How can we retain customers?
For a non-profit organization, marketing is quite different from other companies since the limited marketing budget. Creating a professional internet presence such as an official website can be a great help to display the mission and beneficiaries to our customer. As far as I know, the official website of MSC is http://sisterscloset.org. However, when I searched with the keyword “my sister’s closet” in some major searching engines, it’s not easy to see our website. Actually, most of the top links is to http://www.mysisterscloset.com. When I opened the link, which I thought should be the website of MSC, I found out it was a totally different company whose name is also “My sister’s Closet”. It’s also a resale store but it has no mission to provide at-risk, low-income women any help at all. These make me very confuse and I think it will bring the same confuse to the customer who are interesting in us. What we need to do is to specific our name with any other different organizations or companies. For example, we can add a different website logo, or add the words “Monroe County” on our name, or even talk to the other companies to find out a compromise way on this. To the website itself, a better idea to make our customers to check on us is to put some pictures of our inventories. Furthermore, we need to develop a social media marketing strategy. Social media such as Face book, MySpace and Twitter will be a great help to make a connection between we and our customers. Especially the returned customers, we can send out our events and update our status to remind them of shopping at our store. Since we created Student Board, the students can be a great help to develop these social media. We can setup a department in the Student Board to be the active members to enrich and manager these social media. They can add more pictures and success stories on these social media to share them with our customers. Another thing I want to come up with is the customer database. We have to insure valuing every single customer. Since the money we make in the store is our main source of funding, customers are obvious the most important wealth that we need to take care of. For every customer that came to us, we should try to make a connection with her or him. Those customers who bought things or donated to us, we must ask them to leave their e-mail or even phone numbers, address and date of birth. We can keep track of what they brought and how much they have brought. Then we can use this information to create our customer database, even using Microsoft Office Access can help us to achieve this in a very simple way. Through the customer database, we can manage our customers in an efficient way. We can send out sale events, success stories and new arrival inventories information to our customers. We can research from the database to see the preference of our customers. We can find out the most valuable customer from the database and provide them discounts on their future purchase. Or even can we send out birthday wish to every single customer through e-mail. And there are much more we can do with the help of the customer database. These efforts can definitely help to marketing our organization and retain our customers, and they won’t cost us lots of money. The point of marketing is that we should always thinking about how to being active to in local area and being noticed by our customers.