There’s a really easy way to know if you’re doing a good job with your customers. And in this episode of Real Retail TV, we’re going to explore it.

So before we get into this idea of how do you know if you’re doing a good job with your customers, If you haven’t registered for the Retail Success Summit, if you’re ready to go all in, now is the time to register. Early bird pricing is in effect, and I guarantee you that while we do have a money back, better than money back guarantee, that you’ll have an amazing experience that will leave you inspired with an action plan ready to go.

Having said that, let’s talk about it. How do you know if you’re doing a good job with your customers?

And it’s really quite simple.

If they’re coming back, you’re doing a good job. If they’re not, you’re not.

My colleague, Jay Abraham, has a great way at looking at how to grow your business. He calls it the three ways to grow your business. The first way to grow your business is to get new customers.

Getting new customers is important. New customers are the lifeblood of any business. But as you all know, getting a new customer is both expensive and it takes time and work. So it’s important, but a lot of effort.

The second way to grow your business is to increase the average ticket. And increasing the average ticket is the most efficient and the easiest way to grow your business. People who put their team members through our retail sales academy almost always see a fifteen to twenty percent lift in the average ticket within thirty to sixty days. That’s efficiency, folks.

The problem with building your business on increasing the average ticket is there’s a natural cap. When I was in the toy business, there was no way that I was gonna build my average ticket to say two hundred dollars. The nature of my customer and the nature of my merchandise sort of got in the way.

You know where the real money is? The real long term drink cocktails out of a coconut on a tropical island kind of money is in the third way and that is more transactions per customer. Getting people back in again and again and again. This third way, more transactions per customer. This is where you build lifetime value. And what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to build an emotional bank account. The emotional bank account is a concept, a term that I learned when I was reading Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

And it goes like this. Covey contends that for any good relationship, there needs to be ten deposits into the relationship for every withdrawal. So the name of the game for you as a brick and mortar retailer is what can you bring that’s valuable to your customers? How can you make deposits?

A couple of ways to make deposits. If you have a highly trained team that gives your customers an amazing experience, that’s a big deposit. That’s a big deposit. That in store experience from somebody who’s skilled amazing, big deposit.

Did I mention that?

But there’s all sorts of ways to make deposits. If you send out an email newsletter, which you do, right?

Is it valuable or is it a pitch? If it’s valuable, if it’s filled with information that’s helpful, useful, interesting, that’s a deposit. If your social media is interesting and fun and makes people smile, that’s a deposit. If you go live and people love seeing you and relate to you, that’s a deposit.

And just like in a financial institution, you’re trying to build the balance of your account so you can make withdrawals. And the withdrawal, of course, is when somebody comes into your store and spends money or when somebody brings has guests in from out of state and they bring them into your store and they spend money. So the name of the game for you as an independent retailer is to stay incredibly focused on this idea of the emotional bank account. This is why the concept of WWMCW, what would my customer want is so important because when you focus on what your customers want, your actions naturally go towards doing activities that are deposits into the emotional bank account.

What you’re trying to do is you are trying to build that balance in the emotional bank account to the place where you achieve TOMA. And TOMA is an old school marketing advertising term that stands for that’s an acronym for top of mind awareness. And top of mind awareness is when a way to describe it is when somebody is thinking about buying the merchandise, something that you sell in your store.

Are they thinking, where should I go?

Or are they thinking, should I go to your store? You see, when you achieve top of mind awareness, when they think of what you sell, think of you first. That’s the holy grail. That is what you are looking to accomplish.

And that’s what your mission really should be. You wanna grow a sustainable business. You want to build the kind of business that’s resilient enough that when times get weird and janky like they are right now that you you can weather them. Of course, you know, hard times and weird times always challenge everyone.

But if you have a solid business with loyal customers, you become so much more resilient. So the name of the game, the focus that I’m encouraging you to really, really take to heart is your focus as a leader should be to see everything that you’re doing through this lens of WWMCW. And you’re doing the work that you do. That’s the how to think about it, but the work that you do is about making deposits into the emotional bank account and making enough of them so that you achieve TOMA.

When you achieve TOBA, all of a sudden the lifetime value of your customer really, really goes up. So wanna know if you’re doing a good job? Ask yourself. Go into your point of sale system and say, my customers coming back?

If they’re not coming back like they should, what can I do to make them come back? If you have a pretty good track record record of your customers coming back, ask yourself, what can I do even better? How can I turn those casual customers, those couple time a year customers into several times a year? How do I turn those b customers into a customers? How do I increase the value of those a customers? Because more transactions per customer is the that’s the number. And the number is driven by the simple question, are they coming back?

I would love to hear what you have to say. Put it down in the comments below. And, if you’re ready to go all in, if you’re ready to build that business, register for the Retail Success Summit right now.