5 Ways to Increase Revenue with Your Existing Customers

Learn why and how marketing to customers is more effective than focusing on new customer strategies.

We’ve all heard the old adage that it costs less to keep a customer than to acquire a new one. If customers are the most important part of any business, why do most companies focus their marketing budget on new leads?

Here are 5 ways to incorporate marketing strategy to existing customers for less than it cost to acquire a new customer.

What’s the difference? Retargeting uses a pixel to cookie a custom audience when they visit a landing page and remarketing uses a list of email addresses to create a custom audience.

Similar to paid digital advertising, both provide a strategy to target specific persons (like your current customers) and serve online ads. Both also cost less because you are using a custom audience instead of a keyword strategy. And both are also a great tool to launch new product lines, cross-sell, or reduce abandoned shopping cart rates.

Here are some real-life examples.

Let’s say you just launched an app to complement your online customer portal. You place a Facebook or Google pixel on the dashboard of your customer portal, which will cookie your customers when they visit the dashboard. When your customer leaves your portal, your retargeting strategy will serve up a static or dynamic display ads highlighting your new app over the next 30 days (of course, you will decide the length of time that makes the most sense). This is an easy way to scale the launch of your new app.

With a targeted offering, audience relevancy is key. Online shopping is a perfect example - let’s say you are re-engaging customers with a promotion that gives a discount on women's swimsuits like ModCloth. If you place a pixel on all landing pages for women's swimsuit or just a specific type, you’ll weed out any customers that aren’t a good fit for your promotion.

Suppression lists are also important to avoid marketing to customers that have taken the desired action. This will not only save your marketing budget but also avoids communication fatigue and improves brand perception. If your pixel is placed on a specific landing page, you may have less of a need for a suppression list.

If you are looking to cross-sell, upsell, or simply re-engage your customers, retargeting or remarketing is a good option. As you know, Google and Facebook have different requirements, but Neil Patel breaks down the differences in his blog to help get you started.

Is there a way you can leverage your customers to promote your products or services? The most common technique is asking customers for social recommendations. Google and Yelp are the most common for small businesses, and Capterra or TrustPilot for mid-market and enterprise. But it doesn’t stop there depending on your specialty, maybe Houzz or Angie's List is a better fit. Social recommendations, also known as social proof, encourage buying behaviors.

Another way to boost word of mouth marketing is by encouraging people to hashtag your business on their preferred social medium. You can start by offering a social contest or simply promote a hashtag to your customers. Then be sure to showcase any customer mentions on your company social channels.

A pioneer in word-of-mouth marketing is Barkbox, a pet toy and treats subscription service. They have over 200,000 hashtags or mentions on Instagram from their customers! Talk about free marketing. Use their example to think through how your brand can encourage a similar social strategy.

It’s no surprise that people trust services or products referred to them from people they know more than the internet. A referral program is a great way to capitalize on word of mouth marketing.

Knowing how much it costs to acquire a customer and the lifetime value (LTV) will help to understand how much to reward customers and/or referrals. Let’s say your LTV is $2,000 and it costs you $1,000 to acquire customers on average. If you start a referral program and reward customers $500 and discount services for the referral, this will save you $500! With $500 in savings, you have room to test the incentive and find out if offering a higher reward generates additional leads.

Be sure to think through the logistics of a referral program and properly tag referred leads. Once tagged, you’ll know how many referred leads became customers. Then you can give your new and existing customers cash, discounts, or gift cards. Another consideration will be your payout timeline to avoid any bad customer relations. And don’t forget to earnestly thank your existing customer for their referral.

I recommend reviewing this definitive guide before getting started to really think through a successful referral program.

How many times do you follow up with your customers each year? You can implement 1-2 annual business reviews as part of your customer success plan. This ensures proactive outreach and begins to build a positive customer relationship. Your business review session may focus on the product or service they purchased, but also allow time to follow up on any operational experiences, objectives and/or challenges. Understanding your customer's business allows you to cross- or upsell if it makes sense.

Let’s say you sell an analytics application that recently added features for omnichannel such as Amazon or Etsy. During your business review, you or a customer success representative would ask appropriate questions to learn if your customer is using an omnichannel strategy. Then you’ll have an opportunity to ask qualifying questions for your new feature and find out if it’s a fit. If yes, it’s a seamless transition to let the customer know of your new features.

It’s also a good idea to automate your business reviews outreach so you don’t forget. A reasonable outreach may happen 90 days after becoming a customer and then every six months thereafter. Your automated email should use a self-registration link, which can be combined with an outreach phone call if time permits from you or your team.

The business review gives a deeper understanding of their business so you can identify if additional products or services can help your customer. Be sure to create a process, take notes, and identify any next steps.

Automated emails have been mentioned as a tool to supplement other customer strategies, but a customer email nurture is definitely a stand-alone strategy. Most companies have an onboarding email nurture to acquaint customers with a newly-bought product, but then they send batch emails periodically to their entire database. This will also create customer fatigue and possibly lower customer satisfaction.

Triggered email nurtures require thoughtful segmentation with targeted messaging very similar to your remarketing campaigns, except using emails instead of digital ads. This allows for heavier content and image use. Your triggered email nurture workflow will be set up to deliver your targeted email only when your customer meets specific field requirements.

Some ideas may involve promoting a feature but require your customers to become acquainted with your product first. In this situation, you may trigger a feature promotion 90-days after becoming a customer. Or let’s say you offer a feature for mid-market or enterprise clients only and want to target a customer once their sales hit a specific target range.

You get the idea. Your company and customers benefit from triggered email nurtures to cross-sell products in a timely manner, and automating them is the best way to scale your reach.

Your marketing strategy shouldn’t exclude your current customers. Using any or all of these 5 customer marketing strategies will undoubtedly increase revenue:

1. Retargeting and remarketing

2. Word of mouth

3. Referral program

4. Business review

5. Triggered email nurture

The more you involve your customers in your marketing strategy, you have the ability to build a close customer relationship with many benefits beyond additional revenue. If you don’t see an immediate increase in revenue, you can measure customer retention or feedback to identify if there is a positive lift in your customer lifecycle.

Leave a comment if you have a great customer marketing strategy! Please heart my blog if you enjoyed the content and be sure to check out how marketing can greatly impact your bottom line (with real-life examples!).