How to Grow a Client Base as a New Business
Regardless of your business model, starting a new venture comes with plenty of processes and goals to undertake and strive towards. One of the major concerns for a blossoming business is attracting new customers and sustaining that growth.
Creating a base of loyal customers requires careful planning and marketing efforts. Fortunately, this guide will walk you through how to identify your potential customers, the importance of developing a relationship with them, and how to expand your customer base.
Read on to learn more about the essential tips and tricks for building a strong consumer base.
What is a Client Base?
Essentially, a client base refers to the loyal customers who follow your business for its brand, services and/or products. This includes not only existing customers, but also those who were previously customers and may become ones in the future.
Your business’s customer base tends to hold similar values, needs, aspects, and other consumer habits. This is because they are united in their desire or requirement to pursue your business’s offerings.
As a result, a business’s client base may reflect clear trends or be dominated by a specific type of person. Some of the more notable customer base examples include:
- Age brackets
- Gender
- Occupations
- Lifestyles
- Daily habits
- Proximity of the business to the geographic location of the customer’s places of residence or work
Your client base is often synonymous with your target market. Hence, it is best to know and understand your customers to formulate effective business marketing and expand your revenue.
How to Grow Your Customer Base
The importance of a strong and stable customer base cannot be understated. However, many new businesses have a lot to juggle, with opening day, managing staff, and all sorts of key responsibilities to establish their brand presence.
That is why we have succinctly outlined six main ways to grow a customer base that can be applied to a multitude of business models. Feel free to pick and choose which methods can help your business grow:
Method 1: Provide Notably Great Customer Service and Support
When you are establishing your new brand, one of the most important features it should be associated with is a great customer experience. When your customers are satisfied, they are more likely to remain interested in your business and become repeat visitors.
Small businesses in particular need to focus on this method, as their model typically relies more on word-of-mouth marketing than larger establishments. With a strong and positive reputation in the public’s eye, more customers are likely to head your way.
To help improve your customer service and provide support to clients, consider first how they communicate with your business. Having multiple avenues of communication that are easily accessible to all client types ensures that no business opportunities are passing you by. It also ensures that customers always have their questions and concerns answered.
One of the more reliable means of communication for businesses is a professional phone number, such as a 1300 number. With the right phone provider, you can also gain access to call features such as missed call tracking, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), call routing, and many others. This can help support your customers more reliably and prevent them from losing interest when their calls go unanswered.
Method 2: Partner Up With Other Businesses as Needed
Building a customer base as a new business does not have to be an individual effort. Even when your chosen market or industry is particularly competitive.
Keep an eye out for any local or established businesses that may have complementary offerings to yours. Alternatively, you can also look for businesses that may require your products or services.
Developing a partnership with other businesses may look like you hosting a referral program for them, offering your work at a discount, among others. If they perform similar services, you can help each other grow your respective client bases.
Method 3: Collect and Analyse Customer Feedback for Strategies
The only way to develop your business and ensure greater customer satisfaction is by constantly reviewing your operations and considering how to improve them. To reliably do this, it is best to connect with your client base and ask for their feedback.
Client feedback is a first-hand insight into the pros and cons of your business. It also allows you to determine what areas are working best and others that may require further polishing.
Common ways to gain customer feedback or analyse behaviour include:
- Surveys
- Feedback forms
- Chatting directly with customers
- Looking at data trends in your business
- Researching what competitors are doing
- Consulting with an industry expert
Aim to collect both qualitative and quantitative data for a more accurate picture of your customers’ needs. In turn, you can develop both marketing and operational strategies to improve your business and the customers’ experiences. Hopefully, this will lead to greater retention rates of customers, which can help to grow your client base.
Method 4: Market Your Business to the Public
Marketing is what makes a business prominent in the public eye and ultimately leads to more customers. So, building a strong marketing strategy that is adaptable to changes in the industry, economy, or customer interests is crucial.
The main avenues of marketing efforts include advertising in the following media:
- Television
- Radio
- Social media
- A professional website
Developing your brand across multiple channels ensures greater reach and a higher likelihood of drawing in new customers. Be sure to develop brand tone of voice, values and offerings that appeal to your client base. That way, they are more likely to reach out in kind.
Establishing and maintaining relationships with customers, existing or otherwise, can also help in retention rates. When customers feel seen, heard and considered by a business, they are more likely to trust it. This can lead to greater loyalty and the potential of more customers onboarding as existing customers recommend your business to others.
It is important to have a strong line of communication established ahead of marketing to take on these potential new clients. Whether it is a public social media account to answer customer questions or a phone line for immediate sign-ups, having multiple channels can lower your chances of letting a customer slip away.
Method 5: Personalise Your Marketing Campaigns
When marketing your business, it is important not to take an ‘anything-goes’ or ‘cookie-cutter’ approach. If your business does not have clear values, products or services, branding, or other features, it will be harder to connect with your client base.
Hence, spend time identifying who the right customers are for your business and what would appeal most to them. Be sure to create content that will generate talk around your brand, retain public interest, and showcase what you stand for.
