Have you ever craved a snack that you can only get at a specific store? Maybe some vegan pumpkin spice protein bars? Or some coconut chocolate milk?
Both are specialties of the plant-based protein bar and drink maker Aloha. Unlike some businesses that have formal loyalty programs with punch cards and points, the protein-packed snack purveyor built its customer base by offering unique goods and a shopping experience that fosters a sense of community.
Whether you’re selling a good or a service, a strong foundation of both new and existing customers can help your business flourish. Learn more about how to establish a customer base, with some tips and ideas for fostering this connection.
What is a customer base?
A customer base is the group of individual consumers who regularly purchase your company’s goods or services and prefer your brand over competitors. Although the demographics of the customers within your customer base may vary, what connects them all is the specific need your product or service fulfills and the perception among them that what you offer is special or superior.
“Some people say ’better’ is unique and different—but I say ’better’ is better,” Brad Charron, CEO of Aloha, says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “[Your product] has to be compelling. But it also has to meet the needs of the consumer.”
Types of customers
Both multinational corporations and small businesses depend on customers to survive and thrive. Here are a few examples of the different types of customers to consider when building your operation:
New customers
When consumers purchase your product or service for the first time, they can become part of your customer base. You just need to turn them into repeat customers. They’re also critical for expanding your customer base and increasing revenue. New customers can also reveal the source of potential demand and indicate any shifts in market trends or consumer behavior.
Loyal or repeat customers
Loyal customers represent individuals who buy from your company over and over. These consumers, who may even make up the bulk of your customer base, usually contribute the most to your company’s revenue and profit. Loyal customers are a particularly important audience in terms of marketing and product or service development. Keeping them satisfied is critical to your business’s success. If your business sells memberships or subscriptions, these customers provide stable and recurring revenue.
Common customers
Common customers fall somewhere between new customers and repeat customers; they bought from you a few times, but they haven’t stuck around long enough to be considered loyal. Using effective sales, marketing, or promotional efforts, you can convert these occasional shoppers into true repeat customers.
Metrics such as customer lifetime value (CLV), which measures the estimated revenue a customer adds to your company over the course of your relationship, provide quantitative data that reveal the business value of certain consumers.
Potential customers
Potential customers are consumers who might purchase your goods or services but haven’t because they buy from your competitors or you haven’t reached them through advertising or market penetration. These potential leads are important for increasing revenue and expanding your customer base, though bringing them into the fold requires time and investment in market research, consumer trend analysis, and targeted advertising.
Butterfly customers
Just like butterflies fly from flower to flower, butterfly customers flit from company to company. They have little loyalty to a single brand. Instead, they search for the best deals and find that a wide variety of brands’ products and services can meet their needs—so long as the price is right.
7 tips for building and expanding your customer base
- Identify your target audience
- Create an ideal customer profile
- Analyze your existing customer base
- Explore business partnerships
- Engage in targeted marketing
- Listen to your customers
- Incentivize loyalty
You can drive business and revenue growth by expanding your customer base and strengthening your relationships with existing customers. Here are seven tips that can help:
1. Identify your target audience
Business success hinges on knowing the types of people most likely to purchase what you’re offering. Market research, consumer surveys, and analyzing your own sales data to identify demographic trends are all strategies that can yield insight into who your customers are and whom you should target.
2. Create an ideal customer profile
Buyer personas are profiles that compile the demographic data, customer needs, pain points, and lifestyle details that make up your ideal customer. A well-designed customer profile can help you focus on your target audience as you develop new products or services, as well as develop and implement a marketing strategy.
3. Analyze your existing customer base
Applying modern customer relationship management (CRM) tools—platforms that help you track and manage customer interactions—lets you dig deeper into your existing customer base. This analysis can include where your customers live, as well as their purchasing habits and history, which helps you segment your base according to customer type.
4. Explore business partnerships
Consider connecting with businesses in different markets to expose your brand to new potential customers. For example, when Brad took the reins at Aloha, one of his first moves was to get its products on the shelves of new retailers such as Thrive Market. Developing those partnerships helped Aloha leverage the established identity, trust, and value of those brands, as well as its partners’ existing customer bases.
5. Engage in targeted marketing
Use the analysis of your existing customer base to craft targeted campaigns designed to build brand awareness. For example, knowing that your customers are primarily college students who spend a lot of time on TikTok, you could craft TikTok videos that casually and quickly show how your products fit into a student’s busy lifestyle. Having a solid idea of your customer base helps you narrow down which TikTok trends to focus on and which to ignore, further personalizing your approach to your audience.
Paid ads with social media networks also let businesses specify a target with granular precision. Boosting existing posts with tools like Meta Business Manager works similarly, with the added bonus of not having to create new content specifically for ads.
6. Listen to your customers
When Crystal Landsem joined the online women’s fashion brand Lulus as CEO, she more than doubled the company’s growth potential in part by focusing on customer feedback. When the company received positive feedback from a customer about an in-person shopping experience, Lulus responded by opening a retail storefront in Los Angeles. In addition, the company sends out packages with handwritten order notes to help foster a personalized connection to the brand. They also regularly collect customer feedback from surveys.
“It grounds itself around focusing on the customer,” Crystal says of her business vision on an episode of Shopify Masters. “And we have really, really awesome customers.”
7. Incentivize loyalty
With competitors vying for your customers, you need to give them a reason to stick with your business. A customer loyalty program, referral program, personalized discounts for longtime consumers, and other customer retention strategies can go a long way toward maintaining some of your highest-value customers and ensuring a strong, consistent base that you can build on through word-of-mouth marketing.
Customer base FAQ
How do you build a customer base?
Building a customer base requires offering a desirable product or service, providing excellent customer service, and tapping into new markets to find potential customers.
How do you identify a customer base?
Identifying a customer base requires figuring out who wants what you’re selling, based on your ideal customer profile. You can start with market research to build a base and use customer relationship management (CRM) software to organize, track, and analyze existing customers based on demographics and purchasing history.
What is an example of a customer base?
Aloha, for example, built a customer base of loyal repeat buyers who routinely buy the brand’s protein bars and drinks by crafting unique products, building partnerships with complementary businesses, and building a community around its products.
