Many businesses decide to ‘take the show online’ due to the strong appeal of finding new customers on the massive marketplace known as the internet. The potential audience on the internet is huge, so obviously your focus online should be on finding new blood, right?
Banner ads, forum posts, Facebook pages, Twitter updates and blog content all wind up geared towards finding prospects and educating them about your products and services.
In the ‘real world’ though, much has been written about the value in marketing to your current customers. We’ll avoid quoting the overused statistics about the value of your customer base and the cost of finding a new customer versus the cost of retaining an existing one. Whatever you sell, your current customers represent an incredible chance to cross-sell and up-sell, to drive repeat business, to source referrals, and to make the conversion from satisfied client to raving fan.
So why not value your interactions with your customers online the same way you value them offline? You know all that content you’ve put online to lure new customers – those pictures and videos of your products and services in action, those updates on your company, that quality educational content, those referrals to other relevant sources? Your customers want all that stuff too!
Here’s the good news–
- You’ve got all of the content online already.
- You’ve got an existing relationship with your customers.
So how do you get your customers involved with all that wonderful stuff you’re doing online? You invite them.
It’s simple, but it’s often overlooked. Each time you deliver a product or service to an existing customer, ask them to join you online.
How you invite them, and where you ask them to join you, will depend on the business that you’re in. At Deneki Outdoors we own and operate remote fly fishing lodges. Our guests aren’t the most tech-savvy segment of the population, so we focus on email subscriptions.
We’ve always given our guests a survey at the end of their stay with us to get feedback on their trip. We added a really simple question to our survey– “Would you like to receive a weekly email newsletter from us?” If they do (and more than half do), we add them to our mailing list, and those weekly newsletters are loaded with links to our web sites and our Facebook page and more.
A weekly email from our company keeps us at the top of our customers’ minds. It lets them know about new products and services that we offer. It’s easy for them to forward to their friends. It points them at other places, like Facebook, where we can interact. At the risk of overstating things, we’ll claim that it makes them part of our online family, and the value in that should be obvious.
When you’re planning and executing your online strategy, don’t forget your current customers!
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Andrew Bennett runs Deneki Outdoors, a company that owns and operates fly fishing lodges in Alaska, British Columbia, the Bahamas and Chile. Deneki Outdoors has a web site , a blog , a Facebook page and a Twitter page .
