It’s a skill every aspiring entrepreneur desires and every business mogul masterfully wields. Getting more customers means higher sales and revenues for your business. Fortunately, it doesn’t take an enormous amount of time and effort to successfully acquire customers. All one needs is guidance. Here are five ways to grow your customer base without inadvertently increasing costs:
Figure Out the Problem
What is keeping you from growing your customer base? Identify what’s keeping site visitors and foot traffic from buying your product or at least signing up on your mailing list. Defining what the root problem is should be the first step of your agenda. All too often, entrepreneurs blindly try to fix problems without fully understanding the situation. For instance, your sales may be suffering because you are targeting the wrong audience? Use technology to help you identify bottlenecks in your sales operations. Intelligent retail cloud platforms, for instance, can make your marketing campaigns smarter and easier to manage and connect every aspect of your business in a single, centralized location.
Increase Your Sales Acquisition Channels
The more places where people can see your brand and learn about your products, the more people you’ll be able to attract. If you limit your sales channels to a purely online or store front presence, your sales and revenue will plateau. Aside from product development, you should allocate majority of your operating capital into marketing campaigns including, but not limited to, trade show events, billboards, radio and TV time, social media, and a website and blog site. Having multiple channels that bring in leads and traffic will yield more customers over time.
Become an Established Provider
When it comes to cereal, Kellogs is one of the few brands that people trust. With soda, few can rival Coca Cola. If you need to search something online, Google Chrome is the browser you click on. Why is that? That’s because these brands have established themselves as a trusted and reliable providers of whatever it is they are offering to the public.
Streamline Customer Support
Customer support is the backbone of any good shopping experience. It’s what encourages people to stay with your business, recommend you to their relatives and friends, write you a positive review, and more importantly, help you build a strong brand that last a lifetime. Improve your customer service by investing in more service representatives, more robust training programs, and better systems for managing and directing incoming and outgoing calls. If possible, have customer support on stand-by to address customer inquiries and technical issues in real time. Lastly, offer a one-time courtesy policy for late fees and charges that your customers incur on their accounts. It is a great way to retain your existing customers and attract new ones.
Expand Your Product Line
It’s smart to focus on a flagship product when you’re starting a business. But over time, it should be complemented with new products. This is something that industry giants, like Coca Cola, have learned over the decades in business and have effectively done. New products that complement your existing offerings can also encourage bigger order sizes. For instance, if you’re in the business of selling suits, you could add ties, belts, pants, and other accessories that a customer might need while shopping for suits. If your product doesn’t have a lot of complementary items that go with it, you can always try to expand the variations of your existing product line, such as a budget-friendly or premium account version.
The Bottomline
One of the most common culprits of failing businesses is the inability to acquire customers without increasing costs. Getting more customers is a trade that takes some time to learn and master. Nonetheless, it is a worthwhile skill to continuously hone. Use the five aforementioned tips to help guide you towards the right direction.
by: Jeremy Sutter
Tags: business, Getting More Customers, technology
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