As a marketer, it can be exhausting to continue finding new avenues of growth for your company. Trying something completely new takes a lot of time and effort, and there’s no way to guarantee success.

Unfortunately, there’s no magic bullet for acquiring new quality customers. But, it doesn’t have to be a constant uphill battle either. You can make things a lot easier if you use your previous customer acquisition efforts work for you.

Using your current customers and known prospects to extend your reach can have a much bigger effect than starting a new acquisition channel from scratch.

Plus — leveraging your network doesn’t cost you anything extra, so you can really get more bang for your marketing buck!

But, how do you actually leverage your network?

This article covers 5 ways in which you can use your business contact lists to boost the effectiveness of your marketing and rapidly grow your business.

1. Get Customer Feedback to Improve Your Business

In the most basic sense, businesses exist because they provide a solution or value to a group of customers.

This means that your customers are your most valuable resource in refining the value that you provide them.

So, if you want to keep improving, ask your customers for help!

Start by Asking What They Like and Dislike About Your Business

No business is perfect, which makes finding areas of improvement an endless task.

It’s easy to assume you have all the answers, which leads many marketers to continuously try new ideas based on “hunches” or preconceived ideas about customers.

Though this might occasionally work, it’s much easier to start by asking customers directly what they like and dislike about your business.

This will give you a clear idea of where your customers find value in your solution and where you can improve.

Find out how to add a customer feedback form in WordPress.

See If They Have Any Suggestions or Requests

Prioritizing improvements to a product or business can be a big challenge.

For an eCommerce store, this could be deciding which products to stock, whereas a SaaS tool might be considering which features to develop next.

Whatever the case, prioritizing change can be greatly simplified by including customers in the process. Soliciting suggestions from them allows you to see what’s most important and prioritize accordingly to keep your customers happy.

These suggestions can also clue you into new trends, ideas, or offerings that you may have overlooked, which is a huge bonus.

2. Crowdsource Content or Promotional Ideas From Email Subscribers

Online business presence is often defined by content. Or, to quote Bill Gates, “content is king.”

While content is important in building domain authority and attracting prospects, it’s only effective if the right people want to read it.

But, coming up with good content topics that resonate with readers is a challenge.

Give Readers What They Want

If you have an email subscriber list, sending an email to gather feedback about your content is a great way to make sure your content is still providing good value for readers.

This can also give you insight into which blog post topics are the most interesting for your subscribers, which can shape where you focus your future content efforts.

3. Grow Your Customer Base Through Referrals

Probably the most obvious way to leverage your current customers for growth is through referrals.

This is usually done by giving customers as many chances as possible to refer your business to their friends. This can be done through calls to action in emails, on your website, and even built directly into your product if you have an online tool.

Reach Higher Quality Prospects

Referral marketing has probably the biggest potential in terms of acquisition and marketing ROI. This is true for a few reasons:

• Referrals don’t cost your business any money
• There is implied social proof that makes the conversion rate much higher with referrals over other acquisition channels
• If you can get your viral coefficient — the rate at which customers refer your business — above 1, you can achieve exponential growth.

4. Build Your Business’s Credibility With Social Proof

When people are looking to buy a product, they want to know they are getting something quality. This reassurance usually comes in the form of customer reviews.

Improve Your Reputation Through Customer Reviews

With countless numbers of websites devoted to reviewing every type of business, reviews have become the front lines of developing customer perception.

That’s why it has become so important to encourage your best customers to leave reviews about your business. This can be done in two ways:

• Use an NPS tool and/or marketing automation to identify and follow up with your best customers directly and encourage them to leave a review.
• Create a customer advocate program that rewards customers for leaving reviews and evangelizing your business.

5. Boost Facebook Ad Engagement With Your Contact List

Facebook ads are one of the most powerful paid advertising channels on the market. This is largely due to the advanced targeting and large audience available in the platform.

Facebook lets you upload a list of email addresses for targeting purposes, so you can easily leverage your contacts. This can help you in two ways:

• Target those users directly: This is exactly how it sounds — Facebook will find the accounts associated with your contacts’ email addresses and serve ads directly to them.
• Create a lookalike audience: Facebook creates lookalike audiences by using your current email contacts and finding other accounts with similar interests, demographics, professions, etc. and serves ads to those users. It’s a very powerful way to reach a more qualified group of prospects through paid ads.

Target Quality Prospects With Customer Contact List

Using your customers to create a lookalike audience is an excellent way to get higher conversions on your ads.

You can even take it one step further and segment your customers to find only the highest revenue-generating customers. Once you have this, you can target even higher potential prospects with ease.

Amplify Your Content With Email Subscriber Lists

Facebook ads is also a great way to amplify your best content.

To do this, you just have to identify your best performing content, then include it in a low-budget Facebook ads campaign.

Then, leverage your contact list to create a lookalike audience to ensure that only people who are interested in your articles will be served the ads. As more people engage with your content amplification ads, your relevance score increases, which yields more impressions and lower cost per click.

Now that you know how to leverage your network to grow your business, it’s time to get started on implementing them for your own business! For more ideas, see our guide on growth hacking strategies that are proven to work.