There’s a restaurant about 30 min from where I live that my husband and I go to a couple times a year, typically for celebrations, anniversaries, etc.
Walking in, we know dinner will be around $150 without alcohol and it’s worth every penny. They focus on local, in season ingredients and the dishes – from the salad to dessert are always amazing, creative (think pumpkin whoopie pie with sweet potato ice cream) and made from scratch.
Until recently.
Over the past year, the menu has gone from creative to, in our opinion, odd with a focus on things such as “beef cheeks”.
Their biweekly emails with what’s going on and seasonal specials have been replaced with every six month invitations to dinners that the chef is preparing in another state.
There are other things, but you get the idea.
They’ve surprised us. . .and not in a good way. All of these “little” things get stacked one upon the other until it’s no longer a celebratory experience for us and is now “just dinner out” and at a rate that’s deemed far too expensive.
Not only do we now happily go elsewhere, we’ve stopped referring them to everyone we know as *the* place to go for a special night out.
Now you may not be in the restaurant business, but what’s happening in your business or practice that’s causing customers, clients and patients to go “hmmm”?
Is your business:
- Inconsistent in communications or only reaching out to sell something?
- Constantly changing up programs or branding so your audience doesn’t know what to expect?
- Putting out one image on social media and another through your other media?
Knowing that it costs approximately 7 times more time, energy and money to get a new customer, client or patient than it does to keep one, what are you doing to keep yours?