How To Build A List of Customers You Can Market To Over And Over Again
A membership program is where your customers sign up, either for free or for a fee, to be part of a community or elite club. As an incentive to sign up you could offer special discounts, invites to product launches, early access and other rewards.
The benefits of a membership program are that by offering incentives and rewarding customers’ loyalty, you encourage them to keep coming back to you and buying from your business. You also have the benefit of beginning to build a list of clients that you can regularly market to and offer deals to.
For example, if you have an online store and sell health food products, you could create a VIP membership program for customers, where one of the main benefits is free shipping. The free shipping encourages people to join your VIP Membership Program, now allowing you to continue to regularly market to them.
You could also offer special deals, such as a free gift (perhaps a sample of a new product you want to promote) with each purchase over $30. The free gift with purchase offer incentivizes them to purchase from you.
For another example, if you sell a weight loss course online, you could have a free or paid upsell of a Facebook group where they can more easily reach you, interact with others, ask questions pertaining to their own weight loss journey, etc.. This has two main benefits:
- It can increase the chance that they’ll see future messages and marketing from you via posts in the group. You can increase your impact by using Facebook Messenger. Most of us check our messages when we login to Facebook.
- This can be an easy upsell that you can add without any extra real work on your part. For instance, you can sell access and include the ability to ask you any question and get a response from an expert. In the eyes of a lot of prospects this can be seen as huge value. However, to you, it might be something super easy that you might do anyway. If you would normally answer your customers questions you could now get paid for it.
If this sounds like a lot of work, you could even outsource the job of replying to the questions in the Facebook group. Be sure to select someone who knows the subject well or will research before answering. Your reputation will hinge on supplying quality information.
So consider creating a membership program, where your customers become part of a community, and receive special benefits. Pick an option that fits your business model. It could be free shipping, early access to sales, special deals or free gifts with purchase.
This will allow you to start to build a list of leads and customers to market to, and also encourage customers to continue to purchase from you.
For other strategies on how to build a customer database and other great marketing tips, check out this book here 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!
