SALES ANALYTICS

18 Strategies to Increase Sales From Your Existing Customer Base

When your goal is increasing sales for your business, the answer does not always have to be getting new customers. Sure, having new clients is wonderful, but the acquisition of new clients can be costly and time consuming and often times you can find yourself neglecting the ones who are already paying you just to acquire a client who is essentially “cold”. 

Aside from acquiring new buyers, increasing revenue is also possible by focusing on your existing customer base. Since it is not that simple and cheap to market your services, taking care of your current consumers that are already supporting your products is a great strategy you can use to boost your revenue.  

How your company can increase sales revenue from your existing customers

Are you looking for strategic steps you and your team can implement to maximize your sales? Here are 18 proven tips you can use to connect with your existing client base. 

1) Thoroughly research and analyze your market

Companies should invest extra time in doing due diligence so that they know all the important details about their customers. Since your customers are the prospects that have already seen value in the products and services that your business offers, listening to what they want and need should always be a top priority. 

Taking the time and resources to do your market research is essential to increase your sales. You and your team should gather data by conducting a thorough market analysis and then interpreting the data to offer additional “hooks” that your existing clients would see as valuable. 

Some of the important pieces of information you can gather are as follows:

Demographics 

How old are your customers? Do you have more female clients than males? Client demographics can show you a lot of things that will be useful once you are already targeting them to buy another product or service you are offering. 

Buying habits
How do your customers purchase your products? Do they prefer buying them online, or do you have a physical store they visit? What are the spending habits of your existing customers? Knowing this information will allow you to know how to market your products wisely. 

2) Do not disappear after making a sale

Your customers choose your product or services for a reason. Whether you have the most competitive pricing among your competitors, are the most accessible, offer the most expertise, or give the best value, your company was purposely selected amongst your competitors. 

Because of this, providing your consumers with great after-sale services is critical to nurturing positive relationships. Letting them know about the great service and support your company provides is a great way of always staying present.

Sending automated marketing e-mails or messages when you release a new product or are having a sale is sufficient, but there is no need to go overboard either. As much as possible, make sure that your messages show them three things: personality, information, and value. 

What should you do when your clients are not satisfied with the product or service they bought from you? If this happens, resolving their issue as soon as possible should be a top priority. You should never wait until your customers become too disappointed, or they can also dissuade other people from trusting your brand.

3) Know and address your customer needs

Companies big and small cannot survive without the patronage of their customers. Sadly, a business could always lose its clients for a variety of reasons, but knowing and addressing the concerns and frustrations your customers have about your product before they creep up on you is best.  Remember, prevention is always better than cure. 

Knowing your customers’ needs allows you to address them properly. This is exactly why performing a market analysis, as mentioned earlier, is necessary to improve customer experience and sales. Dedicate your resources to listening to your clients and then make strategic adjustments to your current and future products. 

As always, keeping your consumers happy will ultimately help with customer retention. With proper techniques, it would be an advantage for you to not only increase your sales with your existing clients but also be a way to gain new ones. 

4) Expand and extend your services

Knowing which of your goods and services yield the highest and lowest ROI (return on income) is extremely helpful for companies both large and small. By offering similar ancillary services, you will also expand your target market and should also see an increase in sales. 

Your businesses shouldn’t be a gamble and it shouldn’t be a roll of the dice to find out which of your products will be a success and which ones won’t. Before you launch a new product or service you should already have the intel and insight to determine if the product will be perceived well in the market or not. 

As always, the data you can gather from your market analysis will be useful for you to determine which products you need to offer, which of them you should continue to sell, and which services you need to axe. Expanding your offerings allows you to be in touch with your customer’s needs which will be good for your revenue in the future. 

5) Offer realistic pricing

Since consumers can easily and quickly walk away from high prices, it would not be best to increase your rates without doing proper research on your goods and services. Obviously, if you’re able to present enough value to your clients then overcoming higher prices shouldn’t be as much of a challenge to overcome.  Granted, we know that the goal is to boost your revenue, however, keep in mind that your customers have come to expect a certain level of value from you.  If the value is there, the pricing should not be an objection. 

Taking time to analyze your services will prove to be beneficial in the long run, especially if you want consumers to continue buying your product. In fact, one of the many mistakes business owners make is not offering bundles or shying away from giving freebies to their customers. When done properly, they can also interest new clients to try your product while keeping your existing customer base happy and secure. You can actually kill two birds with one stone, as long as your deals provide consumers with relevant offers that give high value.

6) Reward your loyal customers

What do you do when a customer has been supporting your products for years? If you want to follow what thriving businesses are doing, they do their best to show appreciation to their existing customers.  They purposely avoid making their most loyal patrons feel like they’ve been taken for granted or forgotten.  Forgetting about your current client base typically happens when there is too much of an emphasis on making sales to new clients.  No matter how good your products are, customers like to feel that the business sees them as an essential part of their growth and success.

Creating a similar program would likely go a long way.  Offering loyalty programs that encourage clients to continue supporting your products is effective to retain them for many years. This often translates to a reward or gift. After all, who doesn’t like to be appreciated for being a good and valuable customer?

Depending on your business, rewards should often be relevant to what you are offering. This will help keep the clients motivated and will make them want to continue being loyal to your company and mission. For example, giving a birthday present during their birth month or an incentive after a couple of purchases, or after they’ve met a certain spending threshold, will definitely be appreciated by your consumers. 

