It costs a lot less to keep a customer than to work on acquiring a new one. You can reduce costs and increase revenues substantially by turning the customers you already have into repeat buyers, turning your product cycle into a never-ending circle by expanding your customer lifecycle into infinity.
So how do you turn customers into repeat buyers?
* Create Awesome Products – Your very first line of defense is to create great products. From your freebies to your high priced products, everything should be top-notch and high quality. If you are known for the great quality, word gets around and of course someone who buys something from you then trusts that the next product they get will also be excellent.
* Provide Excellent Customer Service – Even if something does go wrong in terms of the product delivery or the product itself, if you clear it up with customer-centric service some faults will be overlooked and you’ll have gained a lifelong fan and customer.
* Under Promise and Over Deliver – Your sales pages and content that promotes your product should avoid too much puffery. When your customer gets your product it should be even more than they thought it would be according to your sales pages and sales copy.
* Segment Your Customers – Once someone buys from you and become a customer, it’s important to move them through your product funnel. And the best way to do that is to segment them by what they’ve already purchased, marketing to them only what they have not purchased.
* Build Relationships with Customers – Create inner circles and mastermind groups, and even closed Facebook groups to help you build better relationships with customers. Offering customers an insider’s view of you and communication with you will endear them to you in ways that other methods won’t.
* Offer Specials for Current Customers Only – So often, sales revolve around only new customers but this is a huge mistake. Offer current customers discounts, bonuses, and opportunities that are not offered to anyone else.
* Differentiate Yourself from Your Competitors – Even though you’ve already attracted your audience and they’ve bought products from you, you’ll still need to ensure that you work on being very different from your competition so that you don’t lose that customer to them.
* Empower Front Line Customer Service Providers – If you outsource customer service, be sure to give them power to deal with issues below a certain dollar limit without checking in with you. You are only one person and to make the customer wait will create issues that can easily be avoided.
Creating repeat buyers involves a lot of thought and consideration to your customer’s life cycle, your product funnel, and the quality of the merchandise you create. It’s all a mixture of everything working together that keeps your customers buying over and over again.