Your Customer List: Low Hanging Fruit

What do Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Advertising, Email and Social Media have in common? Beyond the obvious, most companies use one of these marketing methods to find customers and make sales. While these methods are arguably among the most efficient marketing methods to find new customers, many businesses overlook a resource that can be much more effective: their own customer base.

In speaking with businesses of all types and sizes, we regularly find that they fail to effectively capture existing customer information and then use it to stay in touch. Maximizing the use of its customer list is low hanging fruit to any business’ marketing effort. Customer retention offers many benefits; they include:

Greater Sales: Repeat Customers Spend 33% More
More Referrals: Repeat Customer Offer More Referrals Than Non Repeat Customers
Lower Cost: It Costs 80% More to Sell to a New Customers

Whether a business is online or offline, the benefits of customer retention, or CRM (customer relationship management), are clear. Therefore I thought I’d offer some ideas on how to grow a customer list and make it more useful:

• Capture Email Addresses in Offline Forms, Like Service Invoices or Work Orders
• Place an Email Signup Box on Every Page of a Website
• Send a Personal Note to Follow Up a Sale; Request the Customer Join the Email List
• Create a Loyalty Program Requiring Registration
• Find & Connect  With Customers Via Social Media
• Engage Existing Customers To Ask for Feedback
• Clean the Customer List Regularly
• Determine Customers’ Area(s) of Interest by Segmenting the List

These are only ideas to get your juices flowing, but the concept applies to all offline and online businesses.  With that said, be careful to follow some basic rules of thumb:

• Ask for Permission
• Don’t Ask for Information That Will Not Be Used

What is your opinion? Do you used any of these methods? Are they working for you?
Please share your experiences in the comments.

In a future post, I’ll touch on some specific ways  to use these ideas to reach out and engage existing customers.

Bill Rowland