Introduction
Attracting and retaining customers do not require the skills of a marketing guru. In fact, you can grow your business’ customer base by simply applying tested offline and online marketing strategies.
Both novice and expert entrepreneurs must adopt specific sales and marketing strategies to increase their customer base. However, unlike big brands, your company may be running on a limited budget, limiting your ability to spend on expensive advertisements.
How then do you increase your customer base quickly and efficiently, while reports indicate that one in every three companies doesn’t know what to do to grow it?
Given customers are the lifeblood of a business, it is crucial to keep generating leads and define ways to retain the existing ones.
This article will demonstrate how to achieve this goal by analyzing 10 smart and useful ways your business can use to accomplish the same customer-growth results as established brands.
What is the customer base, and why is it important?
Your customer base consists of people who buy your products or use your services repeatedly. Given their consistency, this group of customers generates the highest financial value to your business. The customer base can be a specific group of buyers or a target audience with particular characteristics.
Increasing your customer base is crucial as it enables the business to have a continuous flow of sales and revenue. Indeed, statistics show that a 5% increase in customer retention can raise customer lifetime value (CLV) by 75%.
As you increase your customer base by attracting and retaining more customers, your business gains more value over time.
10 marketing strategies to increase customer base
1. Personalize and revolutionize your sales pitch
Build trust and relationships with potential customers. This high-level marketing tactic will enable you to earn customers’ trust, prompting them to listen to you.
You can use this opportunity to educate new customers on your product’s features and benefits.
Before setting out to gain new customers, ask yourself the following questions:
- Who is my target audience?
- How can my products and services improve their life?
When you understand whom you’re selling to, you’ll be able to personalize your sales strategies and product offering to suit their needs, leading to an increased customer base.
2. Build networks
You can begin by reaching out to your existing network to become your brand ambassadors or advocates.
Establish customers willing to refer your services to others and network extensively within your target market. For instance, if you sell business and artificial intelligence services as Grabb Ai does, you can join related groups in the industry like the Artificial Intelligence Working Group.
Again, you should keep expanding your existing network to help you reach more customers. To get more contacts or connections interested in spreading the word regarding your products and services, consider attending networking events, forming partnerships, or speaking at industry-level events.
Natalie MacNeil of She Takes on the World started her business by speaking for free or hosting workshops at business events where her ideal clients were attending.
Building and expanding your networks enables you to tap into new suitable customers. Indeed, this approach will also improve the chances of a network’s members recommending your products or services to their connections. Hence, an increased customer base.
3. Improve customer service/experience
In addition to attracting new customers, also focus on delighting your existing ones with positive customer experience.
Did you know according to a report by For Entrepreneurs, 70% to 95% of revenues for SaaS companies (those selling software as a service) come from subscription renewals and upselling to existing customers?
This finding confirms how important it is to keep your customers happy, which helps to reduce churn.
How can you ensure a better customer experience, leading to an ever-growing customer base?
- Resolve customer complaints effectively and quickly.
- Adopt flexible cancellation and refund policies.
- Market your products and services using personalized promotions.
- Go the extra mile to WOW your customers by sending them birthday messages, event invites, or offering free upgrades.
- Respond to customer instructions, queries, or requests in real-time.
How can you interact with customers in real-time without investing large sums of money on employing multiple customer service agents?
You can use web-based tools, such as live chat, enabling your business to handle multiple customers at a go. This strategy will also shorten your customer response time from the 12-hr average to 1 minute. Consequently, your business will realize an increased customer base and sales.
4. Adopt content marketing
Writing and posting content consistently can help you build loyal relationships with your target audience. However, this approach requires patience of approximately 15 to 17 months to see results.
As a business, you can incorporate this strategy, enabling you to educate your readers about your products and services, or even trending events. For instance, you can run blogs, webinars, guest posts, podcasts, videos, infographics, etc.
Companies using this marketing strategy to increase customer base have reported increased traffic, additional qualified leads, and shares. The return on investment (ROI) from using this approach is worth your patience because you end up spending much less than when employing traditional marketing tactics.
To make the best out of your content marketing strategy, ensure to use search engine optimization (SEO). This approach entails the use of up to date, relevant, and location-based keywords to make it easier for search engine users to locate your site.
The better your website’s ranking, the higher the views, shares, and customer base.
5. Make the best use of social media
Social media (SM) has multiple benefits for marketers, including online customer service, customer engagement, and consumer insights.
As a business owner, you can reach out to new and existing clients through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Depending on your target audience, the nature of business, and the preferred mode of communication, these channels can help to increase your customer base exponentially.
A company, such as Foundr, found its success in using Instagram to inspire entrepreneurs and to provide other useful business tips. This online magazine would interview successful business people like Richard Branson and Ariana Huffington and post inspiring quotes daily. Consequently, they garnered more than 110,000 followers within five months.
