One of the biggest hits by Scottish supergroup Simple Minds is “Don’t You Forget About Me” and it’s a song to keep in mind when carrying out digital marketing in NZ. The country’s leading digital agencies are brilliant at capturing new business but they’ll remind you that there’s another market ripe for the picking – the customers who have already bought from you.
Many businesses make the mistake of sealing the deal with one customer and then moving straight onto another, forgetting about the one they’ve just done business with. This forgetfulness is often permanent, with most businesses failing to forge a long term relationship with their existing customers. This is an expensive mistake according to Harvard Business Review. They suggest it’s 5 times to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain and satisfy an existing one. And while we’re discussing existing customers in statistical terms, here are a few more facts and figures to consider:
- 65% of your sales will come from existing customers if you maintain a relationship with them
- Provided the relationship is a good one, the probability of selling to an existing customer can be as high as 70%. Compare this to getting a prospective customer to buy products from you for the first time and you’re looking at a probability range of 5% to 20%.
- Existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products compared to new customers or prospects.
- 80% of future profits will come from just 20% of your existing customers.
- Existing customers spend an average of 31% more than first-time customers.
Not only are existing customers good for business. They’re great promoters too. When new customers are going through the decision process, they use referrals as a guide— and referrals can only come from the people who already know your brand. When you make a positive impression on your existing customers, that can have genuine dividends down the line:
- More than 80% of people say word-of-mouth recommendations make them more likely to purchase that particular product or service.
- 90% of people trust recommendations from friends, family, and other people they know over other sources.
- 88% trust online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust recommendations from people they know.
- 72% will take some sort of action after reading a positive review.
It’s been said that increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase company profits by anywhere between 25% to 125%. So, it could be a wildly profitable exercise to devote a good part of your digital marketing to reach out to existing customers – with email marketing being one of the more direct ways to say hello and maintain that all-important connection. However you do it, don’t you forget about your existing customers.
