Monday, December 23, 2013

Using Customer Referrals to Grow Your Business

Building a customer base for your small business is very difficult. Regardless of the methods that are used, it is hard for them to gather a lot of new clients. One method can be an array of different marketing techniques. Another one would be cold calling your target client. Potential customer's homes can also be mailed to directly if you like. Many businesses have untapped resources though. The potential of referrals from their current customers is often something that they fail to take advantage of.

Customer referrals, if used in the correct manner, can become the backbone for your business development plan. The best advertisement for your business is your current customers who are pleased. You can drastically grow the amount of new customers your business generates if you are able to start getting referrals through you current customer base. An efficient method to do this can often be the difficult part to figure out.

You can efficiently generate current customer referrals in a few different ways if you think of them. One of the best ways is to offer a bonus or special offer to any new customer that is generated as the result of a referral. This can be done on both ends of the referral. One example would be to offer a buy one get one free coupon to the current customer and the same offer to the referred customer you signed up. The added costs is really the only realistic draw back to this type of technique.

Weighting the cost of new customers is something that must be done to compare. How much time did you spend gathering this new customer? How much money to you spend on the marketing developed? Marketing and time are both high cost methods for you to spend on. Offering a referral bonus often ends up being equal to the amount of money you spend on these other methods. Do not forget that this referral bonus is mean to bring in a new customer, but also makes your current customer base more pleased with you.

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