7 Ways to Double Your Customer Base

Building a truly successful business takes a keen understanding of the needs and desires of your market. By connecting to the people who want your products and services, and directly appealing to them, businesses gain new customers and clients. A common problem faced by many entrepreneurs is that they either fail to define their potential customers or they lack the skills, resources, and strategies necessary to build valuable relationships with them.

Here are seven tried and true methods for adding new customers in record time.

1. Build a Loyalty Ladder to Create “Raving Fans”

Loyal customers are ideal customers. These are the people who sometimes refer others to your business, which makes them especially valuable because they serve as a free form of advertisement. Your most prized clients and customers are those who become so energized about the level of service they receive that they cannot stop telling others about it. These “raving fans” are a golden asset, and are a tremendous source of new customers.

2. Create a Referral Program

Design a referral program that rewards customers for bringing others into the customer base. Referral rewards can be in the form of discounts, gifts, invitations to special events, or exclusive “closed door” sales events. A closed door sales event can have a particularly strong appeal with customers who desire a feeling of exclusivity.

3. Weed Out Bad Clients and Cater to the Best

Contrary to popular belief, it is sometimes advantageous to lose customers, especially if the business owner deliberately orchestrates the loss. By prioritizing the kinds of customers a business prefers to have, it makes it possible to eliminate those who create unnecessary headaches and detract from your overall bottom line. This allows you to better serve other, more valuable customers.

4. Create Strategic Business Alliances

By partnering with other businesses with which there is a common customer demographic but no actual direct competition, a company can expand its customer base quickly and easily. Customers who trust other businesses and have proven their loyalty to them will be inclined to follow their recommendations or perceived endorsements of an alliance partner.

5. Train and Support Employees to Improve their Skills

Employees feel valued when business owners invest in them to help them further their futures and enhance their careers and skills. As a result, they develop a sense of ownership and responsibility that can boost a business’s customer base dramatically. Employees come in contact with people every day, both inside the place of business and elsewhere. Anybody who walks through your doors is a potential customer, but it takes a certain level of professional skill to convert them into a raving fan.

6. Improve the Conversion Rate for Leads and Contacts

Keeping tabs on leads or sending contacts costly mailings can be a drain, not an asset. As leads and contacts are made, they need to be converted as soon as possible into customers. Otherwise, they can simply become a nuisance and a labor-intensive list of names. Once someone becomes a “lukewarm lead”, it is important to warm them up so that they become a hot prospect and then a loyal customer. Convert 40 percent instead of 20 percent, and your customer base has effectively doubled without doing any extra marketing or advertising.

7. Convert a Single Customer into Multiple Customers

One of the easiest ways to increase the number of customers is to concentrate on those already in your database. This kind of conversion is often just as lucrative – but far less expensive – than trying to drum up business from cold-calling complete strangers. For example, by up-selling or cross-selling different goods and services, profits can very easily be increased with little effort. Sell a customer a premium version of the standard item they are already buying, and it turns a mediocre customer into a top-tier one. Introduce them to other products in the lineup, or convince them to purchase other services, and it is just as good as landing a new customer.

Following Up to Take Full Advantage of Marketing Momentum

Most importantly – since profit is the ultimate goal and should always be the primary benchmark – recognize that vibrant relationships with customers are dynamic. Every customer a business counts as its own actually represents the potential of many other customers and customer transactions. Good customers are the best advertising, and they can also contribute many times over to your bottom line through increased frequency of transactions, higher average dollar amounts on sales, greater total revenues and margins, and higher net profits.

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