How much business did you lose today?

Do your customers know what you do?

Have you ever heard one of them say “I didn’t know you did that” or “wow I wish I would have known you did that I just had it done by someone else.”

It’s hard to hear that.

Why does it happen?

Two reasons mostly:

1. You haven’t clearly communicated to your customers what you do
2. You don’t consistently communicate to you customers what you do

We’re all busy, and I completely understand that, but we need to be vigilant in our dialogue with customers. New customers are hard to find and very expensive to win over. Your current customers can be one of your greatest sources of new sales.  They already know who you are, they already like you (hopefully) and they have had a good experience with you (again, hopefully).

Unfortunately most small business owners focus most of their time and money on new customer acquisition, while they’re missing opportunities right in front of them.

My good friend and colleague Neil Thornton says “you need to re-connect with your customers on a regular basis.” He is bang on.

While you do need to find new customers, you also need to focus on the ones you have and build your business with them. This is called increasing your share of customer.

How to determine share of customer:

1. Estimate what you believe a customer would spend on your category in a single year?
2. Of that total, how much do you estimate you are getting?

That’s your share of customer.  This number will be different for different types of customers, but you’ll quickly see that you’re missing opportunities to increase sales.

To ensure my clients customers know what they do I use something called a “Drip campaign”. This is where you target specific customers for mini campaigns and keep your message in front of them in a consistent manner.

To try your own drip campaign follow these steps:

1. Who do you want to target? If you sell clothing perhaps you target past customers that have never purchased a coat from you.
2. What tactic do you want to use? Does this audience respond well to email? Maybe a postcard or a phone call.
3. What is your offer? How will you persuade them to take action? Perhaps a sale or a coupon or a bundled offer.
4. What is the frequency of this campaign?
5. How will you measure success?

A drip campaign can be an inexpensive way to generate new sales from existing customers. If you get this working properly, then you can add in a new customer acquisition program.