In the early stages of your business, your main focus was to get leads and customers. As soon as you had a steady flow of customers coming in the door, your job had just begun. Acquiring a customer is the first part of the equation, now you need to keep as many of those customers as possible.
Repeat business is the name of the game. The good news is that it’s much easier to sell your services to a satisfied customer, rather than a new prospect. With a satisfied customer, you have built trust, credibility and loyalty. That’s why marketing to existing customers is essential for your business.
It’s also a lot cheaper to sell to your existing customers than trying to sell to new prospects. Depending on the industry, it can take anywhere from five to twenty-five times the cost of acquiring a customer versus retaining existing customers. Your business and clients are no different.
Let’s talk about a few ways you can market to your existing clients below…
Stay in Touch With Your Customers
Perhaps an obvious piece of advice here, but one that’s not always executed very well. It’s very important to stay connected with your existing customers. Keeping in touch helps you to continue building rapport, trust and authority. It also allows you to market more of your services or products.
There are a number of different ways to stay in touch with your existing cleaning clients. You can phone call, send out some good old fashioned snail mail, email (personal favourite) and the ever popular social media. I always recommend to the clients I work with to use email as the primary method of communications and below are the reasons why…
- Everyone and their dog has an email address to communicate online
- It offers a very affordable way to stay connected and communicate with your prospects and customers online
- You can automate this entire process with an email marketing automation system. Freeing you up to do other important tasks in your business
When communicating with existing customers, just because you’ve managed to sell them a service previously, doesn’t mean you need to continue ramming other offers down their throat. I always recommend that you send free valuable information to your customers to help educate them.
An example of this could be the following –
Lets say you are in the business of cleaning residential homes. A valuable piece of content to deliver could be a way of keeping a customers kitchen oven clean, or how a busy home office space can be more efficient with keeping things in order, which causes less dirt and dust to accumulate. A tidy office space leads to better productivity. You get the picture….
Offering helpful information without asking anything in return builds more positive association with your brand. Top this with offering a satisfactory service and you’re customers are not going to be interested in hearing any other pitches from competitors!
This doesn’t mean you can’t sell them on other services or products you may have. I firmly believe you should offer value first and then follow up with offers you can provide that helps your prospect solve a challenge they are experiencing. You want to continue the dialogue and introduce new buying opportunities when it’s appropriate. The approach of low-pressure communication is vital to nurturing a customer. When you market too aggressively, the spotlight can turn to you, instead of your customers and that’s not what you want. It’s all about serving the customer in a professional manner.
Our goal as a business is to acquire a customer, satisfy their needs and continue to nurture the relationship so that we can have this customer for months and years to come. Staying connected with your customers and prospects help us to achieve that goal.
Added Value in Your Communication? Try Up selling
If you have managed to communicate and offer value to your existing customers, it might be time to think about offering other services and products. This can be done via an up sell. When you up sell, you convince a customer to buy more than they originally planned to purchase. Generally, customers who buy more will return to your business more often.
It’s important to make sure you have the customers needs at the forefront of your up sell. The purpose of up selling is to add value to a customer’s purchase. To stay relevant and add value, the up sell should continue to benefit the customer and be relevant to the item they initially bought. The up sell and the original items should logically fit together.
Using email as your primary method of communication with your clients, you can offer content that helps educate your customers in solving a problem they have and offer an up sell that helps to solve that problem.
An example would be –
Residential Cleaning business — Let’s say you service a client every two weeks to clean their three bedroom home. You can use oven cleaning as an up sell to the current service. Email educational content about oven cleaning and how the customer can avoid the hard and tricky task of oven cleaning by following some tips.
At the end of the content, add a CTA (Call to Action) that offers a service to clean ovens, so the client doesn’t have to worry about dedicating elbow grease and time to a tricky task like this.
Create a Loyalty Program
Once you have a few satisfied customers in your business, I would highly recommend you setup a loyalty program. A loyalty program rewards existing customers for returning to your business. Creating a loyalty program also connects customers to your business, which deepens the relationship you have with the customer and nurtures it further.
When your customers are being offered more value in the form of rewards that your business offers, it further enhances and solidifies the existing customer relationship with you. The more you give, the more your customer wants to stick around and do business with you because you’re stacking more value for the price they are paying for your services.
So what do you reward in your business for it’s loyalty program?
One simple way of looking at this is to offer your customer reward points each time you both do business together. As they accumulate points over time and reach a certain milestone, they are rewarded in some shape or form.
An example would be…
Commercial or Residential Cleaning: Let’s say that for every completed task you do for the client, they are rewarded 100 points. When they accumulate 1000 points (Completed after 10 cleaning tasks for your client), they are offered something special for achieving this milestone. This could be in the form of a free gift (Cleaning product), a discount on their next cleaning job from you, a buy one get one free offer, a chance to enter a mega giveaway etc etc.
You see how this can be very effective?
We as humans love to close and complete open loops. That’s why we love those soap operas on TV. They are always leaving us on a cliffhanger at the end of each episode… we’re dying to know what happens next and that’s why we tune in to check out the next episode.
This is the same for a loyalty program and the example I mentioned above. As we accumulate these points/stamps (think of your coffee loyalty card), we love to complete these actions so that we reach the milestone and receive the reward on offer.
Loyalty and reward programs help to encourage our customers to continue working with us as. By continuing to do business with us, they hit milestones that begin to reward them further.
Setup a Referral System
The last point I’m going to mention here is the concept of creating a referral system for your happy and current clientele. This is another highly recommended system you should seriously consider for your cleaning business.
Why you ask?
A couple of reasons…
- Want to acquire more customers easily?
- Want to acquire these customers very cost effectively?
If you answered “Yes” to both questions, then a referral system should be put in place. Let me explain how this works.
Example: Let’s say you have a number of very happy customers. You could even go as far to say these people are your brand advocates, because of their love for what you offer. Why not ask these brand advocates if they have any other friends/business owners who would be interested in your services?
Tell them that if they can help you acquire a new customer, simply by reaching out to their network and recommending your service, that you’ll offer to pay them a cash referral fee for their troubles.
What brand advocate is going to say no to that? Not many! The cash incentive all depends on the type of customer they bring in. That’s something you need to figure out yourself, or else I can help you out with that.
Either way… what happens here is that your best customers will reach out to their own personal network and begin the process of recommending you as a service. This is such an effective way of acquiring new business because… word of mouth is the most effective form of advertising. I’m sure as a business owner, you have heard that statement before. The referral system helps to accelerate that process.
These are just a few ways you should be marketing your business to existing customers for your business. The points above help to strengthen and nurture existing relationships, drive further revenue and encourage new leads and customers for your business.
Want more help with these points? Why not get in touch on the link below so we can talk further.
