how to keep customers coming back for more

There are something like a billion people on the internet today (well maybe not quite that many, I don't know the exact figures but you get the picture) and that means you have countless potential customers .
To the inexperienced seller this sounds like it would be pretty easy to get a load of new customers without much time, money or effort.
The problem is that with such a huge amount of customers also comes a lot of competition, so how do you persuade someone to keep buying from you rather than 'billy bobs bits and bobs' which is only ever one click of the mouse away and may be lower in price?

The price is one of the main thing that companies use to get those customers to make their first purchase with them, but once that first purchase is made, oh baby that's when the real business starts!

Did you know that it costs around 5 times as much to get new customers than it does to market to existing customers and get a sale, this means that most of your effort should be used on people who have already purchased from you. 80 percent of your effort to be precise!

If you're constantly working solely on getting new customers to buy from you, competing on price against all of those other sellers then you are making things so much harder for yourself and driving down your own prices to stay in line with everyone else.

Once you get a sale from a new customer, your first priority should be to provide a top rate service and that means first of all getting their purchase to them as quickly as possible.
Make sure you stay in touch with them every step of the way, so when the order is received thank them for it, when the item is dispatched you can let them know, you can even send them an email asking if everything was ok with the order when they received it.

This does 2 things, it makes your customer feel valued and it gives them an opportunity to respond to you and let you know about any issues that you need to address. If there was a problem you can fix it asap. Doing all of this can be pretty much automated with any email marketing software and is a powerful way of establishing your brand with them.

If your customer feels valued and is happy with the service they received from you then they will be primed for more orders in the future. What might have been a single order the first time round might turn into a multi purchase next time or even regular orders every month from then on. Get handful of those every month and you're on to a winner.

So now you have a list of customers on your books what can you do with this information?

You can keep in touch with them via email for starters, try to contact them every couple of weeks, let them know about any special offers you have going on at the moment or give them a discount voucher for your online store. You don't have to do a hard sell in every mail out, something like providing info on upcoming releases or reviews of the latest titles (if you're in the gaming industry) will make opening your mail a joy for your customers.

If your in-box is anything like mine then you will probably receive quite a few mail-outs from companies every week so it's easy to get lost in the crowd if you don't make your email heading stand out, so work on this, try not to make it sound spammy and engage with your customer.

If you want to really stand out, you could send physical mail out to your customers, that's right, I'm talking about actual paper through the post. In this techno crazy world it might sound like a step backwards but just think how much more likely someone is to read your message if it comes through their letter box and once they've read it, if they're interested then chances are it will still be laying around the house in weeks if not months time and everytime they see it they will be reminded of you. So when it comes time to buy their next batch of games you can bet that they will come and visit your site first.

Getting people to make that first purchase is just the start and you shouldn't concentrate on that as your main source of income, being able to get people to keep coming back to you, on your own online store away from the crazyness of ebay is when you'll start to make your biggest profits and begin to build your brand for real.