Tell enough people you are available and you will find someone you want to spend a lot of time with.
Customers will try your product.
They are curious.
They may or may not buy again.
It may or may not fit their lifestyle.
They may or may not want what your offering.
You may be too far from their home or work.
Long distance relationships don't work!
There are two types of customers for your product.
Relational and Transactional
The relational customer is looking for a relationship.
The transactional customer doesn't want a relationship. They want a deal. They go out of their way to buy the cheapest possible product in the category.
The transactional coffee customer doesn't go to Starbucks.
The transactional computer customer doesn't buy a Mac.
Both companies price themselves to avoid those people.
Marketing tactics focused on a transaction will have a limited time offer with a special discount.
The transactional customers flock to a strong offer.
The relational customer will wonder what happened to the magic as customer service suffers when traffic increases to lesser profitable transactional customers.
A neighbouring furniture store uses the transactional approach.
Every week, there's a new special, a new flyer, a new traffic generator.
It's the same wolf, dressed in different clothes.
They instigate traffic with low price offering, through a door crasher, low payment options or some special giveaway.
This strategy has the same problems as cocaine.
In small doses, it can make a business feel great.
But over time, it has a lesser effect.
It requires greater dosages to get the same initial effect.
Eventually, too much of it causes the business to die.
The transactional customer is an important customer.
Just not a profitable one in the long term.
When you chase the transactional customer with a competitor, the customer always wins.
So as you both fight for the transactional customer,
Someone wins the relational customer when no one is looking.
A transactional customer is not a bad customer.
It's just one you don't want to focus on.
If they come in to buy, it's your job to sell to them.
If they buy, we call that profit.
They probably don't buy twice...
A relational customer with cars may be a transactional customer with toilet paper.
A transactional customer with computers may be a relational customer with coffee.
It's not up to you to decide who is which.
It's your job to find the relational customer for your product.
Some of you may be wondering how to find the relational customer.
Are you ready for it?
You find them by telling stories that they can RELATE to.
You find them by telling them what you BELIEVE in. If they BELIEVE in the same things, they will buy from you.
My 10 year old once told me, if you don't tell someone what you believe in, you're silently telling them you only want their money. That will be seen as selfish. And no one wants to buy from someone who is selfish.
I agree with his first two points. However, transactional customers DO buy from selfish merchants if it's the cheapest.
Walmart has perfected transactional buying. We don't buy from Walmart for relationships. We buy because it's readily accessible and the price is usually the cheapest.
Even for giants, the transactional buyer will flee. Walmart closed 269 stores in 2016. Half of them were in the United States.
Why does the giant close stores?
My theory is that Amazon is killing Walmart with online selling.
Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg with Roy H. Williams just wrote a book called, "Be like Amazon, Even a Lemonade Stand can do it".
If you want to know how to how to appeal to the relational customer, you should read this book.
Here's the link at Amazon:
https://www.amazon.ca/Be-Like-Amazon-Lemonade-Stand-ebook/dp/B06XXT8LRP/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497297534&sr=8-1&keywords=even+a+lemonade
No comments:
Post a Comment