When people think about growing their business their tendency is to think of ways to generate new clients rather than a broader view of simply “how do I grow my revenue line?” Do you do that too? For some reason something in our brains tells us that finding new clients is a far better option than trying to sell more to our previous/existing clients. Do you find yourself thinking that too? I think this happens for 2 reasons:
- We simply don’t think about our previous/existing clients as a revenue line once we have delivered the original piece of work.
- We let our comfort zone tell us that there’s no money to be had in marketing back to that pool of previous/existing clients.
So is it really worth marketing back to our previous/existing clients? YES! Let me share with you the results one of my fab clients has achieved recently doing exactly that. This particular client of mine is a Design company. Over an 8 month period we consistently grew his list (the number of people who received his monthly email campaign). When we started he had 60 people on that list which were all previous/existing clients. He now has over 600. All of these are highly targeted individuals in his ideal niche. Basically they all have the potential to be ideal clients. In the last 8 months he has issued one email campaign to his whole list every month. He has grown his revenue line by £100,000 which is over 30%. We have just finished analysing the data so we could be extremely clear on what had worked well, which contacts were making the purchases, how much they were spending and so on so we could plan the marketing for the next 12 months. Here’s what we found:
- He had an 85/15 split. 85% of the revenue had come from previous/existing clients, so it was clear to see that marketing back to that pool had been very lucrative.
- He had looked through his original 60 names on his list and nearly deleted one contact who had only ever purchased a tiny job from them. He decided to leave them on the list and the next email campaign triggered that contact to place a big commission.
- The 85% knew the quality of the work these guys produce and needed little encouragement to commission more projects.
- The new contacts on the list needed a bit more coaxing which is totally normal especially when you remind yourself that people need to see a brand ~7 times before they will make a buying decision. The majority of the new people on the list have only been on it ~5 months (so they have received marketing info 5 times) so they’ve done well to generate 15% already.
- Sustainable future growth will come from growing the 15% while continuing to nurture the 85%.
So the moral of this story…you absolutely should market back to your previous/existing clients. These are your equivalent of “low hanging fruit”. They already know you deliver great work so why not see what else you can help them with. This could trigger a nice harvest on additional revenue . Just in case you are wondering…the new contacts came from LinkedIn (so yes, they were free!) and my client put himself in the shoes of his ideal clients and created email campaigns that perfectly tied in to their needs. Simple email campaigns worked very well in this case but, depending on the size of your list, you might want to try something different. Either way, take action! [hcshort id=”14″]