As a small, or even larger, shop are you finding it harder to land more customers while keeping your production moving? Our company has been around for 22 years and we have been very fortunate to grow at a minimum average of 15% each year. But it was luck that landed us all of the extra work.
In our industry, most shops employ one to five staff members and larger shops are 15 to 30 staff strong for the most part, before you get to be the size of the monster companies that employ 50 to 100 plus staff.
Our company employs upwards of 30 staff and did around $3.5 million in sales in 2024. In the two years before that, we grew by a total of 42% in sales. Year-round, we market in multiple ways and do not spend more than $10,000 per year to do so. Multiple factors are key to this success:
- Customer service is your No. 1 asset, no matter the size of your company. Always be transparent with your customers, even when your company is hitting growing pains. Customers appreciate the honesty and being part of the growth.
- Never let a customer wait longer than 24 hours for a quote. If more time is needed, then make them aware that you are working on it.
- Give product away year-round that has your logo on it and shows off your quality.
- Send bulk emails promoting sales and blind cc your customers on the email. Typically, if you email 50 to 100 customers you can drum up one to four new orders for 15 minutes of work. You can save the email to repurpose later.
- Create sales flyers of your most popular items and share them on your website. Try to hold the pricing year-round. This makes buying easier for your customers.
- When packing your orders, print out sales flyers and put them with the order to help promote the next sale of another product.
- Make products with your company logo on them and create preset raffle baskets to donate to fundraisers.
- Use your social media to not only show your work, but tag your customers in your posts, so that your feed and theirs promotes you both with the potential of reaching a wider audience.
- If you have a company vehicle, make sure it at least has your name and website on it. Not promoting what you do, in my opinion, makes people curious and they will look you up.
- If you tell customers your production time is 10 to 12 business days, work needs to be done one to three days ahead of schedule.
- If you have a great customer who is always ordering or sending you customers, throw in something with their logo on it for free on their next order.
- Be sure to include all your contact info and your social media links in the signature of your email. This will help drive traffic to your page.
- If you are working on an important project for a customer, post it on social media. That is a good time to sponsor the post to drive more likes and follows to your page. Typically, don’t spend less than $100 per post for no longer than seven days.
- Look into promoting your company at home shows and work to be a sponsor of it by donating tote bags or something of that sort. Most people that go to a home show are looking for companies in other industries and often do not expect to see you there. Many of the companies exhibiting at home shows and all their vendors are potential customers. Cross-market to both.
- Never promote being the cheapest and only focus on promoting quality products, top notch customer service, and turnaround times. More and more people are looking for quality and this will help you stand out from your competition.
- When spending money on giveaway items for shows, focus on quality and not quantity. Sure, give a middle-level quality pen away, but then keep a couple dozen much nicer items under your table and give them to people you think have a 75% chance of landing.
Something we started doing over 15 years ago is budgeting for customer errors. Customers at times will give wrong information or not pay attention to your proof and accidently approve it, rendering the order to be wrong even though it is not your fault. We budget $10,000 a year for these mistakes. If a customer admits fault and is respectful, we will replace either half or the whole order at no charge and make them aware that we can only do this once to help them out and next time they must pay closer attention. This helps you not only keep a customer happy but gives you a customer for life in most cases.
You do not need everyone to be your customer. Having a lot of customers is great, but it can also be a curse as well. Producing more artwork, more setups, and more people from whom to collect payments. It is true that you should not have one customer that is more than 20% of your entire company sales. We do not have one that is even 5% of our overall sales. Always maintain control and go after customers who will order a minimum of $5,000 to $10,000 per year and your goal should always be to get to an average of 85% per week in reorders using the same artwork.
When you look back at the above, you will see a lot of this knowledge is a common-sense approach and nothing special. The average marketing firm will try and get you to spend 7% of your annual revenue for this information. The key to any company is good old-fashioned hard work, treat people how you want to be treated, and simply show you care.
Twenty-two years ago, we started our company from a 14′ X 14′ room in our home and around 40 companies were in the same line of work. Now, most of them are gone. Others have never grown, and we are the largest family-owned company in and around our community doing what we do. The key has always been consistency. Being consistent with our message of quality, customer service, and turnaround time. If you pursue that over being the cheapest, you build a loyal following little by little.
