Floral Designers: 3 ways to get more referrals
3 Things floral designers can do right now to build trust, engagement, and get more referrals from customers.
An epic customer service experience always leads to new customers!
The foundation of every floral business must be a commitment to epic customer service for every single client. We all understand how important it is to treat others as we want to be treated. It is a fundamental basis for any business; however, this is true especially in our occasion-based and emotionally-driven industry.
In order to build a business with integrity and character, we must always have empathy for our customers and dedication to putting them first.
This is the first step for floral designers like you to get more referrals!
This building block of business is a vital reminder for newbies and seasoned veterans alike. Obviously, a customer’s positive or negative experience can greatly influence that person’s decision to share their story with those around them. Certainly, the effects of sharing their experience can have a big impact on whether their circle of friends, co-workers, and relatives will become customers themselves. When you give your customer that epic experience, there’s a window of opportunity to increase revenue and profitability by mobilizing that customer to promote your business for you!
Infographic- Profitable Floral Design People are 4x more likely to make a purchase - floral designers get more referrals
Nielsen studies show how clients who've been referred are 4x more likey to purchase. We want those clients!
Building trust with your customers grows your customer base!
The first thing to remember is that trust begins with honesty, kindness, and dependability. You’ve given a customer their epic experience and they love you for it. Now what? Do you just let them organically tell friends and family about how wonderful the floral designs and services were from your company? Yes, you do. That is how your customers start to naturally build a cycle of referring you to even more customers.
Your goal must be to get to a point where everyone coming into your store is already primed with a referral from a friend. Here’s why!
90% of people trust suggestions from family and friends. [Hubspot]
74% of consumers identify word-of-mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decision. [Ogilvy Cannes]
On top of that, in our industry Amy and Maggie of Botanical Brouhaha recently did an independent survey that found…
50% of couples chose referral as one of the reasons why they hired their wedding florist.
What led you to hire the florist you chose for your wedding? (choose all that apply)
Graph wedding florist choice courtesy of Botanical BrouhahaFloral Designers get more referrals Profitable Floral Design
Wedding floral designers listen up! The top 4 answers to this question were design style, budget, personality, and referral. That information is extremely valuable. How can you leverage that as a floral designer to get more referrals? By showing your potential clients how much your past clients adored their experience with you.
I think an example may help. Let me tell you a story.
There’s this glowing google review from 2016. It’s written by a groom who lived in Dallas with his fiancé when I first met him. They came to Austin for a weekend to interview 7 floral designers in hopes of finding the right one for their wedding day. Yep, 7 of us got the pleasure of spending an hour with this couple and creating a proposal for them. Markedly only 1 of us was going to win their business.
They came into my flower shop, sat down and we started talking about their wedding flowers and decor. He was a typical groom. And by that, I mean he was not paying much attention to the conversation between me and his fiancé. He seemed bored and uninterested because he was worn-out from meeting 6 other florists. I was the last one of the day! Little did I know; he was engaged in something. He was reading all the thank you notes that decorated my consultation table.
In a stroke of genius my team and I decided to display all the beautiful handwritten thank you notes we received from clients. We placed them artistically between the table and the protective layer of glass.
Guess what? Those positive sentiments stuck in his brain!
The words past clients used to describe the service and care, my team, provided won him over big time! It was nothing I said or did during that meeting. I won this client simply by displaying my previous clients thank you notes on my consultation table.
More importantly, winning this client didn’t cost me a single dollar!
His review brought countless new clients our way. Not only did he write about his experience with us, but he wrote about the influence other clients’ experience had on him through those thank you notes.
Consultation Table covered in thank you notes. Floral Designers get more referrals. Profitable Floral Design
My old consultation table covered with thank you notes from previous clients with a pick up order waiting to be packed up for the Thanksgiving holiday.
You’ve got to shout from the rooftops every time someone gives you a positive review.
Simply doing that gives you the upper hand. So many floral designers are shy when it comes to tooting their own horn. If you don’t toot your horn, no one else will toot it for you.
Now that you know the domino effect my thank you notes had on my business, how will you implement that in your customer strategy?
I’ve got a few ways that you can implement this word-of-mouth referral concept right now!
The fact is you can expect at least 16% more in profits from referred customers. [Harvard Business Review]
Here are 3 ways you can start making this floral design referral concept for you!
1-Email Marketing!
Your customer’s email address is gold. You must start a customer email list and use it!
Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar? You work hard to build major trust with your client, then you give her that epic customer experience. You wow her socks off and then you never speak to her again. Well, I understand completely. Your busy and you’ve got more clients to serve. That’s not ok.
