When it comes to small business marketing, a lot of focus is obviously spent on acquiring new customers. And it makes sense. In order to grow, small businesses need to reach out to audiences that may not be aware of them. But that doesn’t mean your marketing stops once you get those individuals in the door.

Indeed, one thing that we often discuss with many small businesses is that some of the most important marketing they potentially do is actually with existing customers, who not only spread the word about the company’s brand/products & services but also, depending on the industry, might buy again.  Here are 5 ways you can boost your marketing to existing customers, through a more established customer onboarding and engagement process:

1. Develop an Automated Email Welcome Series

We know a lot of companies in which a first purchase is made or a conversion of some kind occurs but then there is no follow-up from the company. As a result, customers can feel in some ways like they have been abandoned or left to their own devices to figure things out. Better to set up an automated email welcome series. Typically, a series can be anywhere from 1 to 3 emails:

• • Email 1: Thanks for becoming a customer. A great opportunity to talk more about the company and/or your products and services and highlight your customer mission.
  • Email 2: How to use the company’s products or services. Not applicable to all industries, it may be that you want to highlight customer education pieces here so that customers don’t get frustrated. Or try a Q&A style format that would address frequently asked questions about your products/services.
  • Email 3: Don’t hesitate to contact us. As a small business, you’ll want to make sure the customer understands that you are accessible, so make it easy to contact you. And provide different ways they can access your customer service, either online, through email, or by phone.

Also, if follow-up purchases are frequently bought after a certain timeframe, you can also simply create an automated reminder email to go out to them if they haven’t yet bought the product or service again after a certain period of time.  

2. Ask for Reviews

In the past, we’ve worked with a few clients where we made recommendations to integrate more of a process to ask customers for reviews. For example, with small to midsize businesses that deal only within a local area, Google Reviews and Yelp reviews are pretty critical to boost visibility and improving SEO. For other businesses, getting reviews from customers directly on your website can also boost social proof and your SEO ranking if you have the right semantic markup/format for them.

Generally, the more reviews you can garner, the more people will trust your products and services and the higher Google will potentially rank your site – that is, if you structure reviews and ratings in a way that they can pull them into search results. How to ask for reviews:

• • Create a process for first-time customers who see you in person to review you positively in Yelp or Google Reviews. Provide them a takeaway (even as simple as a piece of paper) with the URL to submit a review. And don’t hesitate to ask them to tell their friends too.
  • You can also automate asking for reviews through email (after whatever appropriate period allows individuals to first make use of your products/services.)

3. Create a User-Generated Content Campaign

Do you have the type of product or service that others would love to “show off”? Some companies that do will spread the word by creating a user-generated content campaign. For example, post-purchase, you can have customers submit photos using your product/services and/or testimonials that you can then use to put on social media or your website. Burberry’s famous “Art of the Trench” campaign – in which the company asked buyers to provide photos of themselves wearing the famed Burberry trench coat – went viral as people loved seeing themselves in the Burberry campaigns. For others, who hadn’t yet bought the trench coat, it created a kind of fear of missing out (FOMO) that spurred others to purchase as well.

4. Create Video Walk-Throughs or How-to Explainer Videos

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, once famously said: “We see our customers as invited guests to a party and we are the hosts…You know, if you make a customer unhappy, they won’t tell five friends, they tell 5,000 friends…” He was likely speaking about the ease of purchase through a site such as Amazon, but his point also applies after purchase. How do you help customers? If you have a more complex product or one that may take some time to learn, do you provide a walk-through or explainer videos about how to best take advantage of it? Do you provide other forms of customer education or ideas to help your customers best succeed? For example, if you sell a software product, it’s relatively easy to do a video walk-through with Camtasia or another screen-capture software.

5. Develop a Loyalty or Follow Up Program

From a marketing perspective, we get that companies want new prospects all the time. But it’s worth restating the importance of also caring for the customers you’ve already acquired. Why not, for example, develop a loyalty program to encourage more repeat purchases? You could:

• • Provide discounts for bulk purchases
  • Create a subscription service to allow customers to restock on items at a specific interval and save money.
  • Create a membership program that your best customers sign up for and save (Costco model).
  • Send personalized discounts on customer birthdays or anniversaries of signing up with the company.

Conclusion

The importance of engaging current customers can’t be overstated in terms of both maximizing repeat purchases and creating great word-of-mouth. If you need help implementing any of the ideas of above or just want to talk about better ways to improve your marketing ROI, contact us for a free consultation today. Our mission is to help you excel in digital marketing.