Ideas for Increasing Sales to Existing Customers

One of the most important aspects of your sales process is finding buyers for your products or services. As simple as this task seems, it is very tough for certain businesses to increase sales. If this is your goal, then you must find the best strategies to do this.

Let’s start by asking you a question, do you have an amazing product or service? Are you having issues with finding buyers or patronage? If your answers to both questions are yes, then you just picked the right article.

We have put together a list of ideas for increasing sales in this post. At the end of this post, you should achieve your goal of increasing sales.

How to Increase Sales to Existing Customers

When you are planning to increase sales, you need to get your priorities right. Your existing customers should top that list. This is because they have already shown you trust by purchasing your products or patronizing your services.

It is simple, if you treat them well, they’ll return, and soon, they’ll become your advocates. Here are a few stats from a survey conducted by Customer Thermometer to show you why you need to focus on your existing customers:

• About 65% of your total sales are likely to come from your existing customers.
• You have a better chance of selling to existing customers (60–70%) than new prospects (5–20%).
• There is a better chance for existing customers to try your new products or services out.
• About 80% of the profits your business will make in the nearest future will be from 20% of current customers.
• Returning or existing customers will spend about 31% more than what first-timers will spend.

These statistics must be giving you some interesting ideas already. They go a long way to tell why you need to focus more on your existing customers. Let’s show you some of our ideas and strategies in the next section.

Top 6 Tips to Increase Sales

We have already established the fact that existing customers are important to your sales campaigns. You need them if you want to increase sales considerably. Here’s how you can maximize your sales to existing customers.

Always consider customer behavior

Understanding customer behavior is a very important aspect of drawing up a marketing campaign. It is important to understand how customers relate to your products or services. Do they rely on a single feature more than others? Are they having issues with one of your product features?

Considering their behavior gives a clear picture of whether you need to provide upgrades in certain areas or not. One other approach is to provide personalized services or training to customers. Using this method helps to enrich or extend your relationship with your existing customers.

The secret is to avoid being forceful or too compelling. Rather, it is offering education on what services or product features that you have. They probably never knew about those features or services in the first place.

Seek feedback

Feedback is very important when you are trying to increase sales. It is important to ask your customers what they think your products or services lack so that you can focus on value-added upgrades.

Here’s a simple example to buttress this point. Let’s say there is a restaurant that only offers eat-in services. Some of your existing customers might not always be interested in always sitting down to eat your food, and it may even be a considerable amount. You may be losing out on significant earnings by failing to understand this. You will only know about this if you seek feedback from them.

This allows the restaurant to reach out to customers that cannot make it down to the physical location. Making this addition increases sales considerably and it shows why you need to seek feedback.

Adopting the same method for your business will also ensure that you add new product features or services. This will help build stronger relationships between you and your customers as well.

Run regular promotions

One of the best ways of increasing sales is by rewarding your existing customers. Who doesn’t love an incentive? Promotions that reward old customers will improve their loyalty and tend to increase sales numbers significantly.

The frequency of the promotions doesn’t matter. They can be weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. What matters is that it doesn’t stress your business. Make sure that you always plan for promotions so that they don’t wear you out.

With an established rhythm for your promotional campaigns leveraging on email marketing or popular platforms, your customers will begin to anticipate. Such anticipation is what helps you increase sales. Why?

Apart from the fact that customers target these periods to patronize you, they act as advocates and sales agents. They’ll begin to spread the word about your promotions long before it is time. This way, new customers begin to flock to your business so that they’ll be eligible just in time for the promotions.

The referrals you get to become the foundation for a whole new customer base. See why you need to run promotions?

Stand out from the competition

No matter what you sell, you will always have competition. Even if none exists at the moment, it is just a matter of time. What do you do to keep your existing customers on your side?

You need to stand out. This means that you have to study what the competition is doing and find a way to do it better. It also implies that you must come up with ways that put you miles ahead of the competition.

Come up with a clear message or slogan that is distinct from that of your competition. Work out your promotional campaigns to be more satisfactory for your existing customers. Understand the pain of your customers and find the best ways of solving their problems.

Use visual mechanisms to tell your story

It is no secret that it is easier to spur action with visual aids. One of the easiest ways to increase sales is to use visual aids or infographics. This method makes messages actionable and subtly convinces existing customers to make more purchases.

Visual mechanisms include whiteboards, videos, images, infographics, etc. The idea is to show customers how you plan to solve their problems with a product or service. Visual mechanisms create a contrast that encourages a level of urgency in the customer to close up the sale.

Over-deliver all the time

The way to keep customers coming back is to over-deliver every single time. Doing this does not only keep them returning for more products or services. It also ensures that they have great stories to tell about your business. Provide them with tremendous value.

Don’t get us wrong, you don’t have to do this to the extreme that you lose money. All you need to do is step over the line just a little. This gives your customer an unexpectedly pleasant experience and an amazing product or service.

Here’s something that you should understand about delivering to your customers — never consider product or service delivery in the short-term. Always focus on the long-term effects on your customers and your business. You also need to be consistent if you are adopting this method because soon, they’ll always expect that little “extra.” Focus on the customer and prioritize them.

If you want to implement this value-based mindset, look into Agile project management practices. Such methods are focused on delivering value to the customers and visualizing the whole process for the team. With Agile project management tools it becomes easy to see what the team is doing and what extra steps they could take.

Conclusion

With each of these tips, you should be able to increase sales to existing customers significantly. Don’t forget that this fraction of your audience needs your attention the most and should be a priority. What other ideas do you have? Share them with us below.

Author: Maria De La Pena

Maria is a content writer for the unlimited graphic design service Delesign with a keen interest in eCommerce and internet marketing. She is a communications graduate and understands what it takes to write persuasive copy and blog posts. Outside of work, you can find her mini-blogging about her life on social media.