Inbound marketing isn’t just a great tool for closing new leads into actual conversions, it’s also perfect for maintaining a relationship with your current customer base with the aim of eventually getting them back into your sales cycle.
If you’ve never considered that before, you might want to ensure it now. After all, inbound marketing to your current customers will help in the following ways: Repeat Business, Continuous Lead Nurturing, Brand Positioning, Monitoring Sentiment and Edge over the Competition.
Repeat Business
It’s called a sales cycle. To maximize the return on the investment of setting up the infrastructure that makes it possible, it should be a recursive cycle of repeat business. It’s the most fundamental reason why you should perform inbound marketing on current customers, and it’s also the most practical.
Just because your customers have finished one cycle doesn’t mean you can’t invest resources on increasing their customer lifetime value. In fact, you’ll find that it’s easier and more affordable to increase CLV through inbound marketing to encourage repeat business than it is to close a new lead.
Continuous Lead Nurturing
It’s not a one night stand. When you come into a relationship with your customers, that bond doesn’t terminate in a closed sale. There’s repeat business and brand loyalty, and in these modern, digital times, influencer value.
The value customers bring to your organization does not lie on monetary value – each and every customer is also potentially an influencer. A source of referral through both old-fashioned word of mouth and online social media. Continuous lead nurturing ensures that even after a closed sale, your customer relationships only get better, with returns that aren’t soley revenue related.
Brand Positioning
Even a single channel of inbound marketing can help better position your brand for existing customers. Take email subscriptions, for instance.
You don’t just automatically drop a subscriber from a list once they purchase your product or service. Even after purchase, as your emails continue to be read, you enhance your brand position for that particular client. This helps increase brand loyalty, improve CLV in terms of lowering cost of repeat business, and increase the chances of that customer becoming an influencer.
Monitoring Sentiment
Your inbound marketing channels monitor various facets of your target market. It might appear that continuing to “listen in” on people who’ve already purchased from you might be a waste of time, but in truth, it’s a good way to monitor existing sentiment on your brand from the market segment that can influence your reputation the most: your existing client base.
Best of all, as your inbound marketing monitoring tools are all automated and do not really cost you on a “per person” setting, you can keep monitoring existing customers at no added cost.
Edge over the Competition
Inbound marketing is much more effective with competitor analysis. Whether keeping an eye on local competitors in Toronto or global ones, it’s best practice to always stay abreast of your competitor’s newest developments.
You know what? Your competitors target the same market as you – they’re trying to get the same leads, and they’re trying to woo your existing customers. Ongoing inbound marketing can ensure that your customers stay loyal. In the long run, you lose if you a gain a customer only to loose them to a competitor who will redeem your potential repeat business.
Ready to keep on nurturing your existing relationships with clients through inbound marketing? Think of each and every customer as a lifetime partner and always keep them slipping back into your sales funnel.
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