7) Upsell and Cross-Sell

It is not a secret in sales: the process of getting new clients to try out your products is long and expensive. This is the reason why top companies prefer to focus their resources on improving their relationship with existing customers. Hence, upselling and cross-selling are both creative ways they use to boost their revenue. 

What does upselling mean? Basically, upselling is the process of encouraging customers to purchase a certain product or service that is essentially an upgrade from their original choice. For example, if a consumer wants to buy a standard office chair, offering a more comfy, ergonomic chair that costs 30% more is considered upselling. 

What about cross-selling? Cross-selling is encouraging customers to purchase a certain product or service aside from the one that they originally planned to buy from you. As an example, if you are selling a washing machine, offering another appliance at a discounted price on top of the purchase can effectively improve your sales. Of course, proper research should be done before offering these add-ons, think of Amazon and how they offer their “people also buy” section. 

8) Be honest with your partners

When you offer a product or service, be honest with how it can help your clients. What problems or issues do your solutions solve? What chores or tasks will it help save their time and resources? Maintaining and keeping the standards they set with your goods makes your consumers go back and trust your company for the many years to come.

9) Form an efficient and reliable team 

One of the most important things you can do to increase your company’s revenue is to invest in your sales team. Sadly, many business owners underestimate the importance of having a team that they can rely on. 

Because of this, keeping your workforce happy and equipping them with competent selling skills improves the way they service customers. Having monthly or quarterly check-ins can help everyone stay on track and could also inspire them to achieve better goals. Just like with your consumers, offering incentives and rewards to high-selling employees will yield a positive outcome.  

10) Always offer a convenient buying process

Did you know that complicated payment schemes can turn your clients away? Focus on being a company that is easy to purchase from, and if your client base needs flexibility with purchasing options, find a way to offer that to them.  The easier you can make it for someone to do business with you, the better off you’ll be.

For traditional goods, the procurement process should be easy and simple. Older generations may not appreciate it if you only offer technical ways of payment that require multiple steps to complete. If your target market is a younger generation, you should offer numerous payment options including different apps, banks, and other online payment systems. 

11) Be the best choice over your competitors

Before you try and gain more revenue, make sure that your products are actually worth their value. There is not much sense in spending all your resources on advertisement if your goods and services are not marketable or if there are a lot of products that are better than what you are currently offering. 

Always dedicate yourself to giving your consumers value. That is the primary thing you need to focus on to keep customers and increase your sales. 

12) Offer discounts and host useful events

Bundling products, giving freebies, and offering “action-takers” discounts are effective in both attracting new clients and retaining old customers. In a way, they can introduce your new services to your existing clients without having them pay full its full price. 

As a result, they can assess if the product is beneficial to them and could convince them to pay the full price on their next purchase. This is exactly the reason why big companies can even offer free trials for their services. By showing prospects, both existing and new, that their offers are worth paying for, they can successfully make them loyal consumers by just offering them a few months of free subscription. 

13) Be open for customer feedback

Customer feedback can be wonderful, but sometimes customers can be ruthless and brutally honest. 

Although it is your business, do not take feedback too personally. Instead, use it to improve your services. Are your consumers saying that your products are too strong, too weak, too expensive, not worth it?  Use this feedback as guidance towards creating something even better and more valuable in the marketplace.

It is important to remember that you won’t please everyone. However, if several of your clients are saying the same thing, take a deep breath and see if they are right. Do your research, gather your data. Use their comments to make a better version of your product(s). 

14) Use varied communication modes

Do you remember the demographics of your target and existing customers? Make sure to be flexible with the way you reach your clients. Some may prefer the “old school” way of in-person visits, while others may want to be reached through their emails. 

Since your customers are communicating through various channels and apps, you should be open to how you communicate while still knowing where your customers and potential customers “hang out”. If you are not willing to try new ways of communication, increasing your revenue may be more difficult than it has to be. 

15) Market your services

We can dedicate an entire 10,000-word page on our site about marketing, but it should never be seen as a waste of time or resources. As you expand your product offerings, you’ll want to make sure that you’re always in front of your clients and prospects so that they continue to think of you first. 

16) Implement a fun referral process

Encouraging referrals keep your existing customers happy and also attracts new ones. As long as you have a mutual relationship with your consumers, they are more likely to support your services. 

17) Improve your product and services

Upselling and cross-selling can be beneficial for you as the business owner. However, you should always make sure that they are advantageous for your clients, too. Never try to trick your consumers just for the purpose of getting more sales, or this will backfire on your company sooner or later. 

Getting more business from your existing clients will be difficult if your offers are not giving them the value for their money. Always aim to improve your existing goods before selling other items. 

18) Entice leaving customers

Offer discounts and coupons to clients who have not ordered from your business in a long time. Doing so may allow you to make them your regular customers again. 

How to get more business from existing clients

Getting more revenue from your existing clients should not be impossible. By implementing the strategies we mentioned above, you will surely be able to increase your sales without necessarily having to bring in new clients. 

ReconInsight is here to give you data-driven recommendations on how you can increase your company’s revenue by simply leveraging the existing clientele base you already have. Have your sales organization consistently improve the company’s revenue and profit while maintaining high morale. 

Take advantage of ReconInsight’s Free consultation. 

References

1. Tweet by Peter Farder
   https://twitter.com/faderp

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