Building a Customer Base for your Small Business
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Your pool of customers is your business’ lifeline. Without them, you won’t survive. Say you’re the only Laundromat in your area. Getting a steady pool of customers is no problem because you don’t have any competitors. But what happens when another one opens five blocks from your place? Get more customers and expand our customer base! But before you can do expand, you need to get to know who your customers are first. We don’t mean being in first-name basis with them, of course. Rather, you need to know what types of people patronize your business. So here are the basic things you need to know about your customers:
1. Gender and Age Bracket
2. Location
3. Income Bracket
4. Level of Education
5. Basic Traits and Lifestyle
6. Interests
You can acquire this information through customer feedback surveys or research. Once you have a clear idea of who your customers are, you can now research, plot, and execute plans on how to get more of them to know about your small business. How to do it without risking bankruptcy because of advertising? Here are a few tips:
Find a “Contact Goldmine.” There is a significant difference between someone who has a lot of friends and someone who has a lot of contacts. The former is silver mine when it comes to word of mouth while the latter is a gold mine for more contacts who, in turn, can provide you with more contracts. When you come across a potential gold mine for contacts, hand him your business card and offer special discounts for every successful referral.
Frequent Buyer Cards. The so-called Frequent Buyer Program is a great idea to keep loyal customers happy and to get more referrals. For every “n” number of stamps or stickers, you can offer a great discount for two—for the loyal customer and a friend. And since you’re on the roll, you can add an optional fill-out form for supplementary card users or referrals to add to your customer pool.
Smart advertising. We don’t mean going for the megabucks advertising agencies to help create a massive (not to mention expensive and could result in a massive heart attack) ad campaign for your small business. When we say “smart advertising”, we mean using your street smarts to come up with inexpensive, quick, and efficient ways to advertise your business. Yellow Pages advertising, business pages in social networking sites, bulletin board posts, and vehicle signage work.
Happy Customer Relationship. Keeping your customers up-to-date with promotional emails, discount coupons, and airmail postcards for special holidays go a long way. The last one may sound sappy to you but even the big boys airmail birthday cards to their patrons. Sure, your recipients won’t airmail a note of thanks for the cards. What they will remember, though, is that your small company takes cares of their customers and maybe a few of their friends might enjoy the same products and the same treatment.
Listen to customer feedback. What works for you might not work for others. So in order to widen your reach and expand your customer base, make it a point to listen to regular customers’ feedback. You can do this by asking them to answer a short survey. It may be a short as five yes or no questions printed on a plain sheet of paper or as extensive as a whole website’s worth of quick questions just like the one this famous coffee shop has been doing for years. It also wouldn’t hurt thanking your patrons with a short order of coffee / pastry or even a small token of appreciation for their effort and time.
