Normally when we talk of content writing we mostly have new customers and new leads in mind.
Although lots of content is published to cater to existing customers in the form of FAQs and support pages, active content writing isn’t normally directed towards existing customers.
You may be surprised to know that 61% small and medium-sized businesses admit that half of their revenue comes from existing customers (source).
According to this Econsultancy report, 82% companies agree that retaining existing customers is a lot cheaper than acquiring new customers.
This infographic says that loyal customers are worth 10x as much as new customers.
Content writing for existing customers shouldn’t be a one-time affair. It should be a continuous exercise for multiple reasons.
Content writing for existing customers isn’t just useful in terms of selling to them more, they also help you expand your brand especially when everybody’s pretty much connected to everybody else.
Listed below are some reasons why you should pay more attention to writing content for existing customers.
Cross selling and upselling
Since these are the most alluring reasons for a marketer or a business person, I’m listing them in the beginning itself.
If you haven’t given him or her any reason to dislike you, an existing customer is more likely to do business with you than a new customer because you are familiar to him or her, the customer has already paid you, and he or she has had a positive experience with you.
If you are routinely introducing new products or new updates you would obviously like your existing customers to try them out.
You may also have related products or services that may help your existing customers draw more out of the product or service they have already purchased.
Zoho, for example, has many products that can be better used when combined with each other. You can combine invoicing with CRM. Since you are using their email and collaboration services you might as well try their sales and marketing tools too.
Giving my own example, if your business experiences better search engine rankings through my content writing services, you might as well try out my SEO content writing services to expand your organic reach or my social media content marketing services.
Familiarity and trust are highly coveted attributes on the Internet. Never let them go waste.
If a customer has done business with you, give him or her your best, and then regularly provide quality content to him or her to give him or her a reason to engage with you consistently.
Promoting your content
You never know which of your customers may turn into a celebrity of sorts. Even if not a celebrity, on an average every person these days has 200-300 contacts on various social networking platforms.
Content marketing is an integral part of marketing these days. You need to promote your content.
Your customers are more likely to follow you on Facebook and Twitter. They have already given you their email ID and they expect you to send them email updates related to products or services they have purchased.
You can use these contact channels to encourage them to promote your content among their own friends.
Of course they should deem your content as useful and relevant so by default you should consistently publish high-quality content.
Without building your own network no matter how much high-quality content you publish, it is very difficult to promote it.
Your existing customers are your ready-made network. If they like your product or service, they will eagerly promote your content among their own contacts.
Getting SEO benefits
Search engines like Google give lots of importance to the sort of buzz your content creates. Your search engine rankings improve if more people access your content through social networking websites and through other blogs.
Many of your existing customers may be bloggers or social media influencers. If they are happy with your product or service, they won’t have any problem sharing one of your links on their own timelines or on their own blogs.
This will improve your search engine rankings.
Being there when they need you
When people buy something from you they get into a partnership. If you are a serious entrepreneur you will agree that this might be a long-term or even a lifelong partnership.
If your product or service has many uses (MS Office products, for example) your existing customers may regularly turn to you when they need to know something about the features they cannot use or cannot find.
This is a conventional form of content writing and many businesses already do it in the form of, as already mentioned above, support sections and FAQs.
Many businesses encourage online forums – Google has one – where customers provide help to each other.
If nurturing an online forum isn’t an option, you should publish answers to as many questions and queries as possible on your website.
This will increase and strengthen your customer loyalty. They will know that when they seek answers, you will provide them. They will know that when they have a problem related to your product or service, you will be there to help them.
Encouraging them to stick with you
This might be greatly relevant to subscription-based businesses.
No matter how great a set of features you provide to your subscribers there is a great chance that they are going to leave your service either for another service or they simply lose interest.
Sometimes they just forget that they have to renew their service.
Sometimes they lose track of why they subscribed in the first place.
You can keep them interested in your service or product by continuously providing quality content. Your constant communication keeps them hooked onto your product or service for a long time.
Email marketing
It takes a very long time for businesses to build a verified mailing list.
Your existing customers, since they have already purchased from you, have not just given you their email ids, they have also permitted you to send them regular updates.
Email marketing is an integral part of content marketing.
In fact, your content marketing is incomplete if you are not distributing your content using a mailing list that you have ideally created through your website or blog.
If you are sending just promotional messages to your existing customers they will sooner or later get fed up and unsubscribe from your updates and that will be the end of everything.
Email content writing for existing customers means sending them useful information – information that is relevant to them and would prompt them to stay with you and respond to your messages.
Even if you don’t want to use your major content marketing and content writing resources on existing customers, occasionally targeting them should be an integral part of your marketing.