Do you know who your most valuable audience is?
Does it make more sense to market to someone with a 20% probability of buying, or a 70% probability? That’s not a hard question to answer. But every day businesses choose to focus on the 20%. Hmmm.
Who’s your most valuable audience? Your current customers.
(If you’re a non-profit, it’s your current donors…or volunteers…or students.)
On average, though, businesses lose 20%—even as high as 80% depending on the industry—of their current customers each year due to nothing more than neglect. Not neglect during the buying process, but afterwards—in the lack of follow-up.
“Every day, businesses spend millions of dollars in an effort to find and cultivate new relationships with people who may become future customers…Yet for a large percentage of companies, efforts to retain customers once they’ve already been acquired are often left up to chance or assumed to happen automatically.”
(Source: The Business Journals)
Why You Shouldn’t Neglect Your Current Customers
Here are some quick stats on why you shouldn’t leave your current customers out of your marketing strategy:
- It costs 6-7 times more to get a new customer than to keep an existing one.
- You have a 5-20% chance of selling to someone new to your business…
- And a 60-70% chance of selling to a current customer.
- “On average, loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase.” (Source: HelpScout.com)
- Have you heard the term customer nurturing? That’s what we’re talking about.
How to Nurture Your Current Customers
Nurturing current customers isn’t hard. In fact, assuming their experience with you so far has been positive, all the hard work has been done. They already know you, like you and trust you.
Nurturing the relationship is simply a matter of keeping in touch. That could mean a variety of things depending on your specific audience.
Content marketing can and should play a significant role:
“If you aim to retain, you will make more of an effort nurturing your customer relationships…Regardless of your business type or target audience, content marketing is a top performing retention tool, and can simultaneously cement your customer relationships due to its personalized nature.”
(Source: Digital Marketing Institute)
Why Content Marketing is So Effective for Customer Retention
- Content marketing is designed for engagement. Your blog, email newsletter and social media content are a continual conversation with your in-house email list and social followers.
- Content marketing is personal. You can personalize your email content to each subscriber, answer their specific questions, divide and target your list. You can meet your followers through social media channels.
- Content marketing uses your in-house mailing list. You don’t have a more valuable tool for customer retention than your in-house list because…
- Content marketing capitalizes on the know, like and trust factor. Continue to produce content that enforces your thought leadership and solves your audience’s problems, and you’ll develop loyal fans. Combine that with awesome customer service and you’ll develop raving fans.
- Content marketing can be automated. A good portion of your content can be in the form of autoresponders and scheduled posts. It doesn’t have to take over your life.
- Content marketing can be outsourced easily. Yes, that’s a shameless plug! But it’s true. If you see the value in content marketing but don’t have the staff, expertise or time to do it well, consider outsourcing to a specialist.
Take a look at your current marketing strategy—especially your content marketing strategy. Is a significant portion of it dedicated to your current customers?
If not, it’s time to step back and a look at how you can do it better.