There is gold in your contact database if only you take the time to mine it. Every business owner has a list of customers who love your service, a list of prospects who have contacted you for a proposal even if they didn’t hire you, and a list of valuable contacts who can refer business to you. The secret to getting more business from your customers and contacts is to nurture those relationships by staying in touch. With some organization, some planning and some tools, your company can begin to reap the rewards of good relationship marketing
Customer Relationship Management
Most business owners are familiar with the term Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as it relates to the software system that your company uses to keep track of customers, prospects and business contacts. No matter which software you use as your database, the most three most critical factors in making it work for you are:
• Add every contact and their details to your system (without fail!)
• Categorize each contact
• Be able to extract contract information for any group of contacts easily to send them something.
Customer Communication Plans
Most of us like to think that our customers will always remember us when they have a need for our services and pick up their phone and call, text or email us. Some undoubtedly do, but many more may need a prompting to inspire them to call us instead of our competitor who just sent them a flyer, or another company their neighbor recommended on Facebook or Nextdoor. Think of your customer communications as building relationships. Consider the number of times per year that your customers might need to use your services. The frequency may help determine how often it would be best to stay in touch. For some businesses, perhaps quarterly would be enough, for others monthly may be better. The type of relationship may also dictate frequency of contact. Someone who is in a position to refer business your way might benefit from hearing from you more frequently than someone who may only need your services infrequently.
Take some time and map out a plan to stay in touch with your various categories of contacts. For example, you may want to send a newsletter to everyone on your list periodically, but beyond that there may be differences. For prospects: You may want to send them a direct mail piece or email blast occasionally when you are running a special or you want to highlight a timely seasonal service. For customers: Consider sending letter occasionally which gives a bit more of a personal touch in addition to direct mail or email blasts advertising your specials. A Thank You card at the end of a project is always in season. Speaking of seasons, it’s also a nice touch to send a holiday card. If you are concerned about sending a December card due to the plethora of religious holidays, consider sending a Thanksgiving Card or a New Year’s Card or even a holiday card at some unexpected time such as the 4th of July. For referral partners: You may want to stay in touch more frequently with other businesspeople who are in position to refer work to you. In this case you can plan to add in a telephone call to touch base, or a date for coffee or lunch periodically to get caught up with what’s happening in their business and exploring opportunities to work together.
How often should you stay in touch? For prospects and customers, I would suggest at least quarterly, but you may want to be in contact in one form or another monthly, particularly with your customers. For referral partners, staying in touch at least monthly makes sense.
Leverage Social Media
The more you can drive your customers, prospects and referral partners to connect with you on Social Media, the more you increase your opportunities to stay top of mind. All your marketing materials should make it very easy to connect with your company on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. In addition, if you can create a reason for them to join you on Social Media, it will be easier to get them to connect with you. You may want to offer something of interest to them that is only available on your Facebook Business Page, for example. This could take many forms: Photographs of a community project, a drawing for a prize, an opportunity to participate in a poll, etc.
Keep it Cost Effective
Many businesses don’t invest much in marketing to their customers and referral partners, but getting leads is the lifeblood of your business. Even if you have a small budget that doesn’t cover things like direct mail and big media advertising costs, you can still stay in touch without spending a huge amount of money. Email marketing is extremely cost effective, and a good email service like Constant Contact or MailChimp will save you thousands over print newsletters. Even if you don’t have email addresses for all your customers, consider sending an e-newsletter to those for whom you do have an email address and the print version only to those you don’t.
Letters to customers are also pretty cost effective, and I suggest this to many of my clients who have a small marketing budget. Sure, you do incur the postage costs, but chances are you have a stock of letterhead and company envelopes on hand already. If you’re still concerned about costs – rank your list and just send letters to your better customers.
Put Your Communications Plan in Writing (and on the Calendar!)
As with everything else in your business, implementation is the key. Map out your communications plan for customers, prospects and referral partners by month and identify what method you will use to communicate with each and when. Then transfer action items to your calendar. For example, if you want to send a newsletter on September 1, put that on your calendar. If you know it will take you two weeks to get the newsletter ready to deploy, you should calendar an action item to start working on it two weeks earlier. Keep in mind everything always takes longer than you think!