Creating Repeat Customers

It is easier to dig 2 – 50-foot holes than 50 – 2-foot holes. We foster young athletes to be really great at a few sports than mediocre at a lot of sports. We strive to surround ourselves with a few best friends or close mentors than a lot of loose acquaintances. 

Have you thought about your customers in the same regards? As a company with outward facing doors to the public, you strive to get all the traffic you might possibly need to be successful. You might spend a good amount of your yearly budget marketing, through digital and print advertisements. You might even have a sales team that is working on new leads. 

But what about your current customers? 

The Perfect Customer 

1. Has strong communication skills – a customer that communicates well will make your life easier

2. Knows what they want – when they can come to you with exactly what they need, you can spend less time explaining to them all the possible options you offer. 

3. Is not “penny-pinching” you – customers that know what goes into a job, and don’t constantly challenge your prices makes your orders less stressful when it comes to profitability.  

4. Understands artwork – Arguably the most important, but the customer that understands the industry enough to give you artwork that makes printing orders a breeze.

5. Trusts you – These customers don’t need to micromanage you and your business, and knows they will be taken care. These customers are a pleasure to work with.  

You may have some other key characteristics that make a perfect customer. Perhaps it is their average job size and specific qualities that are important to you. Keep a list of these characteristics. 

Find those customers in your business.

Once you have identified those traits that make a perfect customer scour through your customer contact list and make a list of the customers that best fit your criteria. You might realize that you have been spending so much time digging for new customers, that you forget the best ones are already ordering from you. 

Spend time developing those customers. 

Now is when you re-position your marketing strategy from cold sales to customer success. Customer success is when you take a current customer and develop them to become even better customers. If you can take a customer that orders once a year to twice a year you have created traction with your customer and you are on the road to creating repeat customers. Send marketing material to those repeat customers so they are armed to bring you more orders. If those customers have a great experience, they will be walking, talking salespeople without you even realizing it.  If you can iterate this experience with your top performing customers, they can exponentially expand your reach and can compound orders over time.