Building Your Business: Increase Profits with Regular Customer Contact

If you have a list of customer or client names and contact info but aren’t doing anything with it, you’re missing a golden chance to increase sales and build your business or career. A key tool in maintaining your relationships and increasing recurring revenue is to simply stay in regular touch with the customers or clients you currently have.

How do you contact? There are several mediums to do this. The easiest is to start a newsletter and ask your customers to subscribe to. Include in your newsletter ways to help your customers – free advice; breaking news or money-saving solutions. No matter what it is make sure to express a genuine interest in their needs and concerns and your customers will reward you with repeat business. Offer a discount for your subscribers. (See How to Stimulate Your Business with a Promotion)

 Another medium you can chose is email. Email is thought to be the easiest and least expensive means of contacting your customers (this is versus postcard or brochure mail outs) SignMark Hosting offers Express Email Marketing.

 While email maybe easy don’t overlook print as a marketing medium. You can now order high-quality printing online for very little cost. (See www.ipixbrandingsolutions.com for details on cost effective postcard mailing).

Bonus: Try combining your contact methods. One successful approach is to send a direct mail piece first – say, a letter or postcard – followed by an email scheduled to arrive three days after the postal piece arrives. Or send out the newsletter followed by a postcard mailing with a incentive coupon on it.

How often you contact? When it comes to how often to contact customers the consensus varies widely. Some consultants advise once every 2-5 days, others suggest once every 1-2 weeks or even 1-2 times a month. Bottom line – contact your customers or clients as often as is useful to them. This requires testing the ‘waters’. Start with once every month if you’re new to creating newsletters or writing copy; then increase to bi-monthly or every other week once you get more proficient.

Remember always test various frequencies to find the one that gets the best response. Keep notes on when you get the most responses to your offers in your newsletters and build upon those times.

What to Include in your messages. Offer free advice or send a regular newsletter with brief text highlighting a couple of different products each time. Email them with product updates or new discounts. You can even tuck a come-back offer into your order confirmation emails. This puts you ahead of the curve, planting the seed of the next sale even as you thank them for their most recent purchase.

Now Track your results. The easiest way to track the effectiveness of an offer is through a source code* when using emails. By requiring customers to enter a source code in their shopping cart when responding to a promotion, you can see exactly how many people respond to each offer, running the most successful ones again. Express Email Marketing will also track open and click-through rates to help you gauge reader interest.

You can include the source code on your postcard mail outs and ask them to give it when they phone in to order. This also works on newsletters. Again it allows you to track the results and you can modify your campaigns and customer contacts accordingly.

Remember

Do give them a little text and a small selection of products in every communication.

Do test frequency to see what works (sells) best. Contacting them too often annoys people; too seldom allows them to forget you. Find the sweet spot – for maximum ROI.

Do ALWAYS give them the option to stop receiving your communications. If they ask to be taken off your list, do it. Send them an email confirming the change.

Whether you are changing your career to become a consultant, or even if you are trying to become a thought leader in your industry you can use these tips in the same manner as a start up business or an online business. Just implement them and continue to use them until they are a part of your marketing strategy.

Until next time

Dr. Ande