We provide you the tools with PosterMyWall, and we also wanted to give you the expertise to run your business like never before. For that, we reached out to Allan Dib, a rebellious marketer, successful entrepreneur and author of The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money And Stand Out From The Crowd, Amazon’s #1 global marketing book.
Over the course of this blog post series, Allan will take us through nine steps to create a practical marketing plan that works for small businesses.
This is part 5 of the ‘How to create a marketing plan’ blog post series. If you haven’t read part 4, you should read that first.
Now, over to Allan.
Customers for life
Finding new customers is important, but a bigger gold mine is existing customers. Here I’ll talk through focusing on existing customers and increasing their lifetime value.
To do this, you want to have strategies and tactics in place that get existing customers to do more business with you.
So for PosterMyWall, it’s to continually find new ways to help small businesses and organizations to better promote their events, services, and products. They think about your marketing for you. So when you log on to PosterMyWall, every month there are new templates for social media posts, business flyers and digital designs. They’ll soon have email marketing templates as part of their strategy to provide more value to their current customer base.
In thinking about how you can get your customers to do more business with you, there are five primary ways to do this.
One is to raise your prices, and I know this can be tough for small business owners. You feel squeamish and worry that it could chase your customers away. But the truth is if you’ve positioned yourself correctly and delivered an excellent service most customers will happily accept the increase.
Two, you could try upselling, and this is basically offering free add-ons. McDonald’s ask if you’d like fries with your burger. This strategy has generated millions of dollars for the fast food franchise. If it works for them, it’ll work for you. Even though you’re not dropping your price, the customer still feels like they’re getting a great deal.
Three is to focus on ascension, and this is the process of moving customers onto a higher priced product. It’s not for everyone, only for those where it would be beneficial and makes business sense.
Four is to increase the frequency of your customer’s purchases or attendance at events, and a great way to do this is to give them a reason to come back. It could be a voucher to put towards their next purchase. People hate to waste a good coupon, so they’re likely to come back.
And five, reactivate past customers. You can do this by creating a strong offer that’s too good to resist. They already know, and like you, so it’s all about enticing them back.
So that’s the five ways to increase your customer lifetime value, this is square 8 on The 1-Page Marketing Plan. Hope I’ve got you buzzing with new marketing ideas that you can start implementing immediately.
We’ll close off this series by talking about referrals, and empowering customers in ways that would even surprise them.
