Marketing Your Current Clients Like Prospects
Watch or listen to an ad for a cell phone plan, internet provider, streaming service, or one of the many other 21st-century services, and 15 seconds of detail around this incredible deal is almost always followed by the phrase for new customers only.
It’s a great incentive to join, and no incentive to stay. I don’t know that companies are maliciously calculating a strategy of: bring them in and hope they’re just too lazy to leave for a better deal. It’s just that the priorities are skewed very much to one side.
Potential recency bias acknowledged, but it feels like demand generation is as hot of a term as it has been in the past decade. The way companies are planning, hiring, and structuring their marketing is around revenue-generating and outcome-oriented marketing. Everyone wants to grow their share of the market.
What’s interesting is that it doesn’t seem that existing clients or customers are much a part of that equation. People spout the reminder that it’s more cost-effective to keep a customer than acquire a new one, and yet the prize for many marketing teams and companies is net-new leads, opportunities, and customers. B2B companies seem to be particularly at fault here, but it’s not absent from the B2C world either.
By the way, I get it. You want to keep looking ahead to what’s next and always try to expand your horizons. But there’s so much potential within current client and customer bases that companies are missing out on by not engaging. And the truth is, you don’t have to adjust your strategy that much. It’s just different versions of the same messaging.
This isn’t just about loyalty and rewards, either. It’s about putting in the work to foster long-term relationships. Here’s where to start.
Keep Them Aware of Your Journey
Companies are in constant states of change. Products and services are evolving at a rapid pace, as is their positioning and objectives in the market. Don’t assume that just because a customer converted and began working with you a year ago, that they know and are keeping up on everything going on with your brand now. They have their own stuff to worry about.
Instead, make sure your customers are consistently receiving updates about what you’re doing and what you offer. There’s massive upsell potential as you scale. Maybe you’re a services provider that used to only focus on one channel and now are adding others. Or you’re a consumer goods brand expanding into a new market. Your older customers likely still think of you in the same light when they converted and may not know you offer more now.
Keep yourself top of mind because you may be even more valuable to those customers now than when they first signed on, they just don’t know it. And by this point you’ve hopefully built up trust and validated yourself.
An ancillary benefit is that customers like to see/know that the companies they engage with are set up for the future. Make sure they know how you are scaling and evolving for the better.
Expand Beyond the Sale
The customer-brand relationship is like any relationship in that if you don’t keep working on it, it will go away. The job isn’t over once someone converts. Companies need to keep proving themselves time and again, or else customers will leave. And you can’t just do that with more offers.
There are plenty of ways to do this, with a few being:
Share thought leadership tips and tricks and ideas that keep customers feeling ahead of the curve. Give them something they can put to use.
Get them to participate in the narrative – either through case studies and telling their stories for B2B or user-generated content and features for B2C.
Make them feel seen and appreciated with personalized messages and content.
Treat Customers First
If we go back to the cell phone example at the top, what those ads are doing is making consumers feel like they have lost if they joined the company as a customer too early. What brands should be doing is the opposite: treat existing customers like VIPs.
Your current customers are the easiest to market because you have all their data/preferences and they already know you. Very little education is needed. So if you’re rolling out a new version of your software or launching a new line of your product, tell your customers first and give them the opportunity before opening it up to the larger public. Make them feel special and like there’s a reason they are a customer of your company.
Another benefit is this group makes for a great test audience. A soft rollout to current customers can give you valuable insights and data to make tweaks and improvements before the full launch.
Methods of Success
This doesn’t need to be a dramatically different approach from what you would take with new prospects. You leverage the same channels and touchpoints, it just requires slightly different messaging. Reach out for help on how to fine-tune that messaging and strategy to start getting more out of your current customer base.