Your best prospects are people who have purchased from you before. They have already experienced the products you offer as well as the service you provide.
They know you, like you and trust you. (At least they did when they first bought from you… enough, at least, to give you their money.) Hopefully, things haven’t changed. And ideally, your relationship with them has improved.
Research shows that it costs around six times more to acquire a new customer than it does to sell something additional to an existing customer.
So, if nothing else, it makes good financial sense to attempt to sell your existing customers before looking outside for new prospects.
One of the best ways for doing this is to constantly keep in touch with them. Make it impossible for them to forget you. Let them know you really appreciate not only their business, but their friendship, as well.
One of the best and most effective methods is to send a newsletter to your clients. You can publish articles of interest to them, and at the same time, let them know of special, customer-only sales or special items they may be interested in at reduced prices.
If you have a “Referral Reward” program that rewards your customers for referring others to you, you can publish the results in your newsletter. This reminds your other customers about your program, and may entice them to participate in it.
Your newsletter can be published monthly, every two months or even quarterly. It really doesn’t matter. The most important thing, is to keep in touch and get your name in front of them in a welcome, non-threatening way, on a regular, consistent, and predictable basis.
But remember, people don’t necessarily care about what you care about, or your business. They care about what they care about.
So, make sure your newsletter contains items of interest to them. There are several other methods that are effective, and we’ll discuss them in more detail further in our Marketing Mistakes series.
