
One of the biggest marketing mistakes franchises make is solely focusing on new customer acquisition.
In this post, I’m going to show you why this is a mistake, and how to better market to your existing customer base.
Existing Customers Are Revenue Steady
While it’s important to keep attracting new customers, maintaining customer loyalty with your existing customers is often essential to your success as a franchisor. Let me break it down for you.
A lot of companies rely on a steady stream of return customers to stay afloat.
For instance, subscription-based companies meanwhile rely heavily on customers constantly renewing to maintain a steady income (think gyms).
Therefore, it’s necessary to also focus some of your marketing on your existing customers – whether you’re a restaurant, a residential cleaning brand or a lawn care franchise.
New Customer Acquisition: Understanding The Customer Lifecycle
Customers typically follow a lifecycle. And, there are lots of ways to break down this life cycle depending on the type of company you are focusing on. However, generally speaking, most customer lifecycles are made up of these three stages:
1. New customers
These are customers who have never used your product or service before.
And, most companies focus their marketing solely on these types of customers. On new customer acquisition. Big mistake.
The way to break down this lifecycle is to turn it into a multi-stage process of creating brand awareness, converting into leads and finally encouraging payment. The sales funnel is sometimes used to break down this process.
2. Return customers
These are customers who have used your product or service before.
Providing that you left a good impression, such customers can be encouraged to keep on buying your product or using your service by targeting them with marketing. Such marketing tends to be more customized to the individual.
And in my experience, the more customized the offer, the better the chance it will produce revenue.
3. Churning customers
Churning customers are customers who decide to stop using a product or service.
The reality is that eventually, many of your customers will stop buying your product or using your service. That is unless you also focus some of your marketing on preventing customer churn. How?
By using ‘win-back’ strategies. These strategizes make it possible to stop customers leaving and turning them back into repeat customers.
All in all, focusing on all three stages is sometimes referred to as lifecycle marketing and ultimately could be key to keeping your company growing and thriving.
Does your franchise company produce lifestyle marketing programs for your franchisees?
What Are Some Great Marketing Strategies for Encouraging Return Customers?
Most of us know some of the strategies for converting and acquiring new customers.
But what are some good marketing strategies for maintaining return customers?
Below are three of the main strategies you should consider:
1. Loyalty discounts
A popular strategy is to offer discounts to customers who keep coming back or keep renewing their subscription.
This method of rewarding return customers provides a monetary incentive to stay loyal and discourages customers from shopping elsewhere for cheaper prices. Types of loyalty discounts include:
- Loyalty point cards
- Discount vouchers
- No claims discounts
- Air miles
- Birthday discounts
2. Email/text mailing lists
Asking customers to sign up to an SMS or email mailing list can be another great way to retain them.
As a matter of fact, mailing lists are a convenient way to keep customers updated on new products, events and promotional offers. You can also send exclusive loyalty discounts via these mailing lists. This keeps customers aware of your business and constantly reminds them of the perks of returning.
3. Customer app push notifications
A customer app can also be a great tool for encouraging return customers.
An app icon provides a constant reminder of your business on a customer’s smartphone. Through this app you can also send push notifications to encourage customers to keep using your product/service. These work great.
What Are Some Excellent Marketing Strategies for Preventing Churning Customers?
Having measures in place to discourage customers from leaving is also important.
Granted, customers should be able to quit your service at any time, but you can use certain targeting marketing strategies to make them think twice. Below are some of examples of such strategies:
1. Retention discounts
When a customer chooses to cancel a service, you can encourage them to stay by offering a retention discount.
Many insurers, energy providers and TV/internet providers have specific discounts reserved for these situations. If a customer is leaving in order to find a cheaper deal, they may think twice if you offer them a better price. Try it, and see if it works!
2. Win-back emails
Win-back emails are used to win back customers who you haven’t heard from in a while.
These emails can include an exclusive discount or could simply be a personalized message that helps sell the perks of continuing to use your service/product.
Additionally, by tracking data on the most common times that customers leave, you can trigger win-back emails at specific periods to retain customers.
Alternatively, you could trigger win-back emails to be sent if a customer hasn’t bought a product from you in over a year or if a mailing list subscriber hasn’t opened any of your emails after a certain period.
3. Win-back push notifications
You can also use your customer app to send win-back push notifications.
These can be automatically triggered to send if a customer hasn’t used your app in a certain amount of time and could similarly include an exclusive discount or simply a carefully worded message to encourage customers to stay (phrases like ‘we miss you’ are popular and effective).
You do provide an App for your customers, right?
Bonus idea: If you use chat on your website, you should try to insert marketing messages. gently…but try.
Finally, I suggest bookmarking this post, so you can go back and brush-up on the ideas I shared. And to remember that new customer acquisition shouldn’t be your only focus as a franchisor.
Because some of these marketing ideas, used wisely, can help you increase your revenue-and your franchisees’ bottom line!