t’s time to talk about one of the most overlooked and underrated revenue streams in your business…your existing customers.

You may be thinking, “What? Why are we marketing to them? They’re already customers; we already got them. Why would we need to market them?”

It takes way more effort and costs way more money (about five times more) to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one. That equates to a lot of money when you take into account your whole customer base. You want to make sure that you’re taking good care of your customers and making it easy to buy from you, over and over again.

I find that many businesses work hard to bring in new customers, and once they’ve finally made that first purchase, they just say, “Great, mission accomplished, we got a new customer. We can move on now.”

They mistakenly think if the customer just uses their services they’ll be happy without really doing anything in particular, other than business as usual. If you just do that (aka the bare minimum) you’ll have an average business. To make a super successful business that is really tipping the awesome scale, you’ll need to take better care of them. If you keep them happy and show them everything you have to offer, they will happily spend more money with you.

If you don’t want to leave a lot of money on the table, you need to not only take better care of your customers, but create marketing specifically for them. They are the easy sell; they already know you and you’ve provided them so much value so they will be much more receptive to the offers you make.

Additionally, you can market all the different services you have and convert a decent portion of your customer base to pay additionally for new services—often services that they are already paying other business for. So, if you can service some of those needs the same or better than they are currently experiencing, it’s a no-brainer because they already know you and love you. You want to try to find some new and different ways to service existing customers.

One simple way to do that is by bundling services. Your business probably does a bunch of different things for people—could be daycare, boarding, training, grooming, walking and/or retail products. If someone is bringing their dog to you for daycare, there’s a pretty good chance they might require some training as well. Or, if they have a long-haired dog, they’re getting grooming somewhere, so why not with you?

If you have pre-built packages that bundle services, you make the customer aware of the options available and make it cost effective for them to buy them together, locking them in to all of them. This gets you more money up front and gives the customers a deal for going with the bundled package.

If someone books a week of boarding, make sure you offer them the upsell of an exit bath or tell them about your day-training package. Bundle the services and make the offers. Educate your staff members on all the services you offer, the bundles you have and show them how to properly make the upsells.

I have a client right now that is killing it with day training. A very high percentage of their daycare customers are opting for the daycare/day-training bundle so their dogs can learn some skills while they’re hanging out all day. The clients are happier, the dogs are happier and you increase the lifetime value of your customers, making you more money over time.

Holding contests and doing giveaways every once in a while are fun ways to whip up a little bit of excitement around your business and help create more of a sense of community, which is a great way to get people to become more loyal to your brand. Maybe partner with a local pet store to give away some cool dog products or create a special bundle of things (could be products and/or services) and hold a monthly giveaway.

You can also host and market your own events. It doesn’t always have to be dog related, although most probably will be. One of my clients does special “date nights” where you can bring your dog for playtime one evening for a few hours while you go out for a nice dinner. Or, you could have “yappy hours” where people come and socialize with other dog owners while their dogs play. Connecting people with live events helps take your relationship with your customers to a much more personal level, which will always help with retention.

Lastly, you can market all of your seasonal promotions. Every holiday can bring a new promotion or event. Each new season is a reason to reach out to your customer and let them know what you have going on, concerns to be aware of for their dog and maybe just check in with them. Every holiday is an excuse to do something cool for your customers.

If you continually focus marketing on your existing customers, you can really expand that lifetime value, help them stick around you with you for a long period of time and withstand any number of competitors that spring up in your neighborhood.