How Do I Market to Existing Customers?

Marketing is a challenging discipline. Knowing the pain points of your potential customers, the pertinent industry trends, and marketing best practices takes time.

In comparison, selling to existing customers sounds relatively simple. After all, they’re already customers of your business, so convincing them to buy should be more accessible. Marketing can be nixed entirely, right?

Indeed, convincing current customers to buy more or a different product can be easier. Many businesses recognize this and dedicate resources to grow existing customers into top-dollar accounts.

However, many businesses don’t provide adequate marketing support when they are looking to grow their current customers into repeat brand advocates; their account teams can struggle. Marketing to existing customers differs from reaching out to net new contacts, but marketing is still required.

Consider What You Know

Focus on building this relationship in all marketing elements for best results. Feedback from your sales team or account team is crucial for best results, and you should consult with these teams to understand how to best market to this client. What are the client’s goals? What’s happening in their industry or business model? Do they have new products or business units coming down the pike?

The example above focuses on a B2B example, where you might have a salesperson or account manager to consult with since the accounts are larger. However, the basic idea holds for B2C marketing as well. If you run an online store, you likely have done segmenting of your customers based on what they have purchased or their expressed interests.

Even if you don’t know the unique identifiers of any given customer, you likely do know your existing customers’ overarching aggregated pain points and profiles. Focus on this when you develop your marketing strategy for existing profiles.

There are various ways to implement this knowledge. Maybe it’s sending new product launch emails to customers who have purchased similar products or styles. Perhaps it’s developing sales collateral that highlights a unique value proposition of your brand vs a close competitor.

Maybe it’s taking research from questionnaires answered by existing customers to develop new products and services and then announcing those new products and services on social media. Regardless of how you do this, just be sure you incorporate what you know about the customer into your marketing for the best results.

Consider Tactics

Not all marketing tactics are excellent methods of reaching existing customers. Advertising, for instance, is usually a costly and inefficient way of reaching current customers. Advertising can work wonders for acquiring new customers, but we don’t recommend it for messaging to your current customer base. Consider these marketing tactics when reaching out to existing customers.

Social Media

Social media is a great way to stay on the top of your current customers’ minds. Someone who follows your business’s social media platforms is likely aware of your brand. Using their attention on your social media platforms is a great way to stay top of mind.

It is important to remember that social media is not the time and place to push for sales and sales only. Promoting new products and deals on your social media platforms is perfectly alright, so long as you don’t do it incessantly.

Remember, your customers follow you on social media to learn about your brand, and while that includes promotions and deals, it shouldn’t only include self-promotion. We recommend emphasizing interactive forms of social media. Polls, brand videos, and announcements of new products make great social media content.

Photos of your business and staff can also be a great way to humanize your brand and show off the human element of your business. Office parties, company volunteering outings, and staff birthdays can make great social media posts for your business.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to engage your past and current customers. For one, you have contact information to use when reaching out about new sales, products, and promotions. Email marketing is also highly automated, low-cost, and quite efficient regarding Return on Investment. If done right, you can utilize your CRM and automated email marketing to keep your top customers aware of important opportunities and trends with your brand.

For best results, be sure that you’re keeping track of what matters to your existing customers. Knowing your customers’ services, past purchases, and preferences is critical for effective email marketing. Let’s say that you run an e-commerce store that sells sports jerseys. The effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns will be diluted if you announce every new jersey, regardless of the sport or team, to the entire database via email marketing. Maybe you’ll get some traffic and sales, but you will likely send out irrelevant emails to your base, which only increases the odds that your customers will slowly stop responding to your emails, and that’s the last thing you want.

Instead, a better action would be tagging every customer contact for the team and sport they purchased for. You could then use this information to send information about new rugby jerseys only to those who purchased rugby apparel in the past and so on for hockey, baseball, and basketball. This approach lets you serve only relevant information to your customers and increase the amount of opens, clicks, and sales you drive.

Sales Collateral

Your sales and account teams, if your business model includes these client-facing teams, offer you some great opportunities. These teams can be an excellent vector for personalized messaging to relevant stakeholders at your client accounts. If you have the resources, consider developing relevant and engaging sales collateral to support these conversations.

Sales collateral can be used for educating prospective clients. Still, suitable types of whitepapers, battle cards, and case studies can help market to current customers considering a new product or service. Creating compelling and visually appealing content helps educate the relevant buyers and increases the odds of a sale.

Focus On the Relationship

One of the most significant advantages when marketing to existing customers is that you already have a relationship with your contacts, whether it’s a face-to-face relationship through Sales or a digital connection through their patronage of your e-commerce store. Focus on building this relationship in all marketing elements for best results.

This will vary from brand to brand and customer to customer. It might make sense to invite a large B2B customer to a sit-down fireside chat about your industry to build a relationship with key decision-makers at that account. This highly personalized approach might not work well for B2C customers.

However, sending out an email to your most loyal online store customers with a flash sale as a thank you for their patronage is an excellent way to build that relationship. Again, the approach won’t see universal execution,  but it is essential that you still focus on the trust and rapport you have created with your customer.

Their positive feelings about your brand are one of the main reasons they’re likely to purchase again; highlight that relationship and trumpet it in your marketing to existing customers for the best results.

Contact JSL for Marketing Strategy

If you need help managing your existing strategy for marketing to current customers, call JSL Marketing & Web Design! We’re an award-winning marketing agency based in Dallas, TX, and we’re ready to put the pedal to the metal for your marketing strategy!

Contact Us Today!