New customers are more important than existing ones?

Most companies are spending tonnes of money on marketing to attract new customers. Free gifts, bonus reward points, roadshows, extended warranties, etc.

After spending so much money, the companies would expect their number of new customers to grow.

But having more new customers do not mean having more customers.

Total customers = New customers + Existing customers

What about the existing customers? Is there any existing promotion, or free service upgrade or free warranty extension for them? More often than not, there’s nothing for the existing customers. I find it quite amusing that most companies, in their pursuit of having more new customers, start to assume that their existing customers would not leave them for anyone else.

But they are wrong. Unless we’re talking about a monopolised market (like our national telco…which is also under threat from few companies), chances are, existing customers will leave if there’s a better bargain out there.

And once they’ve left, it’s even harder to attract them back. It could be even more expensive than attracting new customers (unless the new service sucks and the customers have no choice but to fall back to the old service).

However, instead of hoping the services provided by other competitors sucks more than your company’s service, isn’t it better to think of ways to make your customers (new and old) remain loyal to you?