Last week, I talked about how to keep visitors coming back to your website. This week, I’ll focus on steps you can take – online or offline – to get your customers to buy from you again and again.

It’s almost always more profitable to sell to an existing customer than it is to go find a new customer. With an existing customer, uncertainty about the quality or usefulness of your product has already been overcome, so less “selling” is needed.  You’ll notice I keep saying “product.”  By product, I mean product or service.

A basic requirement for earning repeat business is that you provide quality products and services that deliver real value to the customer. If that isn’t true in your business, the rest of this article isn’t going to help you.

Once you’ve met the basic requirement, the most important thing you can do to get repeat business is to keep in touch with your customers. It doesn’t matter how wonderful a customer thought you were when they made the purchase, unless you keep in front of them, they will forget about you.

Here are three ways you can keep in touch with your customers, in order starting from the fastest, cheapest, and easiest.

1. Follow up on a purchase

Too often, as soon as a sale closes, we move on to the next opportunity. If we follow up at all, it’s when we want the customer to buy something else. This is the wrong way to go about it. Make it a point to check in with a customer after they’ve bought from you. The appropriate timing and intensity of the follow up will depend on your market, but at a minimum, you’ll want to:

• Confirm that the product has lived up to their expectations
• Answer any questions they have about the product
• Help troubleshoot any issues they may be having using the product

The one thing you absolutely don’t want to do here is try to sell them anything. By keeping the focus strictly on the customer’s satisfaction with what they bought, you are earning respect and trust, making it easier to close the next sale.

2. Send them a newsletter

I use newsletter as a blanket term to cover several ways that the content can actually be delivered. No matter what the media you use – printed, email, blog, video, or audio – the key is to provide content that:

• Teaches them to consume your product
• Provides information related to your product
• Alerts them to related opportunities to purchase new or supporting products

Notice that the content is all about the customer, not you. When you provide a steady stream of information that helps your customer address their concerns, you will develop the reputation of being someone who helps them. You will become someone they look forward to hearing from.

3. Build in a “back end” service

If you sell a product, think of things you can do to provide help and support in the use of that product. For example, if you sell a piece of equipment that requires maintenance, you can offer a subscription plan where you provide all the maintenance services in exchange for a monthly/quarterly/annual fee. If you sell educational or training materials, set up a membership web site where your customers, for a monthly fee, can access additional content and interact with other customers.

This is often referred to as “continuity” because you’ve converted a one-time purchase into a stream of recurring payments. This can actually be such a profitable step that businesses will gladly lose money on the “front end” product in order to get the customers to sign up for the ongoing “back end” service because in the end, they earn far more from a customer than if they had just made a profit on the original sale.

There you go. I’ve just handed you three things you can start doing today to increase the proportion of your customers who come back to buy from you again and to increase the amount of money they spend with you over their lifetime.