Identifying potential customers to grow your customer base

Acquisition

There are two specific strategies to consider at this stage:

1. Know your ideal customer

Identifying the needs of customers means your marketing effort can be focused, deliberate and direct. The key here is getting low-cost leads. This is not “cheap as chips” leads because sometimes the conversion from those leads takes months and months.

Sometimes it’s appropriate to spend more for leads, especially if you know how much the lifetime value of the customers is and also, how quickly you can convert the lead into a sale. 

Better to pay more for a faster-converting lead than a cheap slow burn.

2.  Get new customers on board

Churn is the biggest problem businesses have. If you can get a new customer on board, you reduce the risk of losing them by 50 to 80% depending on your business and industry. 

The key here is spending time with them post-sale to ensure you understand them and know what their expectation is.

A new customer survey will do the trick to help you understand them better. It also exposes any flaws in the sales process they just went through, and if needed, what you need to do to recover.

Service

Service is not about you. It’s about what the customer thinks high-level service is. You need to understand what’s important to the customer and focus your service and delivery on that.

Customer segmentation is important in this area of growth because each customer type will have different expectations and experience needs of your products/services and staff delivery.

The easiest way to work this out is to survey your existing customers. You can do this in little sound bites as the customer interacts with your company at many of the customer touchpoints.

For example, for an IT service business a quick online tick and flick survey at the end of the initial tech support call, three or four tick the box questions at the end of a hardware installation or on-site service call handed to them by the tech.

As well as three or six-monthly phone calls from a person asking the decision-making customer about how the customer’s business is growing and what they anticipate the business’ needs will be as it grows. 

The more information you can get and really understand, the easier it will be to serve your customers and serve them well.

The easiest way to work this out is to survey your existing customers.

The other critical factor around service is that it involves people. Your employees are the critical factor to delivering a high level of service your customer wants. Simply put a satisfied and happy employee is ten times more likely to deliver customer service that pops! 

A satisfied employee thinks and feels they are supported, looked after and that they are valued. How do you create that? You need to understand your employees and also have the ‘ideal employee’ in mind when recruiting.

You’re not necessarily looking for just skill and experience – like the ideal customer, you’re looking for attitude, values and behavioural traits that suit what your customers are looking for too.

Growth

You want to grow with your customers as long term customers buy more, recruit their friends for you, take less of your company’s time, aren’t as sensitive to price and don’t cost as much to get because you’ve got them.

Coming back to understanding your customer, what’s important to them, and when they are likely to leave or reduce their spending helps you keep them. If you plan and expect your customers to leave, you can create strategies to keep them.

This is where customer loyalty drivers come into play. It helps with customer ‘stickiness’. Some customers won’t use the loyalty program because it isn’t important for them. 

However, if one area of the business isn’t delivering the primary need, the customer has, the little loyalty program you have that’s sent them a gift voucher or a discount or an incentive, maybe the back-up plan to have them come back, try you again or spice up the relationship to keep them engaged.

Loyalty plans need to address the customer’s needs and perceived value. It wouldn’t make sense if Mercedes Benz offered a $20 reward voucher off the next scheduled service because $20 means little to a customer that spent $200,000 to buy their car.

A reward voucher that was $200 off would be enough incentive for the customer, if they were considering getting a service elsewhere that may be cheaper, to possibly think again and go back to the original dealer. 

Remember, the loyalty drivers enhance the experience and also help reduce customer defection and reduction of purchase.

Retention

Retention is the most under-utilised strategy in growing a customer base, perhaps because it’s perceived by business owners to be harder to do. You’ve worked hard to find the customer, win them over and all you have to do now is keep them.

Keeping them means your business needs to be organised. If you continually are being a ‘one-hit-wonder’ with your clients, you churn through them fast, and everyone, including your employees, get disillusioned as there is no real future for customers coming into your business. 

There will always be new faces, and deep solid relationships between your employees and customers will never happen.

How can you create a future for your customer? Even if you are selling a ‘one-off’ product or service, how can you retain the customer? Look at your processes, your employees and their attitude and behaviour, the products and services you currently offer and your policies. You need to stand back from your business with the hat on from the customer’s point of view.

The best example of a business that seems to have one-off customers is a funeral business. 

Their whole marketing strategy is a retention model. The level of service provided, the consultation with the customer’s family, the way employees treat their customers, and even the premises create the ‘total customer experience’.

This type of business can have follow up with personal thank you letters after the service, photo tributes and memory services as well as a customer survey a few months after the event.