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Building Long-Term Customer Relationships: Improve Your Financial Stability
Lipins Partners • March 8, 2023
We know that building long-term relationships with your customers makes good sense for your customer experience. But good relationships are also a key factor in making your business more financially stable and improving your bottom line.
The answer lies in nurturing the relationship, building a sense of trust and satisfaction that leads to regular sales and a boost to your revenue.
Nurturing customer relationships that drive your profits
A business with no customers has no future. But a business with a pipeline of happy, satisfied customers can rest assured that it has a more stable and successful future ahead of it.
This network of happy customers doesn’t appear overnight. It takes time. But once you’ve built these foundations, you’ll begin to see the financial and non-financial benefits.
To drive your financial stability through customer relationships, you’ll need to:
- Build trusted relationship with your customers – Having strong relationships with customers helps to create loyalty. If you can succeed in building this feeling of trust between both parties, you’re onto a winner – and can rest assured that you have a receptive audience who will want to buy your products and services.
- Aim for repeat business and increased sales – A trusted customer relationship can lead to repeat business. As the old saying goes, you only have one chance to make a first impression. But if you continue to make a good impression, time after time, sale after sale then your customers will come back for more.
- Turn your customers into brand advocates – customers that see the value in your proposition, and repeatedly buy from your brand, become advocates for your brand. They’ll tell their friends, their colleagues and others in their network just how great you are – and that’s the best kind of advertising a company can buy. This leads to referrals and word-of-mouth promotion, creating another channel for enquiries and sales.
- Learn from your customers – Deeper relationships also help you understand your customers’ needs in a broad and detailed way. Talk to your satisfied customers, listen to their feedback and use this information to develop and build products or services that truly meet their needs and expectations.
- Keep the business competitive and agile – Closer customer relationships help you stay competitive in your industry by offering solutions that cater specifically to your target audience. If there’s a significant change in your customers’ needs, or a seismic shift in the market, you can pivot, diversify and take the business in a new direction.
- Keep the cash rolling in – a satisfied customer base will spend more readily and will also spend more. These benefits deliver a more predictable level of sales – a huge advantage for any business. Predictable sales = stable revenue + positive cashflow. And that’s excellent news for your financial health and your end profits. This means:
- You can accurately predict your income over a given period
- You can easily cover your operational expenses and ad hoc costs
- You have money to invest back into the business for development or growth
- You have better end-of-period profits, keeping you and your investors happy.
Talk to us about improving the financial stability of your business
Long-standing, evolving and trusted relationships with customers are the bedrock of your business. If you get it right, these solid relationships can result in increased sales, income and profits – all of which keeps the business more financially stable.
If you want to know more about nurturing customer relationships, and how you can tie this into your financial stability, please contact us.
The 2024 Federal Budget was announced on Tuesday 14 May 2024, with a focus on cost-of-living relief (again) and clean energy. There were no new tax or superannuation changes announced, and the previously announced Stage 3 Income Tax cuts were confirmed to begin on 1 July 2024.
The 2024 Federal Budget was announced on Tuesday 14 May 2024, with a focus on cost-of-living relief (again) and clean energy. There were no new tax or superannuation changes announced, and the previously announced Stage 3 Income Tax cuts were confirmed to begin on 1 July 2024.
Traditionally, life’s big milestones were often summed up as getting married, buying a house, having a baby and later settling into retirement. And while all of these are still momentous and memorable life moments, today there are several other modern milestones to add to that list. These could be launching your own side hustle, investing in a property with a friend, choosing to have a child on your own, or deciding to travel in a campervan. Aside from all these moments being a cause for celebration, these milestones also mark an important point in your life to reconsider the security you have in place to not only protect yourself and everything you’ve worked towards but also the ones you love. Considering Life Insurances Big changes in your life are a time to take stock of the things you’ve achieved, your future goals and what’s important to you. And more often than not, life’s big milestones come with added financial responsibility. For this reason, it’s important to consider how you would continue to meet these responsibilities if something were to happen to you. Pooling money with family or friends to buy property can be a great way to break into the property market, however, it comes with its own unique considerations. In particular, having a plan for how you will manage and share the financial responsibility which extends to how you would cover both your shares of the mortgage if something were to happen to either of you. Life Insurance, Critical Illness Insurance and Total and Permanent Disability Insurance (TPD), are all ways to help protect yourself and people that are important to you, helping ensure that if you passed away or could never return to gainful employment, neither your friends or your family would be left to cover the cost of your financial commitment. Similarly, if you were diagnosed with a Critical Illness or experience a traumatic event that left you totally and permanently disabled, you would have lump sum payment to help offer you financial security and assist with ongoing expenses, or debts. Considering Income Protection While big life achievements are generally a result of considerable planning and preparation, you can’t always predict what will happen in life. This means that if you’re considering launching your own venture as your next big milestone, it can be helpful to have protections in place that can help prevent your goals from being railroaded in the event of an illness or accident. Often, increasing earning power is a motivator to launch a business, so it may be worthwhile considering how you would maintain this financial security if something were to happen to you. Income Protection can give you an alternative source of income if you’re temporarily unable to work due to an illness or injury that's left you totally or partially disabled. Whether you’ve launched a solo side hustle or are working with a small team, it can help you stay on top of personal living expenses, medical costs and business expenses, leaving you to focus on recovering. Every Australian is different and has their own unique ambitions, goals and milestones. If you’d like help reviewing your personal financial situation, please reach out. Any advice is general in nature only and has been prepared without considering your needs, objectives or financial situation. Before acting on it you should consider its appropriateness for you, having regard to those factors.