Expanding your customer base won’t come at the expense of your existing loyal clients if you reward referrals, examine engagement, and streamline service.
As an entrepreneur, you want your business to grow, that’s a self-evident rule of the marketplace. However, many businesses get trapped in a cycle of pursuing potential buyers until they make a purchase, and then—once the purchase has been made—turning attention back to the audience of potential buyers. The problem with this sales funnel approach is that a business can’t grow if established clients abandon your business.
So, how to keep attracting potential buyers without losing your established customer base? In this article, we’ll cover three essential strategies for expanding your customer base that reward established customers while prompting growth: referrals, engagement, and service.
3 Strategies for Expanding Your Customer Base
Reward Referrals
Humans are social creatures. We like to talk to other people and bond over shared interests, and that’s good for businesses!
Referrals are an effective strategy for expanding your customer base because they reward social behavior and the natural instinct to share experiences that we enjoy. When you ask for a referral, you are potentially growing your customer base while simultaneously engaging in important communication with an established customer.
When asking for a referral, you should emphasize that this is a way to better understand the customer’s satisfaction: would they invite someone else to trust your business? If not, how should you improve? These are fundamental questions that you need to ask your customers if you hope to improve your outreach.
It’s important to recognize that, when you seek a referral, you are asking customers to take time out of their day to help you. Offering a gift card, coupon, or discount when asking for a referral (or feedback if a referral is declined) is a simple gesture that you care about their time and their opinions.
Examine Engagement
You can’t understand someone from afar, you need to interact with them, engage them. This can feel particularly difficult in a digital world where potential customers may not even be visiting an in-person store, but social media actually offers many opportunities to promote meaningful engagement with clients.
Like referrals, proper engagement demands that you appreciate and reward your clients for their interactions with your business. Quizzes and surveys with prizes not only show that you appreciate engagement with your established customers, but provide useful information to determine what your audience responds to.
In addition to asking questions on the survey to gather data, consider offering a variety of prizes or rewards on offer. This allows you to gather survey responses while simultaneously measuring which incentives are more likely to provoke action from your audience.
Streamline Service
Quality customer service is a boon for any and every client. Even the most loyal, established buyer who has been there from day one can lose confidence in your business after a bad experience with your customer service.
It’s always good to use segmentation to keep track of your established customers’ needs and preferences so that you can provide personalized content that will appeal to different groups within your customer base.
Keep track of the major issues that arise among your established customer base so that you can provide easy solutions to potential buyers who are interacting with your business for the first time. Proper customer service not only shows that you appreciate long-term clients but tells new clients that you know what you’re doing and prioritize the customer first.
Rely On Who You Are, And What You Do Well
The most important factor across all three of these strategies for expanding your customer base is that the practices which keep established clients engaged with your business should give you information about what will appeal to a wider, potential audience.
If you know why customers keep coming back to your business, you need to turn that incentive outwards into a message that can reach newcomers. That’s why you need to ask why your customers would or would not refer your business to their contacts, find the incentives that provoke customer engagement, and ensure the most efficient customer service based on common complaints and questions from your client base.
While this all sounds simple in theory, we understand that it can be quite complicated and time consuming in practice to work on expanding your customer base—especially if you have to sort through a lot of data to focus your marketing strategies.
We here at Monkey VA are always ready to help take away some of that stress: our aim is to provide clear, concise strategies for expanding your customer base that work for your business’s analytics without cutting into your time or costs. Curious to hear how we could help? Schedule your free consultation today!
