For those of you who remember or have heard of Earl Nightingale, you may recall his recording about “Greener Pastures.” He made the point that every patch of grass, or pasture, looks greener from a distance.
When you’re standing on your own lawn, you see every weed and brown spot. But when you look across to your neighbor’s lawn, it looks lush and green like a golf course.
But the fact is, grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence – it’s an illusion. Just as it’s an illusion that the next customers you get will be the best customers who spend the most money and so forth.
This might be one of the greatest secrets of making money via marketing of all time.
Nearly every business owner fails to fully mine the gold in his own customer list. They’re running around trying to get NEW customers, instead of focusing on their current customers.
Jay Abraham made a fortune simply by going to existing businesses and showing them how to fully utilize their most under-valued and neglected asset – their own customers.
Here are some ideas for extracting maximum value from your own customers.
- Offer more products and services.
- Make offers to your list more often.
- Communicate consistently.
- Create VIP groups and memberships with special privileges.
- Let your list know you reward frequent purchasers as well as high volume purchases (if applicable).
- Identify and focus on the hyper responsive customers and give them more opportunities to spend money with you.
- Create and sell continuity programs, or sell affiliate continuity programs.
- Sell renewable products or services.
- Learn about your customers and tailor offers to match their needs and wants.
- Communicate frequently with information, education, and even fun stuff.
- Incentivize greater usage.
- Analyze your customers and separate them into A-B-C groups based on their responsiveness. Then develop strategies to upgrade the C’s to B’s and the B’s to A’s.
- Become the resource in your niche for your customers, offering discounts on other people’s products through joint ventures.
- Ask your customers what they want and what you can do for them as well as what they want to buy right now.
You could even take this one business idea – extracting maximum value from a customer list – and help local businesses to increase their own incomes while paying you a nice percentage of the additional profits.
