Many business owners and contractors today spend a lot of money to attract new customers. We spend money on yellow page ads, radio, billboards, postcards and websites. The main purpose of most of the ads that we pay for is to attract new customers. This is not always bad, as we need new customers to keep our business going. However, it is getting harder and harder to attract new customers.

You see, today people are more skeptical than ever before. They are much less likely to believe our ads than they have ever been. And, our ads are less likely to be noticed than ever before because there are more advertising messages than ever before. People see advertising every where they go, so unless our advertising really stands out, they probably won’t notice ours.

The other problem with attracting new customers is that customers are less likely to spend money because of the economy. That means even if we get their attention and they would like to do business with us, many of them either are unable to spend money with us or are more conservative with their spending.

There used to be some companies that used the churn and burn philosophy. They would spend a lot of money to attract new customers, but didn’t worry about taking care of their customers because they were bringing in enough new customers to keep their business going.  This type of business is increasingly difficult to do.

Very few contractors spend very much time or money on keeping their existing customers. Customers are not very loyal. Just because they did business with you in the past and had a good experience, does not mean they will choose you in the future.  Without some effort on your part, they may choose the contractor that is there when they need more work done.

Current and past customers are much cheaper to keep than it is to get new customers today. It is my opinion that this is best way to keep your business running today. You may be surprised at how many times your current customers are willing to use your services, if you are willing to put out the effort to keep them.

If you are willing to spend half as much to keep your customers as you spend on getting new customers, I think you would be surprised at the amount of business they would send your way. Not only are they themselves a stream of good business, but they will refer others to you.

Next week, I will cover strategies to keep your customers and some specific things you can do to make them want to keep doing business with you over and over again.