Honestly, customer acquisition is no easy feat. It is a journey – one that begins with understanding your customers; understanding your target audience is the first of your strategy implementation. Your strategy must then dive deeper into understanding their needs and why they would love to buy from you as against your competitions.
ExpertsNG
How do I get customers for my tailoring business?
Acquiring and retaining customers regularly is what every company needs to keep its business running, and a tailoring/sewing outfit is not an exception.
Alhough, acquiring new customers may sound easy and straightforward, but trust me, it can be incredibly challenging to find opportunities in today’s saturated fashion design business world, especially if you are new in the industry.
In the fashion world, if you do not tweak your marketing strategies often to enable you to stay updated with the ever-changing trends, you may struggle to acquire customers and may not be able to retain those that you have.
I have put together a list of strategies a tailoring outfit can implement to acquire and retain customers effectively.
For clarity, I have also structured these tips into two broad categories – Acquisition and Retention strategies.
Related article: How To Start Successful Tailoring and Sewing Business in Nigeria
Contents
Customer Acquisition Strategies
1. Keep abreast of trends and master your art
The tailoring/fashion industry is art-centric, with every single piece made – a craft on its own.
In what better way might an artist hope to acquire customers than to hone in on the right skills that help in the creation of the art. As a tailor or fashion designer, your priority is to master your skills to the level that your users, customers, and prospects identify and associate with your work, even when no label is affixed.
2. Price – Do Not Overcharge Or Compromise On Quality
Only put a price in front of your customers when you understand what is motivating them, or what value is, for them.
Olufemi Akinyemi
Finding and charging the right price is essential to winning new customers over. Price is the second of the 4Ps. The first perception or statement some clients would make most times are rhetorical – asking “hope your charges are not on the high side”. Depending on your brand equity and customer experience, most customers would naturally believe that you have overpriced your services.
It is therefore reasonable not to overcharge your clients as the motive first is to pull them in to love your brand enough to want to come back a second time. Once you pull them in, you would only have a chance at making them your brand ambassador. There is hardly any opportunity to make a second first impression, especially with the price of your products and services. Stay within an acceptable price range when dealing with customers, especially a new one.
3. Get Your Products Seen – Promote Your Products
Product promotion is at the heart of marketing. Advertisements, social media marketing, content marketing, search engine marketing, email marketing, video marketing, and other known marketing efforts all depend on a well planned-out promotional campaign.
A tailoring outfit must stand out from the competition by any means to stay relevant and competitive. And the best way to stand out, is to stand out – BE SEEN.
- Advertise On Social Media: Without a doubt, the most effective means of advertisement these days due to technological advancement in this era is the use of the social media space. It is true because that is where the majority of your prospects spend their time and can be reached by your advertisements – An average person spends about 2hr:30mins on social media, daily.
- Leverage influencers in the social media space: Listen, I am not referring to any influencer outside your circle of influence – please find influencers within your area and use them. A brand promotion from a known social media influencer in the fashion space would go a long way in getting you seen by your prospects—leverage such influencers to promote your brand on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Offer to make them a dress and, in return, ask them to put out a word or two to promote your brand. Ask them to show your products to their friends, and if possible, ask for a photograph too.
- Engage Word of Mouth Marketing: Another means of advertisement that works perfectly in the fashion industry is – Word of Mouth Marketing. Testimonials from past clients, especially those customers that have converted to become your brand ambassadors would go a long way in getting you more customers – use it.
Place: You Must Have A Brand Website As Part of Your Tailoring Strategy
In the marketing mix, the process of moving products from the producer to the intended user is called place. In other words, it is one of the places where your customers reach your products; one of your tailoring strategy is to have a well defined domain name, one that easily notify your intending customers that you are a tailor.
Moreso, you could also invest in a physical outlet – A showroom would do you some good in combination to your normal tailoring workshop.
In this era of hypercompetitive retail practices, as well as the constant need to meet the increasing demands of fickle and fragmented consumers, it is important to find ways to keep your products at their reach at all times.
Talking about reach, there is no other men’s currently available to you as an entrepreneur than to build and maintain a brand website for your business.
A well structured and functional tailoring brand website can definitely help you with your customer retention drive. It is a very good way to acquire and maintain customers for your tailoring business.
4. Do Not Compromise On Quality
The quality of service you render should never be compromised in any way, as this is the basis on which you get a multiplier or ripple effect of customers trooping in.
The quality of a design you produce would advertise itself no matter where it goes.
Imagine the feeling your customer gets when they step into a gathering, and they get series of compliments of how lovely their outfit looks, it’s such feeling that brings a customer back to patronize you over and unrepentantly advertise your brand.
5. Build Engagement And Earn Trust
To win clients over and successfully retain them, you must establish some level of trust, and this trust can be built by continually engaging them in a way that they see your potential ability when it comes to fashion ideas, design, and execution.
By continually showing up and giving little advice or suggestions about new fashion trends or ideas, this would attract more people to you and want to do business with you.
A follow-up call after you have delivered your clients’ clothes to the appropriate destinations is another strategic way of building a long-term successful relationship with customers.
Send a note of thanks for their patronage, call to check up on them, strike a conversation by calling to know how they are faring and rocking the designs you made for them, request to do a pick up if necessary and look for an opportunity to continue building a stronger relationship that can lead to referrals on a long run.
In fact, a good relationship with your customers will also be to your favour during any inevitable hiccups like late delivery, poor service delivery such as errors in stitches, ironing, etc.
