Ah, now come my favorite topic. Its customers list building. There is a saying “The more customers list you have, the more money you earn.”. So what is this customers list and how to build them. I will teach you in a few moments.
Customers list is a list of people’s data (their name, number or emails, location etc.) who are either interested in your business or already shopping from you.
There are 3 parts of a customers list: Leads, Prospects & Customers. When someone just show some interest in your business, they are called ‘Lead’. When someone show interest in buying your products, but not purchased yet, they are called ‘Prospect’. When someone brought your products, then they are called customer.
When combine the data of your leads, prospects and customers; it is called customers list.
Let me show you an example.
- A customer purchases a product from your store and you politely ask for their name & number for billing. Then you got their data (name and number). You put them in your list as customer.
- A customer purchases a product from your website and there they need to put their name, number, email. There too you get their data. You put them in your list as customer.
- A customer come to your website funnel, you give them some quality information as free or some discounts coupon in exchange of their name & mobile. You get their number and put them in your list as Lead.
- A customer calls you for inquiry of a product with very interest, ready to buy but not decided yet or not purchased yet. You get their number and put them in you list as prospect.
- A customer calls you for inquiry about your shop, show normal interest or not at all. You get their number and put them in your list as Lead.
Now I guess you have understood about what a customers list is. So what is the benefits of this customer list and how it is the most important sales secret in every business. Let me clear you this now.
The Top 3 Benefits of Customers List Building:
- When you have a large numbers of list as leads/prospects, you follow up them by SMS or emails. Then gradually they will become your prospects and then your customers. You get more sales and finally earn more money.
- When you have your list, by proper following up, you will get repeat sales from your customers. No more need to find new customers. Repeat sales means more money.
- When you have your list, you don’t need to fear sudden market changes or any new big competitors. Because you already have your customer data ( = you own your market) and by proper following up, you will always get sales in your business. Full secure in earning money from your business.
Let’s have some calculations. After using this marketing strategy properly, suppose you will have 10000 customers list in a year. (Every business is different & so their customers is. I am just taking an example here. By following this marketing strategy you can build any large number of customers list. Its all up to you)
Suppose a customer purchase just once from your store in a year. Suppose your average order value of a customer is 1000. Then if total 10000 customers purchase from you in a year, then you will get almost 1,00,000,00 rupees in revenue.
Also there include repeat purchases from customers. (As you are following up correctly). So the revenue will be even more. Even if 1000 customers do repeat purchase of 1000 value product, you will have extra 10,000,00 rupees revenue.
So by just having a list of 10000 customer list, every year you can secure approximate 1,10,000,00 revenues for your business. Now you can calculate your profit % from this revenue as per your business model.
This is just an example. You will earn more if you have more customer list or you increase the value of per customer average order value. All will be done by simply increasing your customer list, proper following up and proper branding.
Big company know the value of customers data.
Big companies know how hard & time taking it is to have a large base of loyal customers. So they treat other company with large customers data as precious company.
On 2006, google brought YouTube company in a deal of 1.65 billion dollar rupees (1 billion dollar = almost 75000 crore rupees). A tech giant like goggle could build YouTube software within a week, still it gave such big amount of money to brought YouTube. Why? Its because at that time of purchase, YouTube have millions of user base, which google don’t have to create again from scratch. Google can directly earn money from those user base.
Similarly, facebook has brought WhatsApp, Instagram in billions of dollar deals. Facebook could have build WhatsApp or Instagram within a week or month. But as WhatsApp/Instagram has millions of users already, facebook don’t have to build them again. Facebook can directly earn money from those customers’ data.
In business news, you can find lots of such big company purchasing other company by paying such large amount of money. Why? Its all about the data.
Never Spam Your Customers: (VERY IMPORTANT)
You must build your own customer list. You can’t use another business customer’s list. There are some people selling customers database. Don’t fall in their trap. Because the people in the database didn’t know you. So if you follow up them, they will feel irritated, feel their privacy is breached and then they will treat you as spammer/scammer. Finally, it will create a huge problem in your branding. Not only your brand value decrease, but also there will be word of mouth of spamming tag in your business.
You can check the number of spams in your SMS or email list. How you treat them. I hope you treat them as spammer who is contacting you and you have no idea how they got your data. Same thing happens with your customers too. If you follow up them without their proper consent, you will be treated as spammer, not a brand & at last they will not purchase from you. Also currently the government regulation is so strict that you can’t spam by SMS (if caught, you will have to give big fines) nor by emails (many email providers will block you immediately).
There are few exceptions here. There are some unique company/business where they can’t built their target customers data in normal marketing ways. They can buy database or collect database and do marketing. If this is your case, then you can use such database to follow ups. But be very careful to not spam.