Embrace your current customers
COVID-19 just changed everything. For many the post COVID-19 world feels like things have speeded up really fast, and many of your customers and your competitors are in turmoil. Supporting current customers now, massively raises your chances of winning their hearts and them paying you forward with their patronage once they have recovered.

For many, if not all marketers, COVID-19 has changed everything and everyone. In circumstances like these, current customer retention must be the most important starting point for any marketing strategy. A bird in the hand is worth ten in the bush. Also, you do not want to neglect the hand that feeds you, or inadvertently bite it (like Branson just did with a Virgin Atlantic begging bowl in the UK).

Now is the time for you to quickly understand how your current customers are thinking, behaving and coping with the COVID-19 clampdown, and its effects on their rights and incomes.

Feel their pain – and respond appropriately

To get you out the starting blocks, please take a look at the attached PDF for a view of the SACOVID-19 5 Survey* about how ‘economically active South Africans’ have been coping each week since the COVID-19 crisis took a grip on our lives 5 weeks ago.

(*The SACOVID-19 Survey is a weekly tracker. We have tracked key consumer variables for the last 5 weeks from pre-lockdown up to last week (week 4 lockdown). New topical measures are added each week. You will be surprised by how much pain ‘economically active South Africans’ are absorbing. The report makes for interesting reading. This week we go to field with round 6.)

The stuff of real brands – earning respect and loyalty

After you have read the SACOVID-19 Report, you may feel the need to get some bespoke customer insights about the current relevance of your products and services to your current customers. This will provide an objective basis for working out what you should, or could be doing, to retain the loyalty of your customers as they run the C-19 gauntlet.

Embracing current customers in the brand fold is more than basic good manners. It is the essential first step to staunching a potential flow of customers to competitors whose COVID-19 responses are better aligned with their current product and service needs. Loyalty levels run low when the wolf’s at the door.

If bad decisions are taken about the brand regarding its public response to COVID-19, this will damage brand equity. If good decisions are taken, this will enhance brand equity and yield the reward of customer loyalty down the line when they are less stressed and able to pay forward with their patronage, the slack you cut them in bad times. This is the stuff of real brands.

Long chats with customers: Enter WAGS

WAGS (WhatsApp Groups) are:

• An antidote to focus groups (hence, qualitative)
• Lockdown and social-distancing friendly
• Digital chat groups (20 defined respondents per WAG)
• Run over a 3-day period
• That you, your team or anyone else can participate in (or just observe)
• With your current customers and / or prospective customers
• Tailormade chat script
• Fully moderated
• Separate moderator / client chat group
• Very cost effective (large volume output – low cost per respondent)
• Fully extracted, charted and presented report
• Quick turnaround
• Thoroughly experienced research team

Get your own survey where you get to decide what tailormade qualitative insights your business needs right now.

Contact

For more, contact Megan (072 060 5241) or megan@alltold.co.za

Click here to subscribe to free SACOVID-19 Survey Reports.