| By: André Larabie, CBC, MBA, PhD |
Here is a business strategy that is subtle but very powerful when it comes to increasing the size of your business. Simply put, you want
to increase the buying frequency for your customers. You want to provide incentives for them to keep buying from you, incentives that will prompt them to buy MORE OFTEN.
A customer who places only one order every 20 years is not going to be a very good customer (unless it is a very large order), and this is because each customer requires a certain amount of overhead maintenance, so you could actually lose money on such an infrequent buyer.
The problem for the business owner is that the customer does not interact with the business enough, so they tend to forget about the business and end up buying from other vendors. You should avoid this by being constantly “visible” to your customers.
You can stay visible with your customer base in several ways. First of all, you can visit your customers personally, but this tends to take up too much time, and it is only cost effective for the most lucrative customers. You can send them periodic mailings, but this has the drawback of possibly getting ignored because the mail gets lost in all the other mail or labeled as junk mail. You can also create and maintain a marketing “List” on the Internet. You can give them an incentive to provide you with their email address. After you build up a database of email addresses, you can send out periodic mailing.
Several list management companies exist. Rather than recommend a single one, you can search for “marketing list management” on the Internet and compare the features of the several top companies.