Are you using social media to keep your existing customers happy?

Do you want to figure out how to drive revenue from existing customers through the social channel?

This post will give you 5 tips to gain more revenue from your existing customers using social media.

Why Focus on Existing Customers?

For many companies, connecting with their existing customers is a natural fit for social media. These companies are seeing conversations about their brands, their competitors and their industry that provide them with an opportunity to engage others in dialogue.

The value of the customer base for companies is substantial. We’ve all heard that it costs more to get a new customer than to keep your existing ones. So it makes sense that we would see more companies developing strategies to engage customers with the social channel.

Social media represents a low-cost way for companies to engage customers in two-way dialogue and develop deeper relationships. Relationships are a benefit that is difficult to achieve with other marketing channels. One often-overlooked opportunity is to use social media to strategically drive incremental revenue from existing customers.

Tip #1: Give Customers Incentives for Making More Frequent Purchases

Whether you are in a service- or product-based industry, you have the ability to increase revenue by encouraging customers to make purchases more frequently.

For service industries, this may mean promoting add-on services, upgrades or premium offerings. For product industries, this includes encouraging customers to come back more often. How can you do this with social media?

You can offer deals and specials that are exclusive to your social media followers based on the level of customer or the frequency of purchase.

For example, if you are a software company, you could offer exclusive discounts to your user conference for social media followers based upon the number of software licenses they are using. Or if you are a product company, you could do a coupon for social media followers that provides a 50% discount off their fifth purchase.

Wine of the Month Club offers fan-only specials.

Tip #2: Give Customers a Reason to Spend More at Each Purchase

The second way you can drive revenue from existing customers is to get them to spend more at each purchase. So if your average transaction is $35, the goal would be to get the customer to spend $50. This can also be accomplished by exclusive deals for social media fans and followers.

You’ve probably seen coupon campaigns many times that are designed to achieve this. Coupons such as $25 off a $100 purchase are aimed at increasing the amount spent at each purchase. Why do they work? In consumers’ effort to get to a $100 purchase, they tend to spend more. This works well for product-based companies, but what about service industries?

Service industries can look to promote package deals for their services that bundle offerings together. In this case, the social channel is used to drive awareness of the offerings with a clear call to action, versus promoting deals or coupons like we typically see for product-based industries.

31 Bags gives Facebook discounts for spending more money.

Tip #3: Combine Email Marketing Offers

Keep in mind it’s important to maintain a balance of content on your social channels. The general rule is less than 20% of your content should be about your company. Therefore, a mix of your own content with information from relevant third parties is important.

The last thing you want is to have a social channel that is flooded with deals and promotions with very little customer engagement.

It will be important to think through why a customer would be interested in buying what you are offering and what the process is for them to actually make a purchase so that you can optimize the path to conversion from the social channel to the sales funnel.

Tip #4: Educate Your Customers about Your Other Products and Services

Another important element of increasing sales is to make sure customers are aware of the other types of services or products your company offers. You can do this by featuring a product or service profile of the week, which provides you with the opportunity to highlight premium services and explain what they are and why customers should care.

Don’t be boring; combine the types of content you use to educate the customer with blog posts, photos, webinars and videos.

Under Armour cross-promotes product lines on Facebook.

Tip #5: Provide Consistent Value

At the end of the day, it’s difficult to keep an audience engaged if you’re constantly running another promotion on your social channels. Therefore, it’s important to find a way to balance your content and provide value to customers.

If your customers find value in the content you produce for your social channels, they are far more likely to keep coming back for more.

InfusionSoft, a small business customer relationship management system, has done an excellent job of providing value to their customer base. They recognize that they have sales and marketing expertise inside their company that the small businesses they serve may not have.

Therefore, instead of promoting a bunch of features their software offers, they position themselves as business advisors to their clients. They provide tips, resources and tons of information that their clients can use to grow. Ultimately, the more their clients grow, the more InfusionSoft grows.

As you consider how to grow your customer base through the social channel, it’s important that you create a win-win situation like InfusionSoft has. If you are only there to serve your own needs, customers will recognize your attitude early. Instead, find a way to combine your desire to increase revenues with the thing that motivates your customers the most.

Businesses shouldn’t rush into social media.

Because having no social media presence at all is better than having a bad one.

Just because something is popular or trendy doesn’t mean you need to do it.

It all depends on your unique situation.

Here are 3 questions you need to answer before jumping in to social media.

1. How will it support your business?

Most people start social media because they hear about it on TV, read about it in the news and hear from others that “it’s a great way to market your business”.

But most don’t understand why they’re doing it, or what to expect from it.

They can’t define what success will look like before they begin.

