Whether you’ve been running a successful business for a while or you’re launching your first startup, finding effective ways of reaching potential customers and clients is key to your ongoing success. Here are four effective ways to expand your customer base that help make the most of your marketing efforts.

Encourage people to join your email list

Email marketing has been around for many years now, and while messaging services and apps have taken over for some sectors of society, it remains highly effective with an average return of $38 for every dollar spent. This means email outperforms other digital market tactics such as social media marketing and paid search.

Encourage reviews

An increasing number of consumers will visit review sites to check out any product or service before they make a purchase. If you want to ensure those customers head your way, you need to encourage as many reviews as possible as the more you have, the more confidence consumers will have in your enterprise.

You may be concerned about the negative effect of the occasional bad review, but studies have shown that consumers are actually far more likely to trust a company that has a mixture of good and bad ratings. If a company has nothing but glowing reviews, consumers are likely to believe they have been written by friends and family members rather than genuine customers.

Be active on multiple channels

A high level of engagement across a range of social media channels is a must for any business looking to maximize their reach. In today’s “always on” society, you have the opportunity to interact with people from around the world around the clock, either directly or through the use of chatbots powered by artificial intelligence.

It’s important to ensure you have systems in place to enable you to reach out to and follow-up customers in a variety of ways. For example, an SAP-based call center solution, such as the Omnia system offered by weaveability.com, provides a consistent customer experience no matter which channel they connect on, allowing for more effective communication in both directions.

Don’t’ forget the power of more traditional channels, such as events that allow you to meet potential customers in real life. There was a time when the only way a business had of meeting and interacting with customers was to see them face-to-face. Although it is no longer an option for every kind of business, where such meetings can be arranged they provide a highly effective form of communication and can provide a way of reaching those customers who are less active on other channels.

Offer entertainment

Customers like to be inspired and made to feel special when they interact with a company, but they also like to be entertained. There are many examples of major corporations, from banks to hotel chains, creating interactive online games as part of a wider marketing strategy. Such games should be available for anyone to play – not just existing customers – and be sufficiently entertaining in their own right to ensure they provide a high level of customer satisfaction.

Although such games can be an effective marketing tool, the goal should be to use them as a way of engaging potential customers on a more neutral basis by generating interest in your brand as well as awareness of what it is you have to offer. If you don’t want to go to the expense of developing a game, you can always do something more straightforward such as holding a funny photograph contest. For a small investment of time and the cost of a prize or two, you can generate huge amounts of interest from all over the world.

While we’re on the subject of entertainment, it is indeed subjective, isn’t it? What makes for “fun” for one person doesn’t necessarily constitute fun in the same way for the other and it is this subjectivity that you should keep in mind when creating entertaining activities. For the less introverted, participating in a game at a mall might be a great way to get entertained. However, the less extroverted might have a different idea of fun. For them, eating at a restaurant while watching music videos streamed by LoopTV could perhaps be more entertaining than breaking their sweat in a game. So, it is better to have different options for different audiences. One size no more fits all. If you focus only on one way of entertaining, it might not work effectively for others. Therefore, be cautious about what you offer and to whom.

In the same way that there are people in your customer base who are outgoing, extroverted, and like to engage, some of your customers might want to be able to solve problems they have in relation to the use of your product or service themselves, without having to deal with a call centre agent, for example.
That’s exactly what knowledge base software like Kayako in particular is for. A self-service portal such as this allows your customer to find the answers they need without all the implied hassle of going through some of other help-and-support channels.