How to grow your biz by staying connected?

Grow Repeat Business, Referrals, & Reputation

Today we’re going to talk about how to grow your biz by staying connected to your existing customer to drive repeat biz & grow referrals.

Your existing customers are a huge asset to your business.

Has your company been ignoring them?

Acquiring a new customer can cost five times to get new business from the customers you already have.

Existing customers are 60 to 70% more likely to use your services again, versus the success rate of selling to new customers is 5 to 30%.

Every company should balance marketing resources to attract new customers and stay connectedto the ones you already have done business with.

Question: What is the lifetime value of a customer to your business?

How many times does a customer come back to your business after one year, five years, ten?

What’s the average sale of each job you did for them?

How long do customers keep using your company on average?

The result of that math is the lifetime value of a customer for your business.

The higher it is, the more business you’ve done and the less you need to spend on acquiring new customers.

Existing customers can not only bring you repeat business and increased sales, but they also are your only source of growing referral business, which can and should produce your best quality and most qualified prospects.

Existing customers are also your source for growing online reviews, testimonials, case studies, and video testimonials.

So let’s take a look at three simple and automated tools you can use to stay connected to existing customers, increase customer retention and grow your sales, referrals, and reviews.

# 1. Automated Referral management systems

Want to scale and grow your business by word-of-mouth?

How about multiplying that word over 100 times in an instant?

Today, great automated referral systems are specifically designed to help you establish and grow a great referral business.

They make it fun for your customers to participate in your referral program and easy for them to share and promote your business with their online communities.

With the click of a button, your clients can share your referral program with everyone they know on social media or through email.

The average American has over 121 online friends on social media, according to a study done by the Cystic Fibrosis Trust back in 2018; no doubt it’s a little higher today.

It’s old-world word-of-mouth meets modern-day technology and scalability.

Spread the word fast with tools that make it fun, easy, and rewarding for your customers to want to recommend your company.

Tools like Referral Rock and others out there provide custom personalized customer dashboards to make it fun and easy to promote and track rewards.

You state the reward amount for each referral, and your customers are eligible to receive cash, discounts, or gift cards from 100’s brand name stores and restaurants, online and offline.

These solutions make it super easy for your customers to promote your program with social media sharing and email integrations.

Use these programs to cross-promote your business with other local businesses in your area that don’t compete with you.

We recommend Referral Rock to our clients, but there are others out there, including:

• Referral Candy
• Ambassador

These tools can integrate your CRM and accounting systems to make it super easy for you to manage

Referrals are the best way to grow your business organically. Take a look at these programs to scale your referral business exponentially.

# 2. Email marketing

Active email marketing lists can add tremendous asset value to a business.

In the marketing world, it’s often said, the money is in the list because an active and engaged email list can generate a ton of business for your company over time.

Start a newsletter, bi-weekly, monthly. An email newsletter is the #1 best way to stay connected to your customers.

But don’t just send emails promoting your products or services.

Make it for and about your customers, use the Gary Vaynerchuk theory of jab, jab, jab, right hook, which provides helpful, useful, or entertaining content at least three times more than you promote your business.

Include DIY tips, product reviews, your team’s favorite places around town, company gatherings, events, and milestones.

Get people excited with sweepstakes and contests, invite user-generated content by having photo contests, surveys, and asking about their favorite places around town.

Use the holidays to increase the fun and engagement.

Email has the lowest costs and highest return on investment than just about any other marketing method in existence. But is your company taking advantage of it and staying connected to your customers?

#3 – Push notifications

Our third recommended way to stay connected with existing clients and even expanded a little to include those who have visited your website is to use website Push notifications

This gets installed on your website and pops up to ask if the visitor would like to be alerted when you publish new content on your site. It then warns those who subscribed to your latest content when they open their browser the next time.

Hopefully, you are regularly adding optimized blog content to your website to grow your local search presence, traffic and generate more leads for less money.

With push notifications, you can add some guaranteed immediate traffic to every post you make to your website.

It’s a simple a simple add-on to your website that can generate lots of traffic and keep your customers and visitors coming back for more info, new products, and more.

BONUS

A 4th bonus tool for growing business from existing clients is social media.

Social media marketing is another excellent way to speak to your existing customers and followers of your channels.

Syndicate parts of your blog posts and email newsletters on your social media channels.

Go into local city groups on Facebook and provide helpful value.

Share videos and stories about the jobs you’re doing and just completed.

Share team photos and events.

Nominate and train a person in your company who loves social media to engage on behalf of the company regularly.

Develop a social media strategy and game plan and start promoting your company on these social channels where people spend a ton of their time.

Okay, those are four great tools to use to stay connected to your existing customers and keep those relationships going to grow more lifetime business, referrals, and reviews from them over time.

In tomorrow’s podcast, we’re going to talk all about reputation management, growing reviews, responding to reviews, and what kind of systems make that as easy and automated as possible.

Alright, I hope that helped some of you. Thanks for sharing your time and attention with us today.

Good luck out there, and create a great day!