That’s a big problem. You don’t need to know the ROI. But you do need to understand how it’s going to either (1) increase revenue, (2) decrease costs, or (3) increase customer support.

So figure out your social media goals before jumping in head-first. Then when you understand it, you’ll appreciate it more and invest more time and effort.

2. Are your expectations realistic?

Being successful in social media is extremely difficult.

It’s a 24/7 job, constantly evolving, So you need to have realistic expectations.

Not only in terms of success (see #1 above). But also what it’s going to take to succeed.

Because it may be inexpensive, but it takes a ton of effort and time. So if you don’t have the energy, or can’t hire people to take control, then don’t even start.

For example, you can’t hire blog writers for $10 per article and expect it to drive business and build an audience.

And you can’t launch a new website, and expect SEO traffic to flood your website the next day.

Inbound marketing tactics like social media and content marketing can drastically improve your marketing ROI.

But they’re difficult, time consuming, and long-term tactics. You need to be willing to work for the long-term payoff if you want social media to build your business.

3. Why should your target customers care?

Finally, why should your customers read your blog posts, “Like” your Facebook page, or interact with you online?

The key to social media is engagement. Because without it, people won’t stick around any buy something.

And people don’t interact with you because you’re awesome. They do it because it benefits them.

Maybe it makes them laugh, cry, or shocks them into taking action.

Either way, it’s not about you. To succeed in social media, you need to be laser-focused on your audience and their needs, wants and desires.

For example, just because you’re in a “boring industry” doesn’t mean people won’t read your blog posts or follow you on Twitter. You just need to focus on what your product or services does for them, and come up with blog content ideas around that.

Because if you want people to interact, then you need to get them to care. This isn’t easy. You need to engage them, watch what they respond to, and be ready to experiment.

And if you’re not ready to embrace that, then you’re probably better off not wasting your time at all.

Step by Step

1.  On your page, at the top of your timeline on the left hand side you will see an image listing:  Status, Photo/Video, Offer, Event +

2.  Click Offer, Event +

3.  A dialog box will open.  Click Offer.  (This area also has other tools such as Event, Milestone, Question aka Polls).

4.  A new dialog box will open and here’s where we start to get down to business.

Make the Offer 

Upload an Image – the image should be clean and uncluttered.  A simple close up of the item is all that’s needed.

Write a Headline – keep it simple and strong.  This is the call to action and what will get people in your door.

Limit the Number of Offers People Can Claim – two thoughts here; create a large number.  This leads people to believe you need a large amount to meet demand or use a small number to create scarcity and urgency.  You decide.

Set an Expiration Date for your offer – simple enough

Add your Terms and Conditions – 1 per person, 1 per day, 1 per table, cannot be combined with other offers.  Whatever is appropriate for your situation.

Example Offer

At this stage if everything looks OK click the preview button.

Post the Offer

Your offer is now ready to post.  Click the Post button.

The offer gets posted to your timeline for your fans to see.

Fans Redeem the Offer

When your fans click on “Get Offer” and redeem your fantastic offer they will receive a message and an email.  They then have the option to print the email or take their smart phone into your venue and show the staff the redemption message.

Check In Flyer Example

In an earlier post, we learned that combination text and image posts get more attention and traction.  So coincidence that the Facebook template to create an offer is a combination text and image?  Nope.

Taking that one step further, create some POP, flyer’s, ads, whatever you want to call it for your store front windows, restaurant tables, bathroom walls, wherever you can put up a compelling reason for customers to visit your Facebook page.

Value of a Like 

It may sound strange to offer a special once the customer is in the store but just because they are in the store doesn’t necessarily mean they Like you on Facebook.  On the flyer add a message to “Like Us on Facebook” and you may get a new fan.

1. Build your Facebook page with relevant and targeted people. It’s better to have 200 people that fit your targeted demographic than 1,000 people who don’t. Work hard to get the right people. Your page is not about the number of people, it’s about the quality of people. Quality over quantity. This is usually the biggest mistake businesses make on Facebook.

2. Once you have the right people, you must engage them. There is a reason why virtually every major brand promotes their Facebook page and not their web site they have spent millions of dollars building. The reason, major brands know that engagement is what sells. People are 50% more likely to buy a product from a brand that they Like on Facebook. Talk to your users, post interesting content and images, and show them you care. Engagement sells.

It’s easy to say to a business to find the right people and then engage them. But that’s the key. Marketing to someone that is not interested in your company is a waste of time. You’d best not market online if you market to the wrong people. Find the people that you think fit your demographic, find where they are online and then go after them.

Facebook is not difficult, it just takes time and consistency, and if you focus on these 2 tips, your efforts will be rewarded.