Ever wondered how to sell to existing customers? Hopefully this short post will help you to answer that question.
Transcript:
Hi there, I’d love to tell you a quick story based on a telephone conversation that I had with a potential customer of ours.
Now, they gave us a call because their website doesn’t seem to be doing so well. They have an e-commerce website. They manufacture stuff for hobbyists and that’s all I’m going to tell you, and they are very good at what they do.
But, their website doesn’t seem to be functioning particularly well, so we’re going to take a look at it.
But, anyway, the crux of the conversation looked at their ability to bring customers to their website and what they do with customers as well.
A question I asked them is what marketing they’re doing to drive customers to the website, but also to drive existing customers back to the website to buy again. The guy said, “Well, actually, none.”
I asked him if he did any kind of email marketing to people who had already become customers and he said, “No.”
At this point, I was absolutely gob-smacked that such an obvious, and easy, and free if worked out right, marketing channel could be so grossly overlooked. In many ways, this would be a blindingly obvious thing to do for most of us in business.
How to sell to existing customers should be obvious. But sometimes it isn’t.
But, that got me thinking because, when most people start a business, they don’t go into it as an instant marketing expert. Most people in business who run small businesses are what Michael Gerber calls, “Technicians with an entrepreneurial seizure.”
In other words, they were good at doing what they did in a job and decided to do it as self-employed or small business, but that doesn’t instantly come with marketing knowledge.
So, one of the points I made to him, as emphatically as I could, was “At the very least, get an email marketing system up and running. Go to MailChimp. It won’t cost you anything to get started and just start sending stuff out to those people who have already become customers. It’s so much easier to sell again to people who have already had a good experience buying from you than it is to get new customers.”
In many ways, in any business, this is low-hanging fruit.
So, please, don’t let that be you. If somebody buys from you, keep in touch. Use social media, use email marketing, send them a letter here and there, some kind of newsletter, if that’s feasible for your market.
But, whatever you do, don’t be like these guys have been. Hopefully they’ll change it and, if I have anything to do with it, they certainly will.
But, keep in touch with those who buy from you.
If they had a good experience last time, it’s highly likely that with a little bit of nurture, and even if you just keep in touch, they will buy from you again. It was put to me a few years ago – it’s not your customers’ job to remember that you’re there. It’s your job to remind them to do business with you.
So, go out there, make it happen, bye for now.