It’s a no-brainer that providing fantastic service and a great end product/service to your existing clients is a brilliant way to guarantee repeat business and spread positive news about your company. But it turns out that engaging with current clients and keeping old customers involved is far more important for increasing retention and maintaining a foundational base revenue for your business than many companies realise. So in what ways can engage with existing customers leads to more repeat business, and how can cloud booking software allow you to keep them in the loop? Let’s take a look at this subject in today’s blog article.
Keeping your business top-of-mind
Nowadays every company is competing for each consumer’s headspace, and it is the business that innovates and adapts most effectively for customer buying trends and priorities that stays top of mind. It might take time but consistently ensuring your brand has a positive presence in your consumers’ minds, and that they immediately think of your company when they need a particular product or problem solved, leads to higher return rate of old customers and encourages them to depend on you more in the future.
So what does this mean for you? Keeping your brand top of mind means establishing a strong brand identity and distinction from your competitors that sets you apart. It means finding and reaching out to other customers, focusing more of your marketing scheme on targeting existing clients, and offering services which match the buying trends of old customers. All of this can help you bring back customers who you’ve worked with before, and encourage them to spend more. This kind of inbound marketing is very powerful because the acquisition cost is much smaller than outbound marketing to new people, and it’s much easier to win old customers over and build relationships because they already know and trust you.
Finding new customers decreases profit margins
If you’re offering a service and constantly chasing new client after new client, you’ll see your profit margins and your overall revenue decrease over time as you need increasingly innovative marketing strategies to attract new customers. This is bad news, and if your profit margins are slim because you spend too much on outbound marketing and not enough on your existing customers, then there’s a clear red flag that you need to be focusing on the client base you already have.
While marketing to new people can bring your business more publicity, it can be damaging to your company’s reputation if consumers see you as pushy, and if you don’t have the skills to sell your products or services to new people, then you’re exhausting potential options – wasting possible clients, that is.
Compare that to the inbound marketing options – which are streamlined by cloud software like online booking applications – and your acquisition cost is far lower, with the added benefit that you can build a lot of loyalty from existing customers faster as they already know you. So, not only can you bring in revenue with much more respectable profit margins, but you can also build your reputation much faster and more reliably than if you were to take on an aggressive outbound campaign.
It tells you about your customers
Guess what? It turns out that looking inwards at the customers and clients you already have, and finding out about their priorities, buying habits, trends and budgets, can tell you an awful lot about the prospects you should be going after in your outbound marketing campaigns!
Serving a high standard of product/service to your existing customers, and getting to know about each one of them, gives you a lot of analytics and insights to work with when you’re trying to target new potential customers. By getting old buyers involved – for example learning what they like and dislike about your offerings, eg. a new type of appointment or event service – you can decide which tactics to use to appeal to new people. This can make the marketing and sales process for outbound much more efficient and save you time, and those oh so precious profit margins!
