You Need More New Customers Here’s How To Find Them – Part II

Last month, we discussed how to utilize marketing tools that profile existing customers. These tools can help you find new customers who fit the same profile. Mailmark’s NeighborDirect Market Penetration Analysis is a resource that can help you with this task.

In review, finding your target audience can best be done by taking a close look at your existing customers. Where are they coming from? What are their age ranges and income levels? A Market Penetration Analysis (available through Mailmark) identifies carrier routes or neighborhoods where you have the highest concentrations of existing customers and provides insight as to where to look for new customers who fit the same profile.

Here’s how you can clearly define your best prospects, reach them with relevant messages and get stellar results.

1. Define Your Prospects
While the location of your best prospects is important, the age and income information associated with each neighborhood is also significant in that it can help to further profile and define your target market. Quantitative data profiling analysis can help you better understand the relationships that exist among multiple demographic and transactional variables.

When you’re ready to target your audience, direct marketing companies can overlay age, income and other variables so you’re sure to reach only prospects in your primary trade area that meet the profiled criteria. Existing customers are eliminated from the list as well. It’s a rifle approach, rather than a shotgun approach to aiming your marketing message only at the prospects that are most likely to respond and become long term customers - not just one-time sales.

2. Use Multiple Channels
Developing a thorough understanding of your target audience is the most important aspect of your customer acquisition initiative, but it is not the only one. An integrated effort utilizing a variety of marketing channels with a consistent look and feel will outperform one contact method alone. Know that it takes a while for unfamiliar prospects to trust you. Consistency and repetition over multiple marketing channels…direct mail, print ads, yellow pages, radio…will build trust and produce stellar results.

3. Relevance
Consistency and repetition across channels will help prospects to get to know you, but your message must be relevant to the prospect as well. You have to address and satisfy the prospect’s specific wants or needs at a time when they are looking for your products and services.

You now know that it is important for your marketing efforts to produce measurable results, and that a consistent approach across multiple marketing channels with a message that addresses the prospect’s needs will generate outstanding results. Most importantly, you know how to profile and find your best prospective new customers, and where to go to get help. Armed with this knowledge, you are ready to exceed your goals, however lofty they may be.

Finding new customers is one way to increase business, but it is not the only way. It is approximately six times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. The real profits will come after you have made the initial sale in the form of repeat and referral business. Marketing doesn’t end after you have found a new customer. That’s when it’s just getting started.