Look at where your company spends its sales effort. Almost all of it goes towards people who aren't customers yet: adverts, proposals, first meetings, quotes that go nowhere.
And then there's the other list — the people who've already bought from you, who already know how you work and have already proven they pay. That list usually sits somewhere, doing nothing.
It's often said that winning a new customer costs several times more than keeping one. We won't repeat figures we haven't measured ourselves. But the instinct behind it isn't controversial: you already have their contact details, you already have their trust, and you already know what they bought.
People don't leave over price
When a customer disappears, the internal explanation is almost always "they went with someone cheaper." Sometimes that's true. Most of the time it isn't: they left out of inertia, because nobody gave them a reason to come back, and someone else did.
That's good news, because inertia is fixed with far less money than a price war. What breaks it is being remembered at the right moment.
The follow-up almost nobody does
There's a moment almost every company wastes: the weeks after a job is delivered. The customer is happy, the experience is still fresh, and they never hear from you again.
Three simple things, in the order they pay off:
- A message asking how it's going, a month later. It's not a sales pitch. It's the call that makes someone say "actually, while you're at it, I could do with…" — and it's surprisingly rare.
- Ask for the review at that point, not six months later. It's useful for you and useful for people looking for a company like yours.
- A reminder when it makes sense. If what you sold needs maintenance, review or renewal, put it in the calendar and get in touch before the customer remembers. Whoever reminds them keeps the job.
Not everyone needs a loyalty card
Mention loyalty and the first thing that comes to mind is points, discounts and cards. That works for frequent retail purchases and gets in the way of almost everything else.
For a company selling services or large, spaced-out jobs, what builds loyalty is something else: replying quickly, warning before there's a problem, treating the second order with the same care as the first, and being easy to reach without going through a form.
And there's one detail worth more than any programme: recognising people who've been here before. A customer who comes back and has to explain everything again from scratch realises they weren't kept on record anywhere. That's a systems problem, and one we've written about in the benefits of a CRM.
The list you already have is worth more than you think
If you have the email addresses of people who've bought from you, you have the cheapest and most stable channel there is — it doesn't depend on any algorithm or any platform.
You don't need a monthly newsletter nobody wants to write. Four emails a year, with something genuinely useful — a deadline reminder, an explanation of what changed in the sector's regulations, a recent piece of work that might be of interest — do more than twelve full of company news.
Two rules: only write to people who opted in, and unsubscribing has to be easy and actually work. That's covered in digital marketing.
Start with the ones who disappeared
If you want an exercise with a quick payoff: pull the list of people who bought from you more than a year ago and haven't come back. It'll be longer than you expect.
Call ten of them. Not to sell anything — to ask how what you did for them is holding up and whether anything's outstanding. Some of it will go nowhere, some will turn into immediate work, and you'll find out why the others left, which is information no report gives you.
How many of your customers come back?
Tell us what you sell and how often customers come back. We'll help you build the follow-up that doesn't exist yet.