How to Attract Clients to Your Business: 5 Ideas that Work

The desire to reduce costs is natural for any running business. There may always come a time when the usual ways to increase the number of customers may be too expensive.

Here are a few tips to help you create a perfectly working marketing strategy with a limited budget.

Content:
1. Optimize your email campaigns
2. Get Cross-Marketing
3. Pay attention to geoservices
4. Participation in the loyalty program
5. Work with online ratings and review sites
6. Conclusion

Do not take e-mail as archaic in comparison with rapidly developing social networks and instant messengers. It remains a tool for driving sales and increasing customers. At the same time, email is a tool that is already working in your business.

This means that you don't have to invest in expensive new software to optimize your email campaigns. With the right approach, the time-tested MailChimp plugin can do the job.

Of course, the optimization of e-mail newsletters will require some time and effort of the company's employees. But this is a real opportunity to get new customers with minimal (if not zero) costs.

For those who doubt, we will give an example of Golden Gate Wine. Hong Kong California wine importer used marketing automation techniques to increase sales by 150%! Nothing innovative has been done by the company.

For example, to begin with, they cleaned the “dirty” contact database. Repeats, soft and hard rejections, uninterested subscribers were removed from the database. For two months of work, 5500 contacts were deleted, 4200 remained.

From the remaining data, information was extracted about:

This paved the way for targeted, personalized marketing. The very same strategy of such marketing deserves a separate story. Therefore, for brevity, we will not dwell on it anymore.

Find a company that has a customer base similar to your own. But not your direct competitor! The synergy of dissimilar brands with the same influence expands marketing opportunities and reach.

Suppose such a potential partner is found. Now think together about how you can sell each other's products or services to your mutual customers. The classic of such interaction is the cooperation of a seller of children's goods and a store with clothes for expectant mothers. A flower shop is likely to find common ground with a pottery workshop that produces stylish vases. A power tool store will negotiate with a workwear company.

For starters, the forms of cooperation can be quite simple – cross-linking to a business, promoting each other through their social media platforms. Even a simple mention of a partner in a telephone conversation is also useful. Well, the aerobatics of such a partnership is, for example, a joint collection of BYGGLEK storage solutions from LEGO and IKEA.

Geoservices is a huge space for customer acquisition work. Those who need to eat, have fun, fix their car, see the sights, etc. – all these categories of customers will use the maps on their smartphones.

Adding a business to Google is completely free. But just reporting the coordinates and the name of the company is not enough. Work with business keywords. Be sure to show high-quality photos of interiors, price lists, communication channels (phone number, instant messengers, etc.).

However, even the most informative mark on the map is only the first step in unlocking the potential of geoservices.

Here is an example of a more complex idea. An employee leaves the office at lunchtime. He walks past a cafe, chatting on a messenger as he goes. And at that moment he sees a push notification: “We have a free table. We book it especially for you. We also have happy hours for burgers at this time. We invite you."

The opponent may retort that in order to convey such information, it is enough to put the appropriate advertising on the street. But I remind you – your potential client at this moment does not look around. He reads messages on his smartphone.

Big business often uses loyalty programs. The bank may offer cashback for some goods or services for using the card. Explore such loyalty programs. In addition to banks, pay attention to airlines, Internet providers, mobile operators. Maybe one of them has a place for your business?

Another way to implement this idea is your own loyalty program. For example, several businesses operating in the same region may well implement a common loyalty program. And then attract additional customers with discounts, promotions and other classic tricks.

  Before joining a loyalty program owned by big business, it is very important to conduct a small test promotion. This way you will understand how interested its members are in your products or services. Eventually as your loyal following grows, you may want to pivot some of your products by launching a subscription box company. Here, recurring and predictable revenue is a guaranteed result from the program.  

Check that this category of sites is regularly viewed. Respond promptly and constructively to complaints and criticisms that appear there. Even if the claims are the most ridiculous. The fact is that the client (both B2B and B2C) often uses information from online ratings and review sites. As a rule, they do this before they come into contact with a company they do not know. Back in 2016, 90% of prospective visitors read at least one online review before deciding to visit a store or restaurant. It is unlikely that this figure will decrease in 2022.

So make the most of the positive reviews. To do this, place a link to such a review on your business website. Find a highly visible sign in your store, office, or restaurant that encourages customers to actively speak out about their experience with your business. So-called “social proof” is a powerful tool. Potential customers will be interested in your services and products after they read the praise.

In addition, there is another positive effect of working with online rankings and review sites. Search algorithms respond well to original and fresh content. And what is customer feedback, if not new, original information? So the algorithms will also love your brand and raise it in the search results.

The deterioration of the economic situation (real or predicted) will force us to look for new approaches to increase the number of customers. Or try something that was left out of your attention. However, this situation does not always require large investments. It is quite possible, it is enough to apply a creative approach, be patient a little and work hard.

Apix-Drive is a universal tool that will quickly streamline any workflow, freeing you from routine and possible financial losses. Try ApiX-Drive in action and see how useful it is for you personally. In the meantime, you are setting up connections between systems, think about where you are investing your free time, because now you will have much more of it.