A Five Step Plan To Finding More Customers

If your business is like most it could use more customers. More customers equal more revenue and profit and that's what all businesses are after. So how does a business go about finding more customers? You're probably sitting on a "gold mine" and don't even know it.

In this case the "gold mine" is your current customer list. Of course, you could probably sell more to your current customers, but that's not the strategy I want to discuss here. Here, I want to describe how you can analyze your current customers to enable your business to easily locate NEW customers.

Here's a simple five step plan to finding more customers:

1) Start with your own customer list. Normally you'll have lots of information including address information. This address information includes a ZIP code. The ZIP code is the key to finding more customers using this plan.

2) Once you have a ZIP code you can locate demographic data at the US Census Bureau or free. The downside of using the Census Bureau is that it is very time consuming to find the data and put it in a useable format. Most companies purchase inexpensive demographic data that will tell you more information about your customer.

Let's say that you've obtained your demographic data and done an analysis. For example, after looking at the ZIP code demographic data for your current customers you may determine that most of them have incomes that are over $75,000 and the average age is less than 30 years old.

3) So now you have a profile of people that bought your products. You really have a profile of the people in the area they live in, but that data can now be used to find more business.

4) Now that you know your customer profile simply search your demographics database for other areas that have the same profile; incomes over $75,000 and less than 30 years old. This will lead you to many, many other ZIP codes where the profile of the people living there are the same as your customer. Bingo these are the areas you want to target.

5) Now that you know the areas you'd like to target it's a simple matter to either go through your leads list/database or even purchase contact lists for the ZIP codes you identified above. This works for direct mail and email lists as long as the email list has a ZIP Code associated with the email address.

So there you have it. Don't be put off by having to purchase demographic data. This is very inexpensive and it will pay for itself over and over. Also keep your typical conversion rates in mind from emails and mailers. These facts and figures will help you determine how much you can reasonably pay for mail/email lists if you go that route.

The author is a regular contributor to ZIP Code Pros where more information about ZIP codes and ZIP code demographics and maps is available.

Article Source: http://www.marketingarticlelibrary.com

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