Client Re-Conversion Can Lead to Big Rewards

A client of ours named John owns a chimney-sweeping business. His customers love him and the great service he provides, but the nature of the business is seasonal and his customers only call him once each year, usually at the beginning of winter.

During the warm weather months, his revenue stream is lean and he worries about how the business will survive until the next fireplace season begins. He wonders how he can persuade people to have their chimneys cleaned regardless of the time of year; how he can hang onto the employees he painstakingly trains every year; how he can attract more customers to grow his business.

Last year, while enrolled in the E-Myth Mastery coaching program, John had a sudden realization. He has a thousand happy customers, but sees them only once a year. If he could somehow serve that exact same group of a thousand customers even just one more time in the year, he'd double his business! Perhaps they wouldn't need a second chimney cleaning, but maybe they would need some other seasonally-related work to be performed, such as scouring winter salt off their driveways and sidewalks, or removing and power washing their storm windows. In fact, what if he had a seasonal cleaning package offering an array of services throughout the year?

"I've got a field of diamonds here," he said, "and I think I should mine it!"

John realized a fundamental E-Myth principle: an ideal target market for any business is the satisfied customers it already has! Converting one-time customers to ongoing clients is its own kind of lead conversion called client re-conversion.

Setting a Strategy

When you perceive a customer as just a one-time buyer, a world of opportunity is missed. But make the mental shift that John made, and suddenly the best target market imaginable - your existing satisfied customers - comes into focus as a key element in building and growing your business.

Set some time aside to think about what else your one-time customer would like to buy. How can your business develop a relationship with a customer that brings repeated opportunities for them to buy what they want and need, leave satisfied, and come back yet again? How many friends could that customer refer to your business? How would knowing the answers to these questions change the way you plan to build your business?

One of the most valuable resources any business can have is a complete set of customer contact information for all customers. Before you can re-engage past customers with your business, you'll need to be able to get back in touch with them. At a minimum, re-converting customers requires an address book with contact information, and ideally it requires that you set up a comprehensive customer database. If you also included each customer's purchase history, you'd be able to analyze important information about purchasing patterns, to gain insights into what else they'd be interested in purchasing. And with the addition of customer demographics and psychographics, you could plan a product and marketing strategy that would laser focus on your customers' interests, preferences, and motivations.

To Learn More about Your Customers, Just Ask

John knew that he needed better information to build the business the way he now envisioned it, so he decided to survey every customer. He sent a letter to his customers announcing his new seasonal cleaning package, and he enclosed a self-addressed, stamped reply postcard. At the bottom of that postcard, he added a simple line: Please help me serve your needs better by telling me about yourself. Underneath that line, he asked some standard questions about age, income, household size, and profession. He knew that he could extrapolate a lot of valuable demographic and psychographic information from just those four simple bits of data.

You Can Do It, Start Today

Do you have that kind of data about your current customers? Have you thought about how you would ask for it? If you have not done so because you fear that it would annoy them, you may be surprised to hear that the majority of people don't mind being asked such information.

For example, my local grocery store chain offers customers a Frequent Buyer Card that enables regular shoppers to obtain discounts on groceries in exchange for giving the store demographic and personal information. I was more than happy to fill out the store's data request form in order to obtain the card, because I can now buy my groceries at lower prices, and the store was happy to receive my answers because they can now offer me, their target market, the kinds of products that interest me and that I am likely buy. It is a win-win situation, and you can probably think of similar examples in your own life.

So, what's stopping you from doing the same kind of thing to help your own business better meet your customers wants and needs? If you don't yet have an idea for what other products or services might interest your existing customer base, why not begin thinking about it today? Start by considering what you can offer your customers in a way that will strengthen your relationship with them. Gather demographic and psychographic information to identify their backgrounds and preferences, then set up a simple data collection system to contain and process the information, and train your employees to use it. The result of these efforts? Your own diamond mine of satisfied customers ready to re-convert to long-term clients!