Redoing your website and print branding can refresh your business’ image and help you attract new customers — but such changes can be less beneficial for your existing customers. When you’ve invested time and money into creating a brand, updating it can make your business less recognizable to your clients, as well as lead them to question if you’re changing anything else.
Handling such a change carefully is important to making sure your customers stick with you through the process.
- Bring your clients in on the process. Especially if you want to continue to target the same market, connecting with your existing customer base gives you opportunities to really find out where you can tweak or revamp your branding. You have the added benefit of being able to warn customers about coming changes to your brand long before they need to be comfortable with them.
- Make the changeover personal. It’s a rare business that doesn’t rely on personal connections to keep customers happy. And what holds true in customer service is also true when your business is in transition. Take the time to reach out to customers and clients personally — whether the owner or another representative of the business makes the call — means that they’re more likely to even be aware of the change, which makes it much easier for them to spot your mail, online communications and other branding materials.
- Explain the transition. Since most businesses don’t rebrand at the drop of a hat, there’s probably some logic behind the decision to change things up. Take the time to share that reasoning with your customers, especially those that you particularly look forward to working with in the future.
- Follow up after rebranding. You may not have to follow the communications process too carefully, though if you’re sending out invoices and similarly crucial business documents under your new brand, you should certainly make the effort. When a customer recognizes your email newsletters or your mailing envelopes, sending out anything that looks differently will make it harder for them to pull those communications out of the piles that most people and businesses receive over the course of a day. Following up can be the only way to be sure that your messages get through.
- Live up to customers’ prior experiences. The truth behind the matter is that your customers may be unsure about what your transition means for them. They chose to work with you, in part because of your branding. Whether you’re changing what customers you focus your branding for or are just changing your color palette, you’re no longer exactly the business a client signed up to work with. The only way to address this problem is to continue to offer great services or products so that your customers can tell that, behind your new branding, your business’ values are still the same.
With these steps, you can move your business to the next level while still maintaining your connections with your customers or clients.