Finding new customers and selling to your existing customers more often are the two ways to increase sales volumes in your business.

Increasing the number of times your customers buy from you is possibly the easiest way to increase sales, improve profit and grow your business.

Why? Because it can cost up to 6 times more to win a new customer than it does to get an existing customer to buy from you again.  You invest lots of time and money to sign upa new customer, but every sale after that involves very little cost.  So you actually make more profit on every sale you make to an existing customer.

Here are some strategies to increase sales in your business by encouraging your customers to buy from you more often.

1. Classify your customers

You should classify your customer base into tiers (such asA, B, C and D)to make sure the right customers keep coming back. By classifying your customer base you will be able to better target your marketing messagesand focus on your most preferred customer type. As a result you will have a much more effective sales strategy.

2.  Ask your customers to return

Simply asking your customers to come back is probably the easiest way to get customers to return to you more often. Yet many businesses never think about doing this very simple thing. They believe their customers will continue to return by their own free will.

Research shows that 68% of customers who leave you for your competitor do so because of what I call perceived indifference. That is, your former customers didn’t feel that you valued them or showed any interest in whether they bought from you again or not.

Your customers will want to continue the relationship with your business if they are happy with your products or service offering.  Making them feel important and valued gives them the incentive to do just that.

3.   Provide your customers with great service

An easy way to keep customers coming back to you more often is to offer a level of service that goes above and beyond what they expect from you.Poor service is the norm in so many industries that if you were able to demonstrate an absolute commitment to customer service, you will be miles in front of your competition.

But you won’t increase sales volumes bysimplysaying you want your customers to be given awesome service – you need to systemize the processes in your business to ensure the team can deliver on the promise consistently and effectively, day in and day out.

4.    Nurture your customers

Nurturing your relationships with your customers is the most cost effective way to make them feel valued and motivated to keep buying from you.  The more you stay in touch with them, the more likely they are to remember you.

The secret to making sure your team stays in touch with your customers is to systemize the follow up process. Too many businesses leave the follow up process to chance, with the predictable result that it just doesn’t get done. If this is happening in your business you will find that you are leaving a lot of money on the table, and you need to change things fast.

5.      Make effective use of customer comments

One way to let your customers know that you are truly interested in them and their opinion is to ask for their feedback.This is something most businesses just don’t bother with so is an obvious opportunity for you to develop another point of difference with your competitors.

When you do make the effort to gather feedback, don’t waste it.  Use the information to improve the way you do business, turn positive comments into referrals and testimonials and let your customers know when their suggestions are being used.

So if your goal is to massively increase sales in your business, don’t spend all your time trying to find and convert new customers. The more effective strategy is to find ways to make your existing customers buy from your business more often. Of course if you really want to improve profit and grow your business, develop strategies to achieve both results at the same time.