Relationship Marketing :: Advisors On Target

Archive for Relationship Marketing

Build Good Relationships with a Customer Communications Plan

Posted by Linnea Blair on

09/17/2019

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!

Categories : Relationship Marketing

Twitter – Great Marketing or Waste of Time?

Posted by Linnea Blair on

07/30/2010

Twitter continues to grow at a rapid pace and attracts thousands of new users each day. But you often hear people say that Twitter is a waste of time with no benefit to the small to medium sized business. Others rave about Twitter’s positive impact on their company.

The fact is that many small to medium businesses are using Twitter to develop relationships with their customers, raise awareness of their company, uncover the latest trends, and make more sales. How do they do this? Before we answer this question, let’s look at what Twitter is and how it works.

Twitter is a micro-blogging site that enables users to communicate with each other in “tweets” of up to 140 characters. You can think of a tweet as a text message that is not directed to one person in particular, but to all your “followers”. When you tweet, your message appears on Twitter to all the people who have chosen to follow you. You also choose to “follow” other people such as your followers, customers, prospects, media representatives and others who have an interest in your company or industry.

It’s important to understand that your tweets shouldn’t be sales oriented announcements about how great your products or services are. Effective tweets should build relationships and can take many forms. The main guidelines are that your tweets should in some way be of value to your followers, they should be worded in a conversational tone, and they should reflect your company’s culture.

Your tweets can help position your company as a reliable source of expertise by including links to your company blog or an industry site. They can let your followers know about the latest developments in your business. They can take your followers behind the scenes at your company to show them your personal side and create stronger connections. You can also “retweet” interesting tweets from others to your followers.
Some retailers offer coupons or special promotions in their tweets. Although these are outright promotions, these companies usually have separate Twitter accounts where people become followers specifically to learn about special offers.

Besides tweeting to your followers, it’s important to remember that Twitter is a two-way conversation. You will want to pay attention to what other people are saying in their tweets to learn their opinions and ideas concerning your company, product, service or industry. Even better, you can tweet to ask questions, present ideas and request feedback from your followers, and get quick responses. You can also use the Twitter search function to find out what all users, not just your followers, are saying about your product, brand, company or industry.

If you decide that Twitter might benefit your business, there are a number of steps to take to get started. First, you will need to set up a Twitter account if you don’t have one. Designate who will manage your account by tweeting and monitoring tweets from your followers. You might want to have several people managing your account to ensure effective coverage. But make sure they understand your Twitter goals and guidelines.

The next step is to attract followers. If you have the email addresses of your customers, you can search for them on Twitter and become their followers with the goal of having them reciprocate by following you. You will want to include a Twitter link on your website and have a Twitter button in your emails, electronic newsletters and other correspondence.

Many small to medium businesses are finding that Twitter is an effective way to communicate with existing and potential customers and build a relationship with them. Twitter might be the right tool to develop connections for your business. Remember that it’s a two-way conversation and that you must bring something of value to your followers in order to succeed in the long run. The best way to learn about Twitter is to jump right in and start tweeting.

Feel free to connect with us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AdvisorOnTarget. We try to share useful information for small to medium businesses about social media marketing and other business tips.

Categories : Social Media Marketing

Tags : Marketing, Relationship Marketing, Social Media, Twitter

3 Little Secrets – The Keys To Low Budget Marketing

Posted by Linnea Blair on

04/27/2010

Even in a downturn, if you don’t get in front of people and explain your unique value proposition then your chances of selling will be restricted to current customers or accidental passersby. Marketing is what sets you up for selling. However, there are three important things you should appreciate before you start.

1. Your target customers need to hear your marketing messages at least 7 times to influence a buying decision. Sounds like a lot – it is. People just don’t always take in all the information at any given time. Especially the first time they hear it, so you need to choose strategies that allow you to repeat them often enough to work for you.

2. Expensive ads don’t guarantee sales – even when they are popular with the public. Companies have gone broke over big ticket ads. Every marketing dollar has to translate into sales.

3. A sure way to improve sales is to use multiple marketing channels. Your underlying message should be consistent, but you need to get it out in a variety of mediums.

So, if you’re a small to mid-sized business on a limited budget your tactics should be to optimize your spending so that you get in front of the right customers regularly and in a variety of ways. Here are four techniques you can use to achieve that.

Identify and target niche customers
Unless you are a major player with an unlimited amount of money to devote to scatter gun marketing – go narrow. Do your market research and focus on niches – those groups of customers you can clearly identify who would be interested in your offering. Customers who are affordable for you to reach! Then get your message out into local clubs, trade shows, industry publications, niche newsletters, anywhere you can reach those specific prospects. Read More→

Categories : Marketing

Tags : Marketing, Niche Market, Relationship Marketing

Are You Killing Your Credibility?

