742 – Grow your business an easy way: Tom talks Increase Customer Value

Episode 742 – Increase Customer Value
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 742 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, I'm going to show you how to increase the value of every customer you have. You got to do this because it's much easier to do that than to try to find new people all the time. All right. Hope you to miss Episode 741. And there I was talking about a skill that pays off in three different ways. You got to check that out. And any time you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number. That was 741 and follow me on TikTok at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire and make sure you pick up a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. You will thank me when you get that book and implement the stuff.

[00:01:13] All right, let's get to the main event. Virtually every expert will tell you it costs way more time and money to find a new customer than it does to sell more to an existing company. Everybody says that for years and years. And it's true. This doesn't mean I don't want you to find new customers. That's ridiculous. That just means I want you to shift your efforts from maybe 90% trying to find new customers and only 10% concentrating on existing customers to a reasonable 75% emphasis on existing customers and 25% on finding new customers. That's reasonable.

[00:01:58] Now, I'm pretty sure if you make this switch, you'll see an almost instantaneous increase in sales and a decrease in your costs to get those sales. So you at least owe it to yourself to give this a try. So let's look at some of the ways you can increase revenue per customer. Well, one way is to develop more products and services along the same line. Now, if you're all over the place on what you offer, you're making it more difficult on yourself to make money because your existing customer from one product line has not shown any interest in the new product line. So sales of the new product line to that customer will be iffy at best. Now you've all heard about niche marketing or niche. If you live on the right side of the tracks, you know. So I'm a small town country bumpkin, so it's niche to me anyway. You've all heard about niche marketing. Well, that's what they're talking about, staying in a certain lane where you absolutely know the existing customer is interested in your new product because they bought an older product in that same niche. Now, that doesn't mean you can't sell different things. Heck, I sell tennis videos, family protection, dogs, public speaking stuff, entrepreneurship stuff and digital marketing stuff. But remember, though, I've been in business 46 years and 29 of those years online, I've had plenty of time, experience and money and chances to go into different fields that I like and develop new customers in those niches.

[00:03:42] Trying to start like that will most likely be disastrous for you. So stay in your niche until you have so much money. You can expand if you want to. Just don't forget about those existing customers that made you all the money in the first place. All right. Another way to increase the value of a customer is upselling. You can upsell at the point of purchase. We call that. Do you want fries with that? And you can also upsell after the sale. We do that with autoresponders. Now, I covered all the intricacies of upselling in episodes 22 and 555. Remember, screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number 22 and 555. Now this can really increase your income immediately. Virtually every promotion I do, using the formula that I describe in those previous episodes, creates between 30 and 50% more sales without fail. So check out those episodes and start upselling. Another way to increase customer value is to get the customer into some kind of recurring billing program, like service agreements and online membership sites. Service agreements are kind of like an insurance policy if something bad happens related to your product. Online service agreements might be you get a monthly fee to write four blog posts for a client or to be available on call to fix a website problem.

[00:05:17] Membership sites can be on any topic someone is passionate about. I knew one membership site about embroidery and they had 20,000 members at $9 a month each. I mean, you do the math. No. Heck, I'll do the math for you. It's $180,000 a month. How would you like that for you. Okay. Let's talk about some more ways to increase the value of your customers. Have you thought about looking for ways to lower your cost to serve those customers? You could sell the same amount. And if your costs are less, you're making more money. Now, in my organization, we used to have a big product room, tons of shipping materials, labels, tapes, boxes, postage, a DVD duplicator. We had two of them that was $6,000 right there and labor to pack the stuff up and to do the duplication and get it to the post office. All that has been wiped out by going virtually all digital. Yeah, I know people like to get physical things delivered to them. I know. I sure do. The Amazon truck just, you know, is worn out a path in front of my house. I'm just saying that some things can be delivered digitally for a fraction of the cost of physical delivery. And I feel it's my job to let somebody else do all that physical stuff and all that expense. And I need to channel my students into digital stuff that's high profit, low risk and low expenses.

[00:06:51] All right. And the last thing I'll mention to increase the value of your customers is what you can do to increase customer loyalty. And there are several ways to do this. One is to treat customers royally where they can't even believe how well they're being treated. I got to tell you, with the norm of many companies and no matter what they claim in their advertisement of how wonderful they love their customers, the norm is that they don't give a damn about the customer. The bar is really low for you. If you respond to emails immediately, people will fall out of their chairs. They just can't believe it. How about answering the phone? I know you get robo calls, I get that. But how about returning calls immediately? I've actually heard on voicemails these idiots people say we'll get back to you within 48 hours. 48 hours? I could be dead in 48 hours. What are you talking about? 48 hours? You're. You're just saying I don't care about you. I'm worried about me, not you. So guess what? I'm not waiting on your crappy company for 48 hours. I'm going to your competitor. And hey, if your company screws up, you got to go overboard to fix the problem and fix it fast. All right. Another way to increase loyalty is with customer only specials and frequent buyer programs. Another way is to educate your customers.

[00:08:22] For instance, with my shopping cart system, I could just throw it at you and hey, good luck to you. But I offer free one on one training so you learn how to use it. And I've had some people using it for I can't really remember, but I think over 19 years. Okay, so take care of your darn customers. Educate them, teach them how to use your stuff. Help them. And the last thing I'll mention is saving customers who want to leave. The phone company, the cable company and places like that have what they call save teams where their only purpose is to try to keep you from leaving. That's why it's good to complain sometimes and threaten to leave because they all have authority to give you some better deal if you stay. All right. That's just the way it is. Now, this is a two edged sword for small companies because you really don't want to piss off your best customers by giving deals only to people that are leaving because, you know, the small company, your customers may talk or know each other. I mean, maybe your best customers hear about it and then they want to leave because you forgot about them. So make sure you do loyalty programs for them. So you'll have to be careful with this idea. But it does work to a certain extent. Now big companies with millions of customers don't really care if a few people get pissed off and leave.

[00:09:47] Leave compared to how many they can keep from leaving by using those same teams to give better deals if you stay. So don't try to be a giant telecom company when you're a little person or a little company, right? So be careful with that idea. All right. So anyway, paying attention and implementing this stuff in this episode, you probably want to go listen to it. I know I rapid fired it at you, but it can really increase the amount of money you bring in from each customer, which is way easier than finding new customers. All right. So if you like that, hey, join my mentor program, Great Internet marketing Training.com. And I have this brand new program to teach you how to be a great podcast guest. Check it out at screwthecommute.com/greatpodcastguest. And I'll tell you what, being a podcast guest and a host also has just opened enormous doors for me and I had a lot of doors open before I even started this stuff. But going on podcast gives you warm introductions to tens of thousands or more people and to get on there and to be invited back, you need to know what I'm going to teach in this course. So screwthecommute.com/greatpodcastguest and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.