There are many reasons why businesses decide to change their location. The three most common reasons being the need to reduce costs, upgrade facilities or to reach a new market. However, although there are always many great benefits behind the decision for a business to move location, unfortunately there are also a few disadvantages.
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The biggest, and most common, disadvantage tends to be be the loss of customers. Because of this, when moving your business premises you need to ensure that customer retention is at the top of your priority list. It is understood that there are also plenty of other things that need to be taken care of when moving a business’s location, but the following advice is extremely easy to implement and will prevent the loss of customers being a huge problem.
Tell Your Customers In Advance
Most of the time when moving business premises the move date will be agreed upon well in advance. As soon as you know the exact date, or the week, when your business will be moving you need to start letting customers know.
There are plenty of different ways that you can do this, so you should decide on what the most effective methods to use will be for your specific business. A banner on the homepage of your website, an email explaining where, when and why you are moving or just telling customers in person are all great ideas. Just make sure that you pick the method/methods that will allow the most customers to learn above the planned move. Another important note is that your most loyal and valuable customers should be the ones you focus on and notify first.
Use Social Media Updates
Social media is one of the best ways that a business can let their customers know of their change of location. A quick update on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ will reach the large majority of the customers that follow or like a business, so to neglect social media would be a huge error. A good idea is to not post just a single update, but to keep reminding customers of the move every so often. Just don’t go over the top and post updates hour on hour but spread them a few days apart.
Have Some Banners Created That Let Customers Know You Are Moving
Having banners created that state that your business is moving is a highly effective way to let customers and other people know about the move. It may also work to land you some new clients as your new premises may be nearer to the location of one time passers by. Always ensure that the new location is included in the banner and that it is clearly visible. Also if the premises that you are moving out of haven’t been sold straight away, or you have a bit of time left on the lease, you should definitely leave the banner at the premises once you have left. This will enable customers that may not have seen that you were moving before, to learn the new location of your business.
Change Any Online Listings That You Have
Most businesses have a number of different online listings. Taking care of these and changing them to the new business location is an essential step that must be taken. This is because it will allow your business to appear in local listings and will provide people that are looking at your business online with the correct location.
As long as you adhere to all of the above advice, losing customers won’t be a problem when moving business premises. The key is to make sure that as many of your customers are told about the move and that they know the new location.
