Acquiring new customers for your business is generally more difficult and costly compared with retaining the existing ones.
When it comes to increasing revenue, businesses often prioritize acquiring new customers and disregard the possibility that they can earn more from their current customer base.
Acquiring new customers is a tedious and time-consuming process. It often requires you to offer heavy discounts or spend excessively on promoting your solutions.
So, focusing on your existing customers and exploring new ways to generate more revenue from them may be a viable strategy worth considering.
Here are some of the ways you can generate extra revenue from your existing customers.
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Upsell and Cross-Sell Opportunities
One of the best ways to generate extra revenue from your existing customers is by leveraging upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Upsell refers to your offers to existing customers, providing them with the option to upgrade from the current solution to a newer, improved version of the product or service.
For example, you can consider recommending a smartphone with 128 GB of storage to your customers who’ve already purchased phones with 64 GB or lower storage capacity.
Since your customers have already purchased from you, suggesting that they switch to a more sophisticated or enhanced version of the product they own can be considered a viable option to increase your revenue.
This is extremely helpful, especially in the e-commerce industry, where upselling contributes to up to 30% of the revenue generated by businesses.
Cross-selling works a bit differently. Here, you offer a different solution or an add-on to your customer’s prior purchase. This offering generally complements the benefits that your customers get from the product or promises enhanced functionalities.
As long as your offerings are relevant and generate value for your customers, cross-selling can be a great way to boost your revenue by targeting existing customers. For example, you might suggest that customers who’ve bought an iPhone from you consider purchasing AirPods.
However, you have to be extra careful when making such decisions. Your offerings should complement your products or services to ensure trust and lasting relationships with your customers.
Reach Out
Another efficient way of boosting your revenue is by reaching out to your current customers. The prerequisite for this is to maintain a database that contains necessary details about your customers, such as their names, email addresses, and contact numbers.
When reaching out to your customers, there are two notable approaches worth considering: contacting them via phone or reaching out to them through email.
We recommend the latter for two major reasons. First, contacting your customers via email is a more subtle way of promoting your solutions. Second, a well-thought-out email campaign has the potential to generate a high return on investment.
However, to reach out to your customers effectively, it’s essential that you get acquainted with their needs and preferences. You should closely monitor different touch points throughout the customer’s journey and extract relevant insights to make informed decisions.
This is one of the reasons why 78% of businesses are either developing customer data platforms or already have one that helps manage and analyze relevant information.
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Provide Amazing Customer Service
Offering great customer service is one of the most efficient and reliable ways of engaging your existing customers and increasing your chances of generating extra revenue from them.
Your relationship with your customers doesn’t end with them purchasing a product or service from you. It starts from there. So, you should be the first and only point of contact for them when they seek answers to their questions or face issues with your products or services.
It’s essential that you quickly cater to the queries of your customers and help them benefit from your products or services to the fullest. This helps foster trust as you win your customers’ hearts by solving their problems, which makes it easier for you to earn extra revenue from them.
Add Social Proof to Your Site
Did you know that 99.9% of people explore reviews online before making buying decisions?
Example of featuring monthly visitors and trusted customers as social proof (Source)
Leveraging social proof helps boost customer retention and enables you to generate extra revenue from your existing customers. Social proof can be anything: reviews posted by your loyal customers, success stories, testimonials, case studies, and so on.
It’s your customers’ narrative about how your products or services helped them solve certain problems and why they prefer you over other alternatives in the industry.
Reading positive things about you can be reassuring for your new or existing customers, and you can cater to any doubts or second thoughts they might have. This helps breed loyalty and brings you a step closer to acknowledging lasting customer relationships.
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Meet Customer Demands
If you wish to increase your revenue from existing customers, listen to what they have to say and meet their demands that haven’t been fulfilled yet.
Interacting with your existing customer base allows you to identify their pain points and explore opportunities that help you generate extra revenue.
This can be done by asking customers for their feedback with respect to your current offerings. To gather their responses, you can engage your customers through email, phone calls, and social media.
The customer insights can help you come up with new features or different solutions altogether that pique the interest of your customer base and make it possible for you to boost your revenue.
Leverage FOMO
Leveraging FOMO, also known as the fear of missing out, is one of the most efficient tactics that can help you generate extra revenue from your customers.
We have often witnessed people making swift buying decisions to benefit from exclusive offers or limited-time deals. Be it the rarity of a particular product or an item frequently purchased by other people, FOMO can work wonders when it comes to generating additional revenue from your customers.
FOMO leads people to make impulsive buying decisions because they don’t want to miss out on certain experiences.
It’s a behavioral phenomenon pertaining to an individual’s need for belonging that can be leveraged to trigger additional purchases by your customers, which in turn helps increase your revenue.
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Offer Tailored Solutions
Offering tailored solutions to your customers is a great way to generate additional revenue from them. There are two benefits if you choose to consider this option.
First, by modifying your offerings as per your customers’ expectations, you give your customers a reason to stick around, which helps increase your retention rate. Second, you come up with a new and improved version of your product or service that’s more capable of attracting a new audience. Either way, it’s a win-win for you.
Plus, when you meet your customers’ expectations, you earn their loyalty, which influences not just their purchases but also the buying decisions of their social circle through word of mouth.
Consider Remarketing
Remarketing is an efficient way to engage people who were once your customers but are no longer with you.
Customers can switch to other alternatives for a number of reasons, but giving up on them is a huge mistake that you should avoid making. Remarketing is the best strategy to consider here, as it helps promote your solutions and attract churned customers.
The prerequisite for remarketing is identifying why your customers left you in the first place. And once you’ve identified the reason behind your customers’ departure, the next step is engaging them via a well-thought-out outreach campaign.
Inform your customers of the improvements made to your products or services ever since they left or the new features you’ve introduced. In short, give them a reason to reconsider you. Not all of them would come back, but you’d get the chance to make things right with the ones that do.
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Announce Referral Programs
If you wish to earn extra revenue from your customers, announcing referral programs can be a great strategy.
It’s a marketing tactic where your customers become your brand ambassadors and promote your solutions. This enables you to get more traction and capture quality leads.
Think of it as an upgrade to leveraging social proof as you enable your customers to share their brand experiences and promote your solutions to their colleagues, friends, and family.
Referral programs are generally fueled by the monetary benefits offered to customers in exchange for their efforts. Here, you can consider rewarding your customers by offering exclusive discounts, cash back, and commissions on referred sales.
Anything goes as long as it generates value and motivates your customers to be a part of the program.
Final Words
There you have it: the nine effective ways to generate extra revenue from your existing customers. In the race to acquire new customers, we often forget about the existing ones and fail to live up to their expectations.
Pursuing new prospects is great and all, but you shouldn’t disregard the possibility of generating additional revenue from your existing customers.
This can be easier said than done, but if you’re willing to give it a try, consider the recommendations provided in this article. They encompass some of the most efficient ways to boost your revenue with your current customer base.
Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash
