Five Things You Can Do to Generate More Business from Existing Clients
Attracting new clients is costly since you’ll need to pay for advertising and spend many hours discussing what you can do to assist them in their business. It’s far easier to generate more business from your existing clients since they already know and trust you. By focusing more attention on retaining your current clientèle, you can easily increase your profits without spending hours, and advertising money, courting potential clients.
Keep In Contact
Make it a priority to call up a couple of past customers each week to see how they are doing and ask follow up questions related to the service that you had provided for them. While some people may not need anything at the moment, they’ll certainly appreciate the time you took to call them up and check on them.
Educate Them
People enjoy getting new information, and will happily consume any material that you give them, so why not create a newsletter, blog or ebook to deliver to your clients? Start a monthly email newsletter and offer them an free ebook if the subscribe. Doing this will entice more customers to sign up and then you’ll have their permission to send them emails. As long as you continue to send them useful content, they probably won’t unsubscribe. You can even offer a discount on your services in these newsletters. Having a blog would be another useful way to provide information to both existing and potential clients.
Create A Referral Program
While this idea is primarily targeted towards obtaining new clients, you can use it to drum up more business from existing clients by offering them an additional discount when they send new, paying clients to you. You can give them some of your business cards, remind them to keep one for themselves and to hand the others out to people whom they think could benefit from your services. By offering discounts, or cash payouts, for successful referrals customers will continue to do business with you in order to use the discount and because you’ve strengthened your working relationship.
Cross Sell
Sometimes customers come to you for a one time service but then they don’t need you anymore. Maybe they have forgotten the vast array of other services you provide. Go through your client list and see if there are any other services or products that would be useful to them. Call them up and let them know that you have other services that will help them with their business. You could include this as part of a newsletter and offer a discount on a specific service if they order it by a specific date. This will create a sense of urgency and get them back in your office.
Ask Customers What They Need
Create a survey to find out what your customers need that you don’t yet offer. Send these out to all previous customers, maybe with the incentive of a drawing for a free service for one lucky person who returns the survey, and then after reading the results create a product or service that will meet the needs of most customers.
Depending on your industry some of these ideas can be tweaked to fit your business model and the needs of your customers. Start with one idea and see how it goes before jumping all in and trying to use all five ideas at once. You’ll likely find that one or two methods work best for generating more business from your customers.
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