Customers have infinite options, so why should they continue to choose you?

If they don’t know why they should stay loyal, they’re at risk to be snatched away. The key to keeping customers – and winning new customers – just might be helping them better understand why you’re right for them.

Here are six questions you want to ask yourself, and more importantly, make sure the answers are clear to your customers.

1. Why you?

Customers go to and stick with a company that “cures what ails them,” says Rob Perrilleon, SVP Delivery Services.

Customers may not outright say they have an “ailment,” but they almost always have a need that, if unfulfilled, would be a problem or issue.

So they need to do more than see how your product, service or people work. They need to understand how it’s making them do better.

One way is through stories that pair risk with resolution.

In other words, help customers see – through conversations with front-line employees, in online and print content and video – what they’d be like without using your products or services, plus the positive results of using your products or services.

2. Why now?

Customers’ needs change, so they may not need you now as much as they needed you at one time. It’s important to remain relevant all the time to maintain loyalty.

One of the best ways is to continually feed customers information on different ways to use your products or services, making you valuable and relevant in different ways at different times. Share changes, improvements and customer testimonials on a regular schedule through social media, email and sales calls.

If you’re trying to win prospects on “why now?,” the message needs to be focused on now, plus the short- and long-term value, which will be the future “now.”

3. Why pay?

One of the most difficult times to maintain loyalty is when customers need to replace a product or renew a service – especially if the cost of those increased at all. So it’s vital to help customers recognize why they pay.

The key is to focus on what’s gone well for customers since they’ve started using your products or services, according to research from Corporate Visions. Show them hard data such as increased profits, productivity increases or savings realized that can be directly linked to your products or services.

4. Why stay?

Your competition will always try to steal your customers. So while you want to help customers understand why you’re superior, you have to be ready to defend yourself against the competition that’s trying to lure them away.

You don’t want to make it difficult for customers to leave you. That can create resentment and viral backlash.

Instead, customers need to understand why they should stay. Perrilleon suggests regularly reinforcing four critical areas:

• stability
• cost of change
• anticipated regret and blame, and
• selection difficulty.

For instance, remind them of the long, possibly arduous, process they went through to decide on you to validate and stabilize that decision. Highlight cost savings by staying with you – which is essentially avoiding costs of change – and discomforts of starting new. And show them how your products and services are on par or better than the competitions’.

5. Why evolve?

The status quo isn’t healthy for you or your customers. You want to help customers recognize when they need to evolve and how you can help them do that through new or different services and products. And if you’re trying to build business, you want prospects to see how evolving will benefit them.

Here’s where you want to appeal to customers’ needs and emotions. You want to show them how something new or different will better fit their changing needs (and you might have to help them recognize how their needs have changed) – that’s the needs half. Plus, you need to help them recognize how evolving will have a positive impact on how they feel or will be seen by others – that’s the emotional half.

6. Why change?

If you help customers see the answers to the previous five questions, you’ve done your job: Customers will find that there’s no good reason to change.

But “when you’re the outsider trying to convince your prospects to change, you need a disruptive story that makes a compelling case for moving away from the status quo,” says Perrilleon.

Copy from Internet Resources