After 35 years in business, I am still as excited as a kid in a candy store when our business gets a new customer. After all, new customers don’t just mean new money. As your relationship grows, new customers can be instrumental in helping you acquire more new customers through their recommendations to family and friends. In turn, those new customers can generate their own new customers.

The Search for Customers

New customers are the lifeblood of every business.

By Fran Carville, CRN, CARCO AWARDS/CARCOAWARDS.COM

(Originally printed in the May/June 2023 issue of Insights.)

After 35 years in business, I am still as excited as a kid in a candy store when our business gets a new customer. After all, new customers don’t just mean new money. As your relationship grows, new customers can be instrumental in helping you acquire more new customers through their recommendations to family and friends. In turn, those new customers can generate their own new customers.

It does seem that finding new customers in 2023 is not as easy as years ago. Consumers want to shop where it is most convenient, they want to shop online and many people already have relationships with competitors. Plus, your customer base might be changing. Consider that 10,000 baby boomers are retiring every day. Those relationships you’ve built with corporate clients could be over soon, requiring finding new customers and establishing new relationships.

The competitive landscape has changed, too. Most recreational departments, governmental agencies and schools now bid out their awards, leaving loyalty behind for less expensive options. Nontraditional competitors, from party stores to pet stores, have found personalized products an attractive way to increase sales. Almost endless options for consumers make it more difficult to retain your customer base.

“Businesses fail for a number of reasons, but three kinds of customer-related issues account for most failures,” writes Paul R. Timm, PhD, in his book “50 Powerful Ways to Win New Customers.” The three reasons he lists:

1. Not enough customers
2. Not the right customers
3. Not the right products for the company’s customers

You might be thinking that the customer problem doesn’t apply to you. Maybe you’ve been in business for a long time, and you have lots of loyal customers. Or maybe you’re a newer company, with loads of new customers every year. But the search for new customers should never cease.

Is a search necessary?
Regardless of how good business is today, the most important reason to constantly reach out to consumers is to ensure that you continue to be busy in the future. While current customers bring stability to your business, new customers bring growth. Consider the following:

1. Current customer situations will continue to change as they relocate, change jobs or want to try new things. Their budgets may be cut, their clubs may be disbanded or their children may no longer be involved in sports.
2. Ever-expanding options can lure even the most loyal customers away from your store. Shopping online will continue to be more attractive to consumers. New competition will make offers you can’t or won’t be interested in matching.
3. No matter how great your business is, over time you will suffer from customer attrition. Research shows that the average yearly churn rate for specialty retailers is around 15%. “Failure to win new customers is the greatest business killer,” Timm writes.

Most of us are interested in and committed to finding new customers. But our interest and commitment wanes when we actually have to go out and find those customers. Often, we wish, we hope, we pray that new customers will somehow find us. We wait it out because that’s more comfortable. But to continue to grow and prosper, we must get active and focus on increasing our customer base.

Where to search?
Determining what customers you want to add to your base will dictate where and how you look for new customers.

If you want to add customers who prefer to shop online, update your website so it’s customer friendly. Put new and popular merchandise on your homepage. Think about the entire shopping experience, too, from adding products to a shopping cart to checking out. Also, be sure to market your website on social media so consumers don’t have to hunt for you.

Be sure to get active in the community, as well. If you want to increase your corporate business, for instance, join a business-oriented group and actively participate. (You’ll probably have to be somewhat involved to reap benefits.) If you wish to increase your little league business, spend some Saturday mornings at the ball parks, meeting parents and passing along promotional information.

Ultimately, decide what type of customers are important to grow your business and find ways to connect with them. By beginning your search for new customers today, you will start to see your business rewarded with new customers to help your business continue to grow for years to come.

Fran Carville, CRM, is an Awards and Personalization Association past president, educational speaker, 2008 Speaker of the Year, a member of the Hall of Fame and winner of an Award of Excellence from the APEX Awards for Publication Excellence. Fran and her husband, Tom Carville, CRM, own Carco Awards in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.