Marketing to previous customers isn’t an event, like a one-time media buy or the year’s big home show. It’s a continuing process of refinement and improvement.
“You want to have a database as the foundation, but then have a set of marketing and business processes that allow for a controlled test-and-learn environment,” Schmitt says. You can test almost every aspect of your marketing effort — mailing frequency, various offers, the color of the envelope, e-mail versus direct mail, you name it. “But do it in a way that is methodical so that you can learn from the exercise and put what you learn into practice.”
CROSS-MARKETING IS KEY Selling previous customers another job typically demands that you offer an array — at least three — of home improvement products or services.
For instance, before launching its previous-customer marketing program, Weather Tight sold just windows and siding. Now the company sells sunrooms, basements, roofing, and gutter protection.
“I don’t know that we added a line because of this marketing, but it definitely influenced the decision to go in that direction,” Colbert says. “The opportunities to cross-sell are there immediately, which is a big incentive to [add a line] instead of adding more territory or branch offices.”
K&H Home Solutions chose adding products and services as its strategy for growth, Summer says. “We thought about opening branch offices, but it’s easier to control everything out of one location, and we like to have the control of keeping something as tight as we can in one area,” he says.
For more than a decade, K&H Home Solutions sold windows and siding. During the last year and a half, the company has added gutter protection, bathtub liners, and shower conversion, and has changed its name to K&H Windows and Exteriors to reflect its broader product range.
Summer recently started marketing to previous customers using a combination of direct mail and phone follow-up with a discount offer. The idea, he says, is “to give them an incentive to talk to us about additional products,” and drive repeat sales up from the 10% they’ve been for many years.
“We [home improvement contractors] are all running out there to find new customers, when we have a lot of them sitting right in our databases,” Summer points out. “I think that too many companies, including ours, fail to recognize the power and benefit of the account base they’ve built and how much extra business is there. After all the years we’ve been in business, it’s only in the last year or so that we’ve started to tap into this, and it’s a whole new market,” he adds.
Regardless of whether the systems you have to do it are simple or elaborate, the most important aspect of marketing to previous customers is simply to get started.
As repeat-business and referral customers become a larger part of your revenue, your systems to generate these leads will become correspondingly sophisticated. “We were unsure of what to do and we procrastinated,” Colbert says. “But you don’t have to have a sophisticated marketing program in place. We just needed to start doing it and learn by doing. Talk to your previous customers. Ask them for business and they will say, fine. You’ll do a lot of business.
“I keep whacking myself in the head for not paying attention to it sooner.” —Jay Holtzman is a freelance writer based in jamestown, R.I.