How to grow a customer base without expanding numbers

Posted by Justin Hesser on June 28, 2012

Many companies place a heavy influence on growing their customer base by adding newer ones. This may make sense on a topical level – the more customers the better – but upon further insight, it may not be the best practice.

In order to properly grow a customer base, Entrepreneur Magazine recommends that companies take the time to pay more attention to their current customers, which can be most accurately done through a custom database software but also through a few sales tactics according to the news source.

One of the many ways companies can grow on existing customers is by enticing them to spend more. This can be done through a number of avenues such as cross-selling programs where companies may push customers to purchase related products, or up-selling programs, emphasizing the quality of higher-end products – a very common tactic in the restaurant industry. Others include next-selling – jumping toward the next purchase – and unbundling, where companies form a sort of a la carte menu to their products.

Furthermore, providing call to actions and mentioning new products or promotions on any form of customer communication template can also allow companies to increase sales. These templates can be stored in the database software as well.

Regardless of the ways companies promote increased customer spending, the data involved in these processes is very complicated. Associates will have to pull information about other products to promote to customers as well track previous purchases. The use of a custom database software similar to FileMaker can help companies maintain these crucial statistics that can play a key part in any customer growth initiatives.