A lot has been written about drawing new customers and retaining your existing customer base. Statistics show that it is wiser to emphasize your efforts on retaining existing customers, as it’s 6 to 7 times more expensive to attract new customers than to keep existing customers. That being said, you probably have underutilized tools, that you are already paying for, that can help you reach new customers that will love your products.

You want to grow your business not only through catering to your existing customer base but reaching all those potential customers out there. There are a number of paths to explore with ways of attracting new customers into your store.

1 – Explore the demographics of consumers interested in your products

You are the eyes and ears of how to make your business succeeds in your community. You know the demographics of who your products will interest. Explore beyond the obvious and expand to new avenues that potentially could expose additional consumers to your store that may not have even thought of you as a viable option.

2 – How to engage with this group

You need to think about how best to reach this audience.  Give this some thought, so that you can tailor your marketing to best reach the consumers most likely to respond, seek you out and enjoy the buying experience at your store.

3 – Get your Message out

There are numerous ways to market to your targeted buyers, ranging from elaborate marketing tools to flyers plastered on car windows. Look at the systems that you have in place to leverage the features that you may already have and that you may not be using to their fullest.

4 – Analyze effectiveness of efforts

Once you have the marketing campaign in full swing, you want to have real time data to assess the success of your program and then can pivot to increase effectiveness. You’ll want to know which marketing campaign is bring in the new customers and what kind of shoppers are they. What are their Units per Transaction and other Key Performance Indicators, are they repeat customers once they discover your business, in general how did your marketing campaign increase the bottom line.

5 – Tweak your campaign to increase effectiveness

Whatever you have put in place to reach your new consumers, it needs to be user friendly so that you can easily modify the parameters to get the results desired. A complex third party application that requires expensive development to alter may not only take too long to change, but may also come with a price tag that does not work for you.

I recommend looking no further than your POS system for advanced marketing tools. Partner with a POS company that can help you get seen by the consumers you are trying to reach.

What to ask your POS Provider to explain:

• How does your system increase my local SEO
• Can I easily set up an integrated ecommerce site
• Can I launch an easy to implement marketing campaigns from the POS System
• Do I have analytics available in real time so that I can pivot my marketing efforts
• Can all of this be implemented through my POS, so that I my data (and learning curve) are centralized

These tools should be available on your POS system and are often underutilized as merchants think that they need to look elsewhere for these solutions and often hire a third party when it’s already provided on their POS. Your POS, not only helps with sales and tracking inventory, but uses your customer data and integrations to give you incredible market reach.