How to grow and nurture your customer base

Your most valuable asset is your own prospect or acquisition database, which you can nurture to the point of making the first purchase. Combining database marketing with other forms of media can significantly increase the size of your customer base.

However, maintaining an active relationship with your customers is critical to business growth, whether you're in a niche industry or have thousands of competitors. Whilst it’s important to create strategies to acquire new customers, sometimes existing customers are overlooked. As you might be missing out on your biggest market.

To reiterate, customer nurturing is an underutilised aspect of e-commerce marketing. In terms of long-term revenue, it's a low-risk, high-reward activity because it can increase your customer lifetime value.

But, we, at Social Media Boutique Agency, are going to tell you how to grow & nurture your customer base to have business growth and drive more sales. First we’ll establish ways to grow your customer base & then focus on strategies to nurture them.

So, here’s how your going to start:

Collect email addresses on the website

This is an important part in growing your customer base. You need to find creative ways to collect the email address of the people visiting your website. So later on you can move to nurturing & creating a relationship with your customers.

This can be done with the help of an opt-in form on your website, that allows users to enter their email and subscribe to your communications. Make sure it’s a quick & easy process that offers your potential new customers benefits (like promotions, exclusive offers, exclusive content, exclusive access to new product launches, etc).

Another way to go around this is creating specific resources/content to email subscribers. Many businesses, especially B2B ones, create informational content that reflects the interests of their target audience. This could be an eBook, white paper, webinar, free software trial, or anything else that provides consumers with useful information. If you’re a beauty brand, you can create a quiz related to your niche, which in return will help you gather email subscribers & populate the customer database.

What helps you populate your customer list is having ongoing ways to collect new email addresses. All the ways you can collect these addresses can be optimised and changed according to the interest of your customer base.

Create newsletters

One of the many benefits of having a newsletter and populating it with new email addresses is that you communicate with your existing customers & potential customers. Newsletters can educate, inform your audience about new products, company success, upcoming events & promotions. You can also use the newsletter to promote special & exclusive offers also for those who open the emails.

It also helps you reach your target audience that already showed an interest in your product or service. Because the company is already aware of this audience's purchasing habits or interests, it can address topics that it knows will be of interest to these readers. And this is what we call nurturing your customer base ;)

But, how do you exactly nurture your customer base once created and striving to grow it? Well, what you can do is:

You can start by sending personalised & relevant emails. As you already know, email is the most powerful channel you can use to engage with your customers. You can create customer loyalty and nurture relationships much easier than other digital channels. But why personalised & relevant emails? Well, you’ll be able to demonstrate your brand’s investment in their unique needs and interests. If your customers have spent a lot of time on a particular page & product, you can follow up with an email about the benefits or offer a special offer to incentivise them.

And what’s also important to note is that you need to have a retention plan as well. The best way to retain customers is with a superior product/service offering and competitive price point. Additionally, you must offer excellent customer service and send targeted emails. But, the most important aspect is the execution. So, the content you’re sending out to your customers needs to drive them to complete a desired action (be it a purchase, book a call, request a demo, etc).

Remember, the biggest mistake you can make is to stop communicating with your customers after they’ve made a purchase on your website. The goal should be to retain those customers for future business, referrals or simply just word-of-mouth.

Finally, one of the best ways to positively nurture your customer base is to reward them. Think of the customers that purchase consistently, wouldn’t it be nice to send them a gift voucher, or a special discount? This in turn can enforce positive customer loyalty.

So, if you’re struggling with growing & then nurturing your customer base, Social Media Boutique Agency is here to show you creative & efficient ways in helping you achieve long-lasting customer relationships. Are you ready to have that chat? Book your discovery call here:

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