The art of lifelong customers
The article below is an excerpt from the upcoming book The Art of Lifelong Customers: The Field Guide to Growing Profitable and Fulfilling Customer Relationships by Mihaela Akers.
Deep down, we all yearn to be respected, acknowledged, and appreciated. When others make us feel this way, we stop and we listen. We feel connected, included, and loved.
I’ve found that the more respected, appreciated, and acknowledged you make your customers feel, the more they will love you and the longer they will keep buying from you. This core principle of customer-relationship building holds true no matter how many customers you have, whether one or ten million.
Products are replicable, but the way you make people feel can never be replicated. You can stand out in a saturated market by making your customers feel seen, respected, acknowledged, and appreciated. When your company authentically makes people feel this way, they will give you their time, attention, and wallet. People don’t just buy products; they also buy connection.
What is business? People will answer in different ways. The way I see it, business is about making a difference in others’ lives. You make a difference in your customers’ lives, and your customers make a difference in yours. It’s a two-way street in a win/win game. Making a difference is not just about donating millions of dollars to charities, inventing products that change the world overnight, or offering advice to millions of people. You don’t need to be what our society labels a “superhero” in order to make a difference. Making a difference starts with how you make your customers feel. When you build an authentic relationship and a meaningful connection with the people who already bought from you, you make a difference in their lives because you make them feel respected, cared for, and appreciated.
Building an authentic relationship and a meaningful connection with customers is a natural inclination for all of us. It’s in our blood. It’s at the core of all business making. The word “customer” comes from the Latin word “consuetudinem,” which means “tradition, familiarity, practice, habit.” The root of the word “customer” describes a person who is accustomed to the business they buy from and who comes back again and again. That’s how business was meant to be conducted back in the day, and that’s how business is meant to be conducted today. Business is not about bouncing from transaction to transaction, but about building lasting and mutually fulfilling relationships.
Let me tell you how this idea helped my parents sell pots and pans at a flea market back in 1990.
Customer-Relationship Marketing in a Post-Communist Flea Market
When I was nine years old, my parents often took me with them on trips abroad to sell various products at a flea market. We lived in Romania, and the flea markets era happened right after communism collapsed in 1989. During communism, there was no such thing as commerce. You couldn’t start a business. The government was the only “business,” and it owned everything in the country. Entrepreneurship was illegal.
After communism collapsed in 1989, hyperinflation set in, and people soon realized that the safest way to survive financially was to obtain and keep foreign currency. My parents collected all sorts of items from local manufacturers—pots, pans, soaps, dish scrubbers, and more. Then, when we had enough supply, we would pack up our car and drive abroad, where we would spend the weekend selling our products at a market, in exchange for foreign currency.
Since we had to drive through customs, we diligently hid every product in various nooks of our blue, twenty-year-old car. We weren’t allowed to “export” products abroad this way. We were essentially smuggling them through customs. Sometimes we got caught and had to turn around and drive back home, but we successfully drove through most of the time. The lines of cars waiting to pass customs were long, and it often took up to ten hours before the border officer would inspect our car and make the call to let us pass or not. Most of the cars waiting in line were doing exactly what we were doing, looking for a place and a way to make some money and live a better life.
At the flea market, I would wait the whole day by the blanket on which my parents had diligently laid our products for sale. My dad did the selling. He didn’t have a business degree, and he didn’t know anything about business. Yet he was able to successfully sell our products at the flea market because he instinctively understood the art of lifelong customers.
The art of lifelong customers isn’t about screaming out loud that we have unique, high-quality products. It isn’t about chasing strangers endlessly and being fearful that not enough people buy from us. It isn’t about coming up with clever offers either and then negotiating a price that makes people open up their wallets.
My dad did the opposite. He waited silently by his flea market blanket, and he didn’t interrupt anybody who walked by. However, when he saw a person who had already bought from him earlier that day or the day before, he would immediately and enthusiastically plunge up from his little chair as if he just saw the queen or king of the whole world. Then he’d intercept that person. He’d put his big hand out to shake that returning customer’s hand, and he’d loudly and joyfully declare with a deep, ceremonial voice: “My friend! Welcome back!” Then he would pat the other person’s back as if they were lifelong friends who hadn’t seen each other in a long time.
Most of the time, people enjoyed being acknowledged in that way. Rarely, someone’s first reaction was one of discomfort, but that discomfort quickly dissipated when they realized that my dad wasn’t performing an act to get them to buy. They understood that his intention was simply that of making them feel included and respected. As a stranger in a foreign country, he was looking for connection, not just for sales. The only place he felt at ease looking for a connection was among his past customers. After all, they had already become family, of sorts.
The only marketing my dad engaged in was to treat his past customers with respect and appreciation, openly, in front of the whole crowd who was there at the flea market. He didn’t do it because somebody taught him about customer retention and customer loyalty. He did it because that’s what he felt in his gut he should do. It felt natural to him. It felt fair. It felt like that’s what business was about: genuine relationships. In genuine relationships, you don’t give in order to get, and you don’t bribe. Instead, you respectfully recognize somebody for the contribution they’ve made to your life and business.
The art of lifelong customers is the timeless art of showing respect, appreciation, and acknowledgment to the people who bought from you in the past. It is the art of staying grounded with the gift you’ve already been offered, the customers you already have. It is the art of understanding that what you already have is not a finite resource, but one that has the potential to endlessly multiply to give you the business and work satisfaction you desire deep-down.
Repeat customers are the foundation of a thriving, growing, and long-lasting company. There hasn’t been a company I worked with where this idea hasn’t held true. Based on all the numbers I’ve crunched in my life (and I’ve crunched a lot of them), I can tell you confidently that it’s impossible to grow sustainably and ethically without building authentic customer relationships. Whether they feel this in their gut, instinctually, the way my dad did at the flea market, or whether they understand it from their numbers, the greatest sellers of the world focus on building long-lasting relationships, not on generating transactions.
When you build long-lasting relationships, not only will your customers buy again and again from you, but prospects will also buy from you.
When my dad would stop an old customer and loudly welcome him or her, the crowd of prospects who were nearby paid attention and became interested in his products. People wouldn’t buy if they didn’t think they’d feel better after they buy. When they see how you treat the customers who already bought from you, they will come to you because they, too, will want to feel acknowledged, recognized, and welcomed. You will become a magnet for new customers by simply offering a high-quality relationship to the customers you already have. Everyone wants to be treasured.
If my dad had constantly run around chasing new customers, and if he hadn’t appreciated the customers he already had, he wouldn’t have been able to sell his products. He sold out almost every weekend and made much needed money for his family, during that austere political time. At that flea market, we were all selling essentially the same thing. How many different kinds of pots do you think existed back then in Eastern Europe? Not many. The products offered for sale may not have been different, but the way in which they were sold was different.
The article above is an excerpt from the book The Art of Lifelong Customers: The Field Guide to Growing Profitable and Fulfilling Customer Relationships by Mihaela Akers.