & not gain anything (except learning a valuable lesson).

With limited budgets, consumers might buy solutions for high priority problems only.

Ask questions, search for ideas & link insights to determine potential & probable connections.

You can ask customers while they're in your store, but they might be in a hurry to go somewhere. Also, some people need time to think about questions & answers.

They might feel like a lot of pressure when somebody is there waiting for answers.

If face-to-face conversations don't work well, you can try self-addressed stamped post cards. It means you already have your store mailing address & a stamp on each card, so it's ready to be mailed back to you.

Why Do You Want To Know?

You can have an explanation for why you need answers. While you give a card to a customer, you can explain, "I'm getting ready to order more inventory. I need to know what's important to my customers so I can order what they want & need. Please answer these questions, then send the card to me. If you want to do it anonymously, you don't have to identify yourself."

This next question can help you focus on the right questions for customers: "Do you __ (fill in the blank by asking about activities you can help them do)?" After their answers, you can say, "I have this short request card about the activities we've just talked about. Please answer the questions so I can serve you well."

Be sure all cards are identical, so customers will know their responses will blend in with the others.

Let That Be A Lesson For You

Something to remember is this: In addition to the questions & answers, you'll also be learning what will & won't bring the responses you need. So, if you get few cards back, you'll know you need to test a variation to learn what works best.

You can compare response rates when you don't offer an incentive contrasted with results when you offer a gift or possibly a discount to reward them for helping you.

To make it easier for customers to answer & so you can focus on what suppliers offer, you can put in multiple choice answers. You also can add spaces for them to write answers.

These are the kinds of questions you can ask:
When do you start __(activity)?
What do you need to get started?
What do you need to finish it?
What have you used before to do this?
Are you satisfied with the results?
Did the tools have: enough features, too many features or not enough?
What else is happening in your life that I may be able to help you do?
What are the changes you've noticed that are starting, happening now & about to start or end?

Please use this forum or my email address to let me know what you're working on & the results you need so I can help you get what you need most.

I can help you more when you let me know what you need.

Thank you for using this blog.

Dennis S. Vogel
thrivingbusiness@email.com
Your business success depends on understanding why consumers want & need certain benefits.
Please use this URL to get for free information.
http://www.voy.com/31049/

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Replies:

Subject	Author	Date
Connect With Consumers In Their Specific Situations	Dennis S. Vogel	02:33:10 05/31/15 Sun