Getting the most from your Customers
by Gianna Lazarou
A lot of businesses pursue a strategy of short term gain, going after customers that provide a quick source of revenue but no lasting profitability. This is not a long term strategy and could lead to problems in the future. A business must get the most from its customers and this means developing the right kind of customer.
A customer that is cheap to gain and cheap to retain will only mean trouble. A customer should be seen as an investment. It is the customer that will make the business profitable or not, it is they that bring in revenue and effect the bottom line, therefore it makes sense to invest in the right kind of customer and to take advantage of this investment.
The customer list is Gold.
Complimentary offers.
Keep in Touch
Referral
It is hard and
 expensive to create a new customer and therefore a customer list should reap maximum amount of investment. It makes no sense to merely concentrate on acquiring new customers when the existing ones represent an untapped cash cow.
The customer list is Gold.
Your customer list is extremely valuable, not to sell or rent to other businesses but to mine yourself.
Complimentary offers.
A profitable technique is to offer your customers complimentary products or services to go with their existing purchase. For example, if you sell them a mobile phone, send them an email a week later detailing the accessories they could buy. Give them a discount for being an existing customer, possibly 5% off. You could also sell them a ringtone coupon for future use. Reselling to your customer base means lowering your marketing costs as
a new customer is much more expensive to attain.
Keep in Touch
Make sure you have the ability to keep in touch with your existing customers. If you are online you would be wise to use an email list. This represents a virtually zero cost in keeping in touch with thousands of customers. Send out an email newsletter detailing current offers, making them too good to resist. Once your customers come back once you may find them coming back again and again.
Referral
Your customers probably know other people who could benefit from your products or services. Introduce an incentive to do this. For each customer they introduce offer them a percentage off their next purchase. A small number of avid customers could bring in quite a lot of new business for very little money.
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