Talking to past customers costs less than finding new ones
All the content effort usually points at people who never heard of you. Meanwhile, whoever already bought, already paid and already liked it sits in your contacts hearing nothing.
The second sale has the hard part done
Someone who already bought does not need convincing that you exist, that you deliver, or that you are worth the price. All that is missing is remembering you exist at the moment they need it again.
That is why one message to thirty past customers usually returns more than a whole month of posts to strangers.
Honest reasons to get back in touch
None of them is "hi, long time no see". All of them carry information.
- The season approaching, if your product is seasonal.
- Something new they would like, based on what they bought.
- The anniversary of what they bought, where that makes sense.
- A genuine question: "did it work out the way you expected?".
Individual beats a broadcast list
A message starting with the person's name and mentioning what they bought gets an incomparable response rate. The same message sent to fifty at once is recognised in the first line, and ignored.
Thirty individual messages take forty minutes. It is the best-spent hour of the month in almost any small business.
Keep the list, even if it is a notebook
Name, what they bought, when, and one line about what mattered to them. It needs no system: it needs to exist. Almost every small business keeps this only in memory, and memory loses.
With that list, the individual message takes a minute instead of ten, because you do not have to reconstruct each person's story.
Content brings new people; the customer list brings the second purchase. The two together return more than either alone.