Build A Large Customer Base

A loyal customer base not only boosts revenue with repeated sales, but these customers often recommend your products to others, helping expand your potential market.

With increasing customer expectations, identifying your core customers and developing good business relationships with them is critical to any business strategy.

However, in today’s competition-driven market, even with a loyal customer base, if you fail to cater to their needs, they will simply opt for other companies to get similar products and services. So not only do you need to generate new leads for more business, you need to retain your existing customers to survive in the market.

But how? Let’s look at how you can build a large customer base for your business.

1. Use Email to Connect With Existing and Potential Customers

Email marketing is one of the most effective strategies to expand your customer base. You can build a strong email list either using first-party data or purchase email lists catering to your target audience from data service providers.

Now leverage email marketing to inform them about your business. You can create brand awareness by sharing the premium features of your product or offering informative content about the industry to those who sign up for your emails. The aim is to stay in touch with your target audience with relevant and personalized emails.

2. Embrace Hyper-personalization

Reach out to new customers and tap into new markets by sharing fresh and valuable content on your website. Identify what type of content and communication channels your audience prefers. Then optimize your content marketing strategy accordingly.

After all, if your ideal customers are interested in interactive content like videos and infographics, offering eBooks or long blogs wouldn’t help attract them.

Create the content on key industry topics and target relevant keywords to rank higher on search engines and get more customers.

3. Cross Promotion

Suppose you’re a relatively new business in your industry, partner with other established businesses to leverage their large customer base. Cross promotion helps increase customer base when the target group of two companies is the same, but the companies are not competitors of each other.

For instance, you can consider promoting your business on partnered companies’ social media, host events and giveaways together, or even create a promotional newsletter to offer something meaningful to the customers.

4. Use Social Media for Networking

Consider this: there are 4.55 billion active users on social media today. Of this, Facebook has a total of 2.89 million users, while LinkedIn boasts 850 million active users.

This means your one relevant blog or video could easily reach thousands of interested customers at a time. Safe to say, social media is the place to be if you want to grow your customer base. Depending upon your target audience, you can run your marketing campaigns on different platforms.

Whether you share a small video wishing the customers on occasion, share the link to a blog post, or post an infographic highlighting mind-blowing industry statistics, your presence on social media strengthens your brand value, establishes communication with your target audience, and draws traffic to your website.

5. Offer Exceptional Customer Service

It is crucial for a company’s growth to understand the needs of the customer. One bad experience can encourage 80% of customers to do business with a competitor. No wonder a company loses 40% of its customer base because of poor customer service.

So to motivate your existing customers to return, a great customer service approach is a must. It will help reduce the churn rate and bring in more customers through good reviews. Here are a few ways you can ensure a positive customer experience-

● Respond to customer queries and complaints quickly

● Address their feedback in real-time

● Adopt a flexible communication system

● Offer personalized content and product offers for a better experience

6. Use Referral Marketing to Build Relationships

Recommendations have a tremendous effect on B2B communication. In fact, 91% of B2B buying decisions are influenced by referral marketing. At the same time, 78% of B2B marketers say that referral programs help them find high-quality leads. Therefore, besides running marketing campaigns on social media, referral marketing can give you a competitive edge over a broader customer base. You can offer rewards or special discounts to customers who send referrals and even reward new customers that come in through these referrals.

This will not only help build a larger customer base but will also act as an incentive for customer loyalty.

The Bottom Line

Building a large customer base requires time, patience, and constant effort in marketing. You need to identify what your customers want, their pain points, and how you can constantly improve by taking valuable feedback. After all, the secret to a successful business rests on how you can make your customers happy.