You can also gain followers on your social media business account by educating and inspiring people, and encouraging your viewers to share your posts.
Publishing content consistently and building connections on SM can help your business to reach more potential clients and increase your customer base.
6. Give freemium offers or free trials
The word “Freemium” is a mix of the words “free” and “premium.”
Companies using this pricing strategy do so by giving customers something valuable in exchange for information like an email address. They also allow customers to use a basic, free version of a product or service with the option to upgrade to a paid plan with more features and benefits.
A company, such as HubSpot, offers some of its sales, marketing, and customer service tools for free, but the beneficiaries have to provide their email address and create an account with HubSpot.
The tactic’s objective is to let your customers understand how useful the company’s tools are for their business. You can then collect data and analyze the products or services usage to develop personalized sales offers based on the most-preferred tools.
Free trials can also enable you to increase your customer base in exchange for honest reviews and testimonials, which you can use for product or service improvements. To turn beneficiaries of free trials into paying, return customers, you can demonstrate to them the value and benefits of your product offering.
7. Gather customer feedback
You can increase your customer base by looking at what customers feel or think about your products or services.
Positive feedback can help you understand the areas you are performing well, which you can use to attract new customers.
On the contrary, negative feedback will tell you what you need to change or do better to improve your customer retention.
You can collect customer feedback when interacting with customers or after the service. The Net Promoter Score (NPS), for instance, measures the overall customer sentiment in terms of how they feel about the brand and how likely they’re to recommend your business to someone else.
Conducting surveys to collect customer feedback will not be enough for your business if you do not understand your target market. You can know your customers better by segmenting the market by demographics, psychographics, ethnographics, and buying habits. You can then gather data enabling you to create or modify products and services to suit the needs of specific audiences.
NPS and other strategies for obtaining customer feedback can help your business to evaluate customer loyalty and needs, enabling you to adopt better ways to increase customer satisfaction and customer base.
8. Adopt offline strategies
Traditional advertising is also an effective way to increase the customer base, both for online retailers and brick-and-mortar stores.
Strategies, such as direct mail marketing, flyers, change of business structure, and customer financing can help to attract customers to your outlet.
Direct mail marketing entails advertising in popular local publications or sending out postcards for upcoming events in your community. It is a good way of informing residents of your brand’s presence and capabilities.
When running special events, you can distribute flyers with your company’s web address, thus driving traffic to your site.
Changing your business from a sole proprietorship to a limited liability company (LLC), a C corporation, or an S corporation can also add credibility to your firm. It makes prospective customers feel a sense of brand stability.
Customer financing at points of sale is becoming standard practice among traditional retailers and online businesses. It is an instant mode of financing payments, enabling companies to sell to customers who would otherwise not afford expensive products. It also enables buyers to break their payments into flexible installments.
These traditional, offline marketing strategies are still in use because not all products and services are online, and neither are all customers. When implemented well, they can increase your customer base significantly.
9. Outsource non-core operations
Business activities, which do not contribute directly to your critical operations, can consume time, which would be better spent on customer attraction and retention.
When you outsource these services to other companies, you can focus on growing your customer base.
Roles, such as bookkeeping, tax and legal support, and utility management, can be run better if they’re automated using industry-standard developers’ information system tools. You can also hire the services of consultants to manage employee recruitment and training and telecommunication services.
These strategies will free up time and resources for your business to concentrate on customer management and quality analysis, leading to an increased customer base.
10. Add a call-to-action (CTA)
When publishing your marketing pieces or blog posts on your website or social media pages, remember to add a CTA.
The CTA helps you to increase engagement by asking customers for their opinions, shares, or tags. It is also an excellent opportunity to ask your content readers or brand followers to sign up for updates from your company.
By letting customers understand how they can work with you, you make them feel they are a part of your journey. Remember, content marketing is not a race, but a marathon; it requires building long-lasting relationships and trust to gain a loyal and more engaged customer base.
Conclusion
Customers are the lifeblood of a business, and whether you are a novice or an expert in entrepreneurship, you need them to keep your business alive.
How to increase your customer base quickly and efficiently is an issue troubling many businesses, one in every three companies, to be precise.
This collection reviews 10 of the best marketing strategies to employ, including personalizing your sales pitch, collecting customer feedback, providing free trials, and even adopting offline marketing tactics. However, keep in mind these ideas work best when you improve your customer experience and build networks.
Grabb can help you to increase your business customer base. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to perform tasks such as identifying which customers segments are insufficiently tapped or alerting you of behaviour changes in some of your customers among other things.
Curious to learn more about how Grabb Ai can help you grow your customer base? Let us know, we’ll be more than happy to help.
