Customer acquisition and customer retention are both important aspects of running a successful business. While customer retention is vital to building a loyal customer base, it is equally important to continue acquiring new customers.
Acquiring new customers helps to expand your business and increase revenue. It is important to have a well-planned marketing strategy to attract new customers. This can include social media marketing, email campaigns, search engine optimisation, and other advertising methods. By investing in customer acquisition, you can continue to grow your business and reach new audiences.
On the other hand, customer retention is equally important. It is important to keep your existing customers happy and satisfied with your products or services. This can lead to repeat business and positive reviews, which can help attract new customers. It is important to provide excellent customer service and maintain communication with your customers to ensure their needs are met.
Remember to keep focussed on marketing and sales - There are several ways you can keep a focus on marketing and sales activities even during those busy times. Here are some of our suggestions:
Having good systems, such as CRM systems, in place – used diligently, this will ensure you have all the details you need about current, future and past clients at your fingertips. Keeping track of exactly where you are in the sales process with every single lead makes customer acquisition and retention more efficient.
Conversion rate – measure what percentage of leads you manage to convert into paying customers.
Repeat business – know how many customers you retain, for how long, and lose.
Delegation – Consider employing someone to make your life easier such as a Virtual Assistant. The jobs that they can do can take a huge amount of workload away from you on a daily basis. Freeing you up to do other things.
Planning – Sounds like an obvious one but keeping your calendar timings clear and transparent can show you where additional meetings can be slotted in at a moment’s notice. Allowing for travel time in your calendar means you should be able to easily plan every hour of your working day.
Marketing – If you did some marketing activities in the early days of your business that worked well for you why not revisit that but, perhaps, on a smaller scale?
Financial Plan – Think carefully about where you want your business to be financially in five years’ time and do the maths – how many customers do you need to have yearly to make that happen?
In summary, both customer acquisition and customer retention are vital to a successful business. It is important to strike a balance between the two and invest in both to ensure the growth and success of your business.