For example, if your client base is mostly made up of younger customers, use fresh and exciting language in your marketing. Speak directly to them rather than down at them, making them feel like they are in charge of decisions, such as purchasing from your company.
Your ideal customer base should find that your services and values speak directly to them. You can help build this connection with personalised marketing efforts such as emails, discounts or limited-time offers.
Among other unique benefits, this can help build and retain a loyal customer base.
Method 6: Create a Customer Loyalty Program
One of the last methods for building your client base is offering loyalty programs to your customers. Having incentives on hand at your company locations, on your website, or via your social media platforms can encourage visitors to become paying customers.
If the incentives are designed to grow with gestures of loyalty, such as regular or high amounts of purchases, customers are more likely to engage with them. By capitalising on their desire to pursue greater awards, you can secure a customer’s prolonged loyalty.
Generally, loyalty programs follow a similar structure of:
- Offer clear and appealing rewards that match your customer’s interests
- Provide tiered membership to motivate further engagement and pursuit
- Directly thank and/or engage with your clients throughout the program to build strong and personalised relationships
Keeping track of engagements in said loyalty programs can also help you adapt your strategies and measure client satisfaction. If you see a drop in a certain loyalty tier or during a particular time, you can adapt your program to address these pain points. In turn, greater success metrics should be capitalised on to both grow and maintain your customer base.
What Types of Customers Make Up Your Base?
There are essentially four main groups of customers that make up a business’s client base. Being capable of identifying each of these groups can help you:
- Perform more accurate market research
- Develop customer profiles to identify pain points, concerns or needs to market to
- Provide new products or services that will appeal to your customers
- Streamline aspects of financial planning
Eventually, this information and action can lead to a solid customer base that provides increased revenue as it grows.
Leads and Potential Customers
Before their first purchases with your business, prospective clients are already part of your customer base. This is because they are usually your target market, hence you need to consider their presence in future marketing campaigns.
By building your brand awareness to appear on these potential customers’ interests, you can set your business up for an expansion of the customer base. So, be sure to consider before even opening your new business what kind of deals, discounts, trials or other marketing appeals can draw in these future loyal customers.
New Customers
The first time someone buys from your business, they are immediately counted in the new customer numbers. This initial purchase may be a one-off, but it is still a source of revenue, offering valuable data on how to strategise for expanding your client base.
The aim is to turn any new clients into loyal and frequently returning customers. Be sure to gain insights into what drew them to your brand, whether it is by discussing it with them face-to-face, using email marketing, surveys, or online reviews.
Regularly engaging with customers is what can change a visitor into a loyal member of your client base. The most loyal customers are those who have a strong relationship with your business and find themselves both trustful of and satisfied with it.
Loyal and Repeat Customers
When a visitor to your business becomes a regular, they are demonstrating their loyalty to your brand. This may be as simple as a monthly purchase of a single product or frequent purchases of multiple services. Regardless of their current engagement method, it is important to focus on upselling and securing greater customer satisfaction with these clients.
Additionally, the regularity of these customers’ engagement with your brand means they have greater insights into the business model and its offerings. Discussing what else they may want or need from your brand, as well as what you can improve, does not just show you trust their insights, but also allows you to strategise future improvements.
In turn, this can lead to great customer service and even greater loyalty from your existing clients.
Past Customers
While they may no longer be part of your active client base, previous visitors are still important to securing more satisfied customers in the future. They provide valuable data and insights into how you can improve your business to attract and retain new customers.
Also, just because they may have left before does not mean these clients will stay away. By addressing the pain points raised by these previous clients and working more on customer relationship management, you may be able to draw them back in.
Customer success is not always linear, so be sure to maintain a relationship with past clients if possible to eventually return them to your growing customer base.
Why is it Important to Grow Your Customer Base?
The most obvious reason why it is important to grow your client base is to gain more customers. In turn, they will make more purchases and significantly grow your overall business revenue over time.
However, the addition of more businesses can also come with other benefits such as:
- Lowering operating costs, which can allow you to set higher profit margins
- Gaining a competitive edge over other businesses by selling at discounted prices or offering exclusive deals available from your lower operating costs
- Manufacturing at a greater quantity with the increased revenue, allowing for smoother scalability of your business
- Diversification lent by a bigger customer base means greater stability in your business, as losing a customer is no longer detrimental to operations
- Maintaining loyal customers gives you a trustworthy focus group to test new products or services, gaining valuable feedback for upcoming business decisions
- Gaining a greater understanding of client demographics and their needs, which can generate new product or service ideas
How Teleca’s Business Phone Numbers Enhance Your Brand
When you invest in a strong and loyal customer base, you can encourage your business and its revenue to grow over time. However, if you do not have the means of accepting new customers and staying in contact with existing ones, your brand cannot flourish.
Fortunately, Teleca’s range of business phone numbers comes with a range of call features that help both small and enterprise businesses enhance their operations.
The professionalism of a 1300 or 1800 number can secure a trustworthy brand image in the public’s eyes. With the right call features, it can also aid in the scalability of your company as your client base grows.
Get in contact with Teleca today to learn more about how our services can help your company develop its customer base. New and loyal customers are just a phone number away.
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