People love free. Since your customers are coming to you as a potential solution to meet their needs, go ahead and help them out by giving them a little advice for free with no strings attached. By addressing their specific situation, you’ll instantly endear yourself to your customers.
Examples
- Blogger Jon Morrow and his team offered to take a look at blogs and provide personalized feedback to commenters via a blog post. I tried it for myself and the feedback was fantastic and highly valuable. I was delighted by the generosity of Jon and his team. And I wasn’t the only one. There are well over 2000 responses to that single post filled with bloggers eager to get some valuable advice from these experts. Specific, valuable, and free. Pretty awesome.
- Hospitals and doctors offices will sometimes hold health fairs. There, they’ll provide screenings, advice, and other helpful information to keep patients and potential patients in good health.
Suggestions
- Make the free advice you give part of an event. You could hold office hours online where your customers can come and ask you specifics. Or you could hold your own “fair” type event where you invite others in related fields to give advice to your customer group.
- Be clear about what type of advice you’ll give for free vs. what advice you want your customers to pay for. There is a clear difference. The free stuff is generally the things you can rattle off the top of your head without further in depth analysis. It also works to give away the “why” and the “what,” but make “how” something people need to pay for.
Application for your business
- Make a list of five types of free advice you can give to your customers.
- For each type of advice listed, brainstorm two ways to deliver that advice to your customers.
Previous tips
1-22. Section 1: Build a relationship with your customers (series)
23-48. Section 2: Make your customers’ lives better (series)
49-62. Section 3: Reward your customers (series)
63-88. Section 4: Be awesome, do awesome (series)
89. Don’t be stingy
