Many businesses that want to increase revenue often focus exclusively on gaining new customers. But while this can have tremendous long-term benefits, there’s another strategy that shouldn’t be ignored: boosting sales from existing customers.
Existing customers already enjoy your product, and selling to them should be significantly easier than selling to strangers. For that reason, it can often be quite cost-effective to boost revenue by expanding relationships with customers you already have. The following tips are useful strategies that you can employ to do that.
1. Look for natural upsells
Unless your business only offers a single product, you may be missing opportunities to upsell to existing customers. If they need one solution in your industry, they may need related items as well. For example, resellers that offer mobile app development using our platform might want to also offer mobile websites to existing customers. These folks have already demonstrated an interest in pursuing mobile strategies, and it wouldn’t be surprising if some of them wanted to explore the possibility of using multiple channels at the same time in order to enhance their mobile presence.
2. Study your customers and listen to them
Nothing could be more valuable than customer feedback and customer activity analytics (if applicable to your industry). By listening to what your customers want, you’ll likely learn which gaps in your offering need to be filled. These missed opportunities often represent additional income you could be earning by solving problems of customers, and may help you boost average customer spend.
3. Reward loyalty
This is probably an obvious strategy, but it is also a powerful one that we didn’t want to leave out. If increased spending leads to rewards at your company, you’ve set up an incentive structure than can help boost revenue. If you’re concerned about adding revenue only to give it back in the form of rewards, remember that rewards don’t have to be costly. If you’re creative, you can find ways to show appreciation to loyal customers that don’t cost you anything (check out our post on boosting loyalty through apps for more on that topic).
4. Share promotions with existing clients
All of those great promotions you come up with to gain new customers can sometimes serve a dual-purpose. When you run a new promotion, consider offering something similar to your current customers, as well. Some teaser discounts and other things will be inappropriate, of course, for sharing with your existing customers. You don’t want to cannibalize your own revenue base. Other offers, however, might fit. Keep current customers in mind and strive to run concurrent promotions where it makes sense to do so.
5. Keep in touch
Spam is bad, but the occasional message to your customer base is a good idea. You generally want to stay top-of-mind, and a decent sales boost can often come through simply putting yourself in front of your customers. This doesn’t have to mean a formal offer or solicitation. Sometimes a friendly, “Hello!” or other communication is all you need.