How to Keep in Touch With Your Customers

As a business owner, understanding your customer's wants and needs is vital. Knowing what your customers like, dislike and how they feel about your business and its products or service is incredibly important. Having customer input can help you improve your business, its products, services and business processes. Keeping in touch with your customers is just one way to build those relationships, which is imperative to any small business.

Here are some ways you can keep in touch with your customers:

1. Stay Connected With E-mail
To keep in touch with your customers via e-mail, collecting e-mail addresses is imperative! Building a comprehensive customer email list is a great way to send updates about new products, services, new locations and much more. Best of all, e-mail is two-way. You can also collect feedback on different ways that you can improve your business.

2. Leverage Social Media to Get to Know Your Customers
From LinkedIn and Facebook to Twitter and MySpace, small business owners are quickly learning that social media is here to stay. Plus, it's another avenue to keep in touch with your customers. It can seem overwhelming with so many options, but small steps are key. Getting involved and learning should be your top priority.

3. Public Relations Helps Customers Get to Know Your Business
Public relations is a great way to keep in touch with your customers, especially since customers may see your business in the local media, which builds credibility. Survey your customers on products and services and then publicize the results. For example, a travel agency may give their customers a survey asking for their favorite travel destination. Once the results are compiled, create a press release entitled "XYZ Travel Agency Finds Hawaii is Local Residents' Favorite Getaway."

What are some other ways to keep in touch with your customers? Offer a monthly loyal customers event, create a special promotion that can be sent to them or just send a short hand-written note thanking them for their business. As a small business owner, you need to show your customers that you care.

Better yet, take a step back and think about all the ways you like to be contacted by businesses that you deal with, it can help generate more ideas on how to keep in touch with your customers. Building relationships with your customers will help grow your business. What are you waiting for? Start building relationships with customers today!