What is the most important marketing activity a small business can do?
- Incentivize the repeat customer!
If anyone has shopped at a department store you can easily answer this question. What is printed at the bottom of your receipt? Coupons to be used in the store and only for the next few days. The store is trying to give you a good enough reason to step back in and shop more. Businesses spend ridiculous amounts of money trying to get new customers. Some of these campaigns are successful and others are not but when you market to existing customers to come back and shop more it is almost always more effective and less expensive. Executives at McDonald’s know that it is a better goal to try and sell each customer 1 additional hamburger, nuggets, and fries next year than acquire new customers. Acquiring new customers is not a lost cause, it is a necessary marketing activity that every business needs to partake in, but, inside marketing to existing customers needs to be a priority.
Ways to market to existing customers are:
- Give coupon on each purchase – this is the retail play and it works. When a customer is completing their purchase, give them an incentive to come back within the next week to month.
- Use social media to distribute offers – we should all have our clients and customers follow us on social media. Each platform should be used to get your clients engage and take action. Share a coupon or bonus offer that someone can take immediate advantage of to shop and buy.
- Send Emails – email marketing is basically free. We should all have or customers or clients share their emails and we should be sending them regular emails. Regular can mean daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly. The most important part is consistency. We all get email offers and take action on them, the only way for you to capitalize on this opportunity to be regularly sending emails with offers.
- Create a punch card or rewards program – if you are a place of business that has regular purchases, create a punch card to keep customers coming back. If there are not regular purchases, create a rewards program that keeps people collecting points and cashing them in! They work!
