We’ve all been there: your sales team needs the net-new logos to meet their growth goals, but for one reason or another, your marketing tactics aren’t delivering them. At the end of the day though, its about revenue growth, and by solely focusing on acquiring brand new customers you are missing a big piece of the puzzle. So, what’s a marketer to do to increase sales?
As it turns out, the solution is right under your nose: your current customers. Those loyal patrons who have been doing business with your brand all along represent huge incremental potential via improved retention rates and cross-sell and upsell revenue. It costs more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain and upsell and existing customer, so rather than only working to gain new business, try allocating some of your time and spend to your existing customer base. So don’t forget to show more love to your loyal clientele and work on strengthening those bonds.
Here are few tips and tricks to help your business drive quantifiable results from improving retention, rather than acquisition:
- Know your buyer: Take it all the way back to beginning of the sales cycle, to the moment you identified the potential buyers that are now your customers. What are the common characteristics? What keeps them coming back to your brand and what products do they purchase? Reflect upon the answers to these questions before you develop your next campaign and call to action. Once you can clearly define the key characteristics of your common buyer, then you can hone in on those preferences and make more meaningful connections with them.
- Listen to feedback: To be successful, marketers must stay alert to social arenas. Your consumers post both negative and positive reviews about your business on a wealth of different platforms—from Twitter to LinkedIn to G2—and you need to stay on top of these assessments. These are opportunities to engage with your customers, to gain insight into potential product development opportunities, and to ensure that your customers feel like they have been heard.
- Use marketing automation: Plenty of marketers think they can sidestep marketing automation but, in reality, this technology can do wonders for establishing strong, ongoing relationships with your customers. Scheduling messages to your customers to either keep them engaged (“we miss you” emails) or to thank them for their engagement (“thanks – you rock, here’s some swag!”) is a sure fire way of communicating how important their relationship is to you.
Marketing isn’t all about acquiring new leads. Sometimes, we need to take a step back and spend time strengthening our existing relationships.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: The Power of Target Marketing: Acquisition vs. Retention
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