Depending upon your business category, acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. Knowing this, it only makes sense to do everything you can to maintain a relationship with your current customers, better known as Core Customers.  

So, what exactly is a Core Customer?  A Core Customer is someone that has done business with you in the past “X-period of time” and has the potential to do business with you again. 

The “X-period of time” depends upon the purchase cycle or how often purchases are made within each business category. For example, in the automotive category: A typical person purchases a vehicle every 3-½ years.  In the plumbing business, less than 20% of the population uses a plumber every year and 50% of the population only needs a plumber every 4 to 6 years. In the hardware business, it can be 1 time per month or more.

If your current customers have purchased from you within your “purchase cycle” time frame, these people should be considered a “Core Customer”.  As a business owner, you want to connect and reconnect with people between purchases until, at minimum, they are out of the “purchase cycle” period.

The other important question is, how often do you need to keep in contact?  It can vary to some degree depending upon the buying cycle, but the rule of thumb is 3 to 5 times a year, with a minimum of twice.

The first thing you must do is identify your business’ buying cycle. Then, identify who your current Core Customers are. 

If you do not have a list of your customers and their contact info, start to create one.  The only info you need is the name, mailing address, email address, date of purchases, and if possible, what they purchased and the transaction amount. 

Having this information is useless unless you USE it!  

Statistics show that the success rate of selling to a new customer is somewhere between 5-20%. The success rate of selling to a Core Customer is 60-70%.

Keeping your current customers is one key to success, but we must understand that regardless of what you do, you stand to lose 20% of your customers each year due to attrition in one form or another.  Therefore, it’s paramount that you continue to attract new customers that turn into Core Customers.  Once you’ve created the relationship, do everything you can to stay connected!