6. Promotional Offers And Giveaways
Promotional offers could be used as a strategy to attract new customers and also to retain existing ones. This gives a prospective client an idea to want to seize the opportunity to patronize you and have a feel of your services while existing customers are always looking forward to another amazing prize to be won on your business account
Giveaway offers such as:
- sew 5 designs for the price of 3
- we sew your 3rd design for free
- half the charge of your 1st design is on us
- give a percentage off as commission to customers that win you referrals
A catchy statement like this would make a client want to patronize you as their mind is being compelled to take advantage of the offer.
Testimonials and Recommendations
This can be put to effective use in acquiring more customers, all you need to do is get your already served customers to give a visual or written testimonial for you to use as a tool for advertisements. The more testimonials people get to see and hear from your past clients would give your prospective customers the feel of confidence to give their cloth to you for sewing.
Make sure your branded packaging form of delivery is also something that would wow your clients as this is the first thing they see when you go to deliver their attires back to them, and this alone could be captivating enough to make them give a powerful testimonial of your service.
It is, therefore, important that you activate a promo offer to them for this little kind gesture in appreciation for their feedback.
Customer Retention Strategy for A Tailoring Outfit
Customer retention is another effective marketing strategy or tactic a fashion outfit can use to put its brand name in the mind of its customers.
Keeping a steady flow of returning customers is equally as important as acquiring new customers. Here are the tips you need as a growing fashion outfit to expand your business reach, more of an how to promote your sewing business guide.
1. Offer Home Service Delivery
To successfully acquire new customers and retain the existing ones, you need to offer home delivery service to clients, most especially those that are too busy to drop by for pick up.
But before you deliver their clothes to their respective houses or offices, ensure that you get their clothes properly ironed and packed, Also, ensure that you are constantly meeting deadlines or target days to boost your reliability index with your customers.
2. Take Note Of Clients Special Days
Have a client’s database records where you keep the details of their measurements and attached to this would be special days in their life and occasions, this is not just for record purposes but to be able to keep track using a reminder to wish them on these special days.
You can as well go the extra mile by sending them appreciation notes, gifts, cakes to felicitate on their special days. It would help the customer build a strong bond with your brand and thereby referring and returning to engage your service as a retained client.
Such minor acts help to promote your sewing business.
3. Give Room For Partnership
In order to earn more business dealings as a fashion designer, it is imperative that you leverage your social network to seek partnership with willing investors.
This brings to memory an event that occurred during my university days – A customer who also was the school nurse gave me a very juicy offer – her offer, though tasking of me, brought one of my major breaks with my side hustle.
With her offer, I had to mass-produce clothes for a choir group on a regular basis. The partnership was great; she kept bringing in the orders while I fulfilled them and I had no reason to go in search of customers
4. Work On Self-Development To Catch Up On Latest Trends
As we all know that fashion design is the act of applying aesthetics, accessories, and tailoring clothes to project or enhance the beauty of your subject or client. Therefore, to be on top of your game at all times, you must do all possible to keep abreast of happenings in the industry – learn and perfect the current trends per time.
Always make yourself relevant in the fashion world by going for training regularly, reading journals, and fashion magazines to be abreast of the latest trend.
It is no longer news that new trendy designs come out on a daily basis as new fabrics hit the market. Knowing everything about this would help you, and knowing something about all other aspects of fashion will pave the way for you to the point that no question or design from your prospect would catch you unprepared.
This way, you would be able to retain your clients as they have an assurance that you are not just up to date on fashion trends but also up to the task.
5. Strong Customer Service Approach
This is a very important point that could keep your customers coming back for more; from the moment they initiate an inquiry, down to the point of payment and to delivery of the service you must ensure that your customers’ experience is well guided to keep them comfortable enough to become repeat customers.
In a nutshell, being the first line of contact, your customer service department must be top-notch; trained, and equipped well enough to place a premium on every call that comes in.
The ease of doing business birthed by your well-trained customer service department would give your customer an assurance that you have a system that works – that alone would keep them happy enough to be loyal ambassadors of your brand.
Furthermore, it would be easy for your When your business is expanding through additional customers added to your customer base, you need to employ competence and qualified staff to help facilitate better and fast service delivery so as to meet up with customer demand.
For ease of access and client’s confidence-boosting, always be on time. But when the time isn’t possible, build a rapport enough to be able to quickly notify your clients beforehand.
6. Increase Your Production Capacity When Needed
A major mistake that is common to most players in the fashion industry, especially the not so experienced tailors, is that they often outsource their jobs to less experienced tailors when they have their hands full.
As the founder of the tailoring outfit, it is natural that your customers associate you with your brand in person. What you should do is to first find a way to separate yourself from the business, especially with the order taking tasks.
Get your customer to become comfortable with your employees; when feasible, stand back and let them take the measurements of your clients while you watch. With time, your customer would get comfortable with your employees and that would free up time for you. Having done that, it would become easier for you to increase capacity when the need presents itself.
7. Ask For And Act On Feedback
One important aspect of customer retention that is often neglected is asking for feedback. Ensure that you always ask your customers for feedback – spend that little extra on a 5 minutes call to your customers and ask how they feel about every aspect of your service. Be sure to listen as they take you through their experience while you served them. Improving every bit of their experience the next time they come calling, is a sure way to move them from satisfied customers to become loyal customers.
Must Read: How To Improve Sales Through Excellent Customer Service
Nice insight for those of us in the fashion world.It is also important to note that when you are able to retain customer you’ll spend less time and effort finding new customers and convincing them that you are the one they should buy from, which means – less expenses. To build a long-term business relationship with new customers cost more than maintaining existing customers. Existing customers have already bought from you, so unless they had a disappointing experience, they will continuing buying from you. Try as much as possible to desist from disappointing yours customers especially on the delivery of their outfits.
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