I’ve gone through my past lot of articles for this ezine and realised just how long it has been since I wrote about keeping customers.
It’s the SECOND most important thing in business. But you need to know it before you start tackling the most important thing in business.
The most important thing in business is being able to get a customer. But what’s the point of getting them if you don’t know what you are going to do with them once you’ve got them?
I’ve talked to quite a few start-up businesses of late – about newsletters. And I always tell them the same thing – first thing first get you need a system for getting customers that is largely independent of you. Once you have that you then need to focus on keeping them.
It took me about 8 weeks of concerted effort to pull together the original customer acquisition system for Newsletter Marketing Systems, 3 years ago. It is still generating leads and customers for us – and some of those customers are still with us that started with us at day 0. That is a system.
Then all of our effort went into keeping those customers – by being essential to their business.
Building Print Town’s initial funnel might have been even quicker. It might have been about 4 weeks of effort – but I had the benefit of a lot of gestation time where I was working on other things.
Thankfully we already have a good retention system in place.
Here’s why this is important, it means I have a whole new lot of customers we can plug in and keep for longer.
The longer we keep our customers loyal to us:
- The more chances to get these customers to repeat purchase from us for a fraction of the cost of the first purchase.
- A readymade market for other products and services we choose to introduce in the coming weeks, months, years. (For us that list is getting longer not shorter.)
- You have more opportunities to show your customers how to use your products and services in more ways – increasing the frequency they purchase and also the amount they purchase
- The more chances they have to refer new clients to us.
We look at the value of all four of these things in our existing customer opportunity audit in your business.
Why? Because they make the value of all the money you invest in customer acquisition yield a much bigger return.