Majority of customers visit your website or your brick-and-mortar location only one time. Think about that. All the marketing efforts and money that is spent on driving traffic to your business results in most customers only giving you one shot. And it can cost five times more to attract a new customer, than it does to retain an existing one.

Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%, according to research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company.

With these statistics in mind, it makes sense to focus efforts and funds to nurture your existing customers who are spending their money on your goods or services time and time again. This is not to say that you shouldn’t market to new consumers, which is a must, of course. But these statistics should be taken into consideration when budgeting how much you spend on acquiring new customers versus taking care of your existing customer base.

“After operating my own startup marketing agency, I discovered that retaining and nurturing existing clients had much better ROI than on-boarding new ones because you already have existing manpower dedicating time on these operations, and don’t need to initiate a new process. Then, if clients are already paying you monthly, they are accustomed to it and you can offer more services because of the trust you’ve built. Getting the first dollar from a new client is much more time consuming,” says Yoav Vilner, an advisor and external CMO.

It’s Key To Identify Your VIP Customers

There are many ways to identify who your VIP customers are. Whether you track how much they spend personally with your company over a given period of time, which customers are brand advocates and have the highest number of friend referrals, or which influencers bring in the most sales by sharing your products on blogs and social media, it’s crucial to know who these customers are.

Once you have identified these VIPs, implementing a customer segmentation marketing strategy for each subgroup allows you to maintain the relationship and even glean insights on how to convert more customers into these VIP groups. Not to mention, this strategy will achieve much better results than a one-size-fits-all marketing approach.

Determine What Keeps Customers Coming Back

The next step would be to determine what makes these top customers so loyal, and if you can replicate those offerings, you can grow your top customer lists and increase business.

In a survey taken last year, customers stated fast shipping, easy and fast returns, expertise, knowledge and personalization, among the top reasons to make repeat purchases from retailers.