How to Increase Your Customer Base in a Budget

It is no secret that to find new customers, you would need to market your business. You could buy lots of online and offline advertising. But marketing isn’t cheap. This post will cover how to increase your customer base within a budget.

Generating new sales is a crucial skill for any entrepreneur. There are many possibilities for finding new clients.

When I first started my business, I read a score of books about sales techniques. I figured that if I had a lot of sales, my business would be fine. Later, I discovered that thought to be partially accurate. I will explain why.

How to Increase Your Customer Base: Understand Your Business

Before you start expanding your portfolio of clients, here are a few questions you should ask yourself:

• How many clients can you service?
• How many orders can you fulfill?
• How many service calls can you complete without compromising quality?
• How much can you make or manufacture?

All those questions will play a crucial role in how hard you push on the sales.

Yes, you can hire more people. But hiring is a process, and it will take time to have someone trained. And good employees are hard to come by.

There is no magical number for how many clients you need, but you must keep in mind your process.

Additionally, think of what you are offering. What is your value proposition you offer your customers? All of these factors play a major role in your day-to-day business.

How to Increase Your Customer Base: Understand Your Target Audience

Before you jump headfirst trying to find new customers, you must understand who they are. You will need to do some market research.

There is a disconnect between your motivation to increase sales and your customer’s motivation to solve his problem.

Honestly, a lot of customers are willing to pay someone to solve their problems. The real question is, are you able to solve your customer’s problems?

Get to Know Your Current Customers

In order to develop a successful market plan to reach new customers, you must first understand your current ones. What attracted them to your company. What service or product you are offering that differs from the competition.

Surveying your current customers is fairly inexpensive. One way is to send them surveys by using online survey tools. However, you might have to offer some incentive to motivate your customers to reply or fill out forms. The stimulus might be future discounts or gift cards of some sort.

Listen to Your Customers

Your current customers hold the key to finding new ones. Listening to your current customer and finding solutions to their problems paves the way to find more customers. Any information they provide should be wisely used for your market research and strategy. In fact, their opinion should be treated as intel for your operations.

How to Increase Your Customer Base: Provide Customer Support

When I first started my business, I made several critical mistakes. I quickly found out that having a large customer portfolio was not the answer for a huge paycheck. The biggest problem was that we could not service all of our calls with the same quality. Furthermore, several service calls were either done late, or we never got to it.

Whether it is the first purchase or the hundredth, treat each customer with the uttermost respect. Keep in mind that a happy customer is likely to tell three friends about a positive experience.

How to Increase Your Customer Base: Keep Your Website Content Fresh

In today’s environment, having and maintaining a website will help your business in many ways. However, simply having a site is not enough. Always keep your content fresh by adding interesting things to it.

For instance, in one of my sites, we always keep up with major holidays and change some of the banners to whatever holiday is coming up.

Additionally, fresh content will search engines, like Google and Bing, to find your website.

Visiting Your Clients and Prospects

While we have shifted to a more virtual setting, face-to-face visits still impactful. It is a good practice to occasionally visit your clients.

You have to create your own sales strategy. However, mixing up with cold calling, email, and in-person visits can be effective.

Conclusion

In conclusion, when trying to expand your customer base, your capability is the first factor to be considered. Understand the maximum workload you can possibly take is crucial. Providing great services or products followed by good customer experience is the art of attracting and keeping new clients.

In fact, word of mouth still one of the best ways to attract new clientele. Thus, building a rapport with your current customers is the key to expand your business.