What Can You Do to Expand the Customer Base of a Home-based Business?

When you’re working solo from a home office with a constrained number of hours to put into the business each week, it’s easy to feel stuck. How can you expand beyond what you’ve already achieved? Is it even possible? Surely, you cannot get more done than you’re doing already and you’re not ready to hire staff yet.

Here are a few ways to help increase customer numbers both directly and indirectly.

Make More Time Through Time Tracking

We’re not always as efficient with our time as we like to think. Whether it’s too many coffee breaks and trips to run some errands, or a little too much surfing the web aimlessly, we’re all guilty of doing a few things that waste time.

To avoid procrastination and losing precious time in our business, the first thing is to track your time. There are time trackers that make this easier like Toggl, which let you get a much better handle on what you do with every 15-minute segment through the day. Without tracking, it’s really impossible to know how your day is being spent. The result is likely to surprise you.

Play a Better Customer Service Game

Customer service is a tough nut to crack for people who work from home. Whether replying to emails, responding to direct messages on Facebook in a timely manner, or picking up the business line when it rings, it’s all an interruption to what you’re trying to get done. Or, at least, it seems that way sometimes.

We actually spend much more time and money finding a new customer than we realise. For this reason, and the future reputation of the business, it’s critical to provide an improved customer service and support function to customers. By making the extra effort to go beyond the call of what customers would readily expect, you not only help to retain your existing customer base but it is likely to spread positive word of mouth both in online reviews and offline conversations.

Go All-In with Social

Social media often seems like a drain on time to business owners who have better things to do with their time. Your customers don’t feel the same way though because they now spend over 1.5 hours every day trolling around on social media. Whether they’re chatting with friends, asking questions or interacting with like-minded people in the same industry, there’s a lot going on across social media platforms that you could be missing out on. Use software like Hootsuite to streamline the use of social media to maximise time used for the return on investment.

Re-vamp the Website

Big corporations change their website far more often than smaller ones. For SMEs, the website isn’t seen as important as the core operations, but this is an old-fashioned way of thinking. If your website hasn’t been revamped in a while, contact a web design Coventry firm and ask their advice on what you should be doing. Getting visitors to complete a contact form or buy a product or service directly from the site returns many times the cost of a site redesign.

Expanding from a home base isn’t just a matter of doing a few things right. It’s also a case that the decisions we made when we started the business don’t necessarily still serve us several years into running it. We must be open to innovation and modernising our approach to improve our results.