Today is when that must change because you are losing out by not following up
At the same time, I know there are just a few customers you don’t want to follow up with and that’s ok too. If someone is a bad client (we all know they exist and we are better for acknowledging how to handle them openly) you have every right to not add her to your email list. If you think for any reason that a client wasn’t a good fit, it’s fine to leave them out of future communications.
Let’s put the bad clients on the back burner for now. On the positive side, we want to focus on the 99% you love. Here’s what you can do for them via email marketing.
Use your clients’ email addresses to continue your relationship with them.
Often with wedding clients, you’ll want to remind them you are available for events other than weddings. Many young couples are flower novices. You need to make sure they are aware of your range of services and your capacity to fulfill all their floral wishes!
When you attend a wedding showcase or bridal open house, you can email all your past clients and ask them to forward the invitation to friends or family members who are about to plan their wedding. Any of the bridesmaids in your client’s wedding may be about to start planning her own. Surely, a friendly reminder email is just what she needs to book a consultation with you!
Overall, you can use the email list to create a newsletter letting your customers know about upcoming workshops or classes you’ll be hosting at your studio, reminding them of holiday occasions to send flowers to local friends and family and to offer insight into the day to day goings-on of your team. Past clients are your fans. Giving them a glimpse into your work process is a powerful way to keep them engaged and get them to refer you to friends as their prefered floral designer.
Lastly, use the email list to shout out your recent clients!
You’ll need to get their approval of course. Chances are there's someone on your email list who knows them too. The smallest things like hiring the same florist can give people a communal bond and that type of engagement can start organic conversations that lead to even more clients!
People love to support local businesses. Especially in trying times. I think Mother’s Day 2020 is a great example of that! You need to give your clients lots of opportunities and reminders to engage with your business and buy from you. An email list is a free way to keep those clients coming back time and again for more epic experiences.
2- Push online ratings and reviews!
91% of consumers say that positive online reviews make them more likely to use a business. [BrightLocal]
BrightLocal infographic- Positive reviews bring more referrals -Profitable Floral Design
Positive online reviews are essential for floral designers to gain more referrals in today's competative business landscape.
Here’s where I’m going to push you out of your comfort zone. I want you to reach out to your customers and express how much reviews help your business. They already love you because you gave them an epic customer experience. So, explain to them that reviewing your business positively is one of the best ways to say thank you. I think most of them will go for it. You can always follow up once with a reminder then move on to the next.
Remember, legit reviews are what we are going for here. You don’t want to force anything because consumers can sniff out a fake review miles away these days!
Above all, Keep it friendly and light. Let them know you appreciate them and make sure your review request is at the end of the email and make it direct!
3- Inspire User-Generated Content!
My final suggestion is specifically geared towards the more dedicated customers, people that comment on all your Instagram posts, the ones that read your blog, and are frequently on social media. It’s called user-generated content and it’s a way of getting your most dedicated clients to promote you for free and easily get more floral referrals!
Now, I know you are thinking “I don’t want to capitalize on clients that way”. But, you do!
These are the clients that love you, remember? They want to help you succeed and support local business in the process. So, go for it. Here’s how.
Find the clients that have the most engagement on social media. The ones that are hitting you up on Instagram and have lots of followers are going to be your best bet. Then, just reach out. Just like with the email marketing I mentioned above—find an opportunity and use it.
For example, let’s say her 1st wedding anniversary is coming up. You can send her a message asking to highlight your business in some of her posts! Then, she can tag your business and send some new clients your way. Win, win!
Don’t forget to use a hashtag to make it more effective.
You can pick something fun like #fiercefloralninja or simply go with the name of your business. Use that hashtag consistently! Then you can take it a step further by sharing your client’s user-generated content on your other social media channels and prominently feature it on your website!
To sum up, user-generated content will make your business the subject of lots of social media posts and organically increase the social proof around your business. This is such a good thing!
Time for action floral designers!
Get out there and use these tactics to drum up new customers with a higher built-in trust level based on free word of mouth marketing. Even though you’ve already got happy clients, it's your job to get them to shout from the rooftops about that great experience to everyone they know. So, what are you waiting for? Go out there floral designer friends and get those referrals!
Then use a system to price with confidence and simplify your ordering to boost your profits even higher. EveryStem is the florist software I built to help designers just like me ensure their profitability on every design sold!
Until next time,
LuAnn
Here’s a pic from the wedding reception of my wonderful client from the thank you note story above!
They brought their personality to the chair signage, without reservation!
Until next time,
LuAnn