Conventional marketing wisdom tells us that it is cheaper to keep existing customers than it is to find new customers. For businesses with products and recurring services, it’s usually obvious how to generate new income from past customers: they buy another box or another haircut or whatever. While there are exceptions, a lot of web site development occurs in chunks. When you’ve redesigned a client’s site, do you call two months later to ask if they want it to be redesigned again?

I look forward to the client who will happily pay me to redesign their site several times a year. I have yet to snare that elusive prey, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get new work from some of my best past customers.

The important thing to remember is that most of your customers are not web experts. While they may be willing to invest money in their website, they don’t know what options are available to them. That’s where you come in. Here are a few suggestions.

New Technologies and Concepts

Of course you and I know what a blog is. The name has been around for years, and the concept has been around in various forms even longer. So of course everyone must know about them. Wrong. Unless you tell them, many of your clients wouldn’t even dream that it could be within their budget to have a web site they can update whenever they feel like it.

I use blogs as an example, but this applies to ideas new and old. If you have a customer with a particularly convoluted navigation structure, suggest a DHTML menu to clean things up. How about setting up one of the popular lightbox galleries that seem to be everywhere?

Competitors

Another great source of ideas is to look at the sites of your customer’s competitors. Are they offering features that you could add to your customer’s site? In many cases these will be much easier to sell. I have a lot of customers that aren’t interested in having the most cutting edge features for their site, even when I provide an impressive list of benefits. These same decision makers cringe at the thought of their rivals one-upping them. Simply pointing out the feature on another site is often enough to get them asking me if I can add something similar for them.

Cross-Pollination

Once you’ve created that first DHTML menu, all future DHTML menus become that much easier. When you add some slick feature to a web site (whether it’s a brand new site or an upgrade for an existing customer) think about who else might be able to use it. That online scheduling calendar you created for a yoga studio could be useful for hair salons, personal trainers, massage therapists, and anyone else who makes appointments.

filed under: Dealing With Clients, Finding Work