Posted by Bill McKinney on

02/22/2009

I just returned from New Orleans (I’m still in mourning about having to come home) where I participated in PACE 2009, the annual national convention for the painting and decorating industry. Between manning the Advisors On Target booth at the trade show and presenting an educational program on web strategies, I had the opportunity to meet and talk to hundreds of painting contractors about their online efforts and results.

Not surprisingly, I found a wide range in the general level of web competence among the business owners I talked to. Some were pretty savvy internet marketers, looking for subtle ways to improve their already strong results online. Others were just getting going – either starting from scratch or looking to revamp old, tired websites and strategies that aren’t up to 21st century standards. But nearly everybody had one thing in common. Everybody was aware that online performance is critical in today’s business and social climate – that your web presence it the most cost-effective way to promote your business, and that more and more consumers rely exclusively on the internet to find and evaluate local businesses.

I was pleased to see so much awareness and so much determination to master the tools and techniques of internet success. But I was shocked by the number of business people who mangle their credibility by overlooking a simple thing – their email address. Read More→

Categories : Internet Marketing, Marketing

Tags : Internet Marketing, Marketing, Relationship Marketing

Keep Your Customers Coming Back

Posted by Linnea Blair on

09/28/2008

Customer loyalty programs work big time for big companies but small business owners are often deterred from developing one because of worries about how much it would cost or how difficult it would be to organize and manage. As a matter of fact, the very same principles that keep customers coming back to big companies can be utilized to develop a small business scale loyalty program without a lot of cost and drama.

Make customers feel like ‘members’

Creating a ‘club’ that provides special incentives to members is one of the best ways to retain customers. This approach works because it is based on the primal human need to ‘belong’ to something – especially where belonging also makes us feel we are being treated as special.

Who gets to be a member? A customer loyalty program based on membership should convey a feeling of privilege for those selected so it can’t be open to all and sundry. Customers may qualify for membership either by purchasing their entrée or by dint of their past support and loyalty.

General Nutrition Centers, a specialty retailer of vitamins and supplements, offers a Gold Card membership program that provides discounts on products, personalized mailings and email on health related topics, product news and exclusive offers. GNC found that they could even use their program to actively iron out lows in their sales pattern by offering a special discount on sales made on Tuesday, traditionally their slowest sales day. Read More→

Categories : Customer Service Systems, Relationship Marketing

Tags : Customer Loyalty, Customer Service, Relationship Marketing

Good Business Deeds Can Be Good Business Deals

Posted by Linnea Blair on

11/27/2006

‘Cause’ marketing that links your company or brand to a non-profit group or charity enables you to promote your business while you give something back to your community. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this kind of marketing is that it’s been shown to make customers feel better about deciding to purchase and that translates into an increase in repurchase intentions.

Consumers transfer their emotional bonds

Many people have emotional bonds with a non-profit group. They may even be regular financial contributors or do volunteer work for a non-profit organization. When these people see a business that’s supporting this organization they’ll often be predisposed to purchasing from it. “Look at what you sell and understand the targets you’re trying to reach. Then align yourself with causes that will bring out the emotions of that audience, from a grassroots, a community and a media standpoint,” advises Rodger Roeser, of Justice & Young Public Relations in Cincinnati.

Employees feel better about their employer

Surveys consistently show that whether candidates are choosing an employer or employees are deciding whether to stay with their present company, the degree to which a business demonstrates a social conscience is perceived as increasingly important. In fact, a majority of employees of companies in many industries have said they’d work for less money if they felt their employer was socially responsible.

It’s good for PR and community relations

Naturally, there are a lot of positives about supporting a cause that will benefit the image your business has in the community. You’ll be seen as a good corporate citizen and as an organization that contributes to the welfare of everyone in the community.

Seek alignment with your business and your customers

There are thousands of causes and some will no doubt relate to your business activities. Find a cause that has a link with your company, no matter how tenuous, so that people will understand how your business fits into the cause overall. The cause needs to also be related to the interests of your customers. It should align with their feelings and beliefs, and not be in conflict with other organizations they might want to support.

Tell the world what you’re doing

Although it might seem a bit ‘commercial’, your business will only benefit if it tells the world at large about your involvement with the cause. You need to spell out what it is you’re doing and why you’re doing it. It will also help if your business becomes a conduit for your customers to help the cause by making donations through your website or at your business premises.

Your cause marketing activities should be part of both your external marketing and your internal communications. It should be featured in your promotions, your packaging and your website, as well as referred to in your employee newsletters.
Give your employees and your customers a chance to participate in the cause by hosting a function or sponsoring an event where the proceeds go to the cause.
Ask the cause you’re supporting to promote your association with them. They have every reason to do this; the non-profit world depends on donations and they like to tell prospective donors that they’ll be in good company when they part with their funds.

In today’s competitive world consumers want to know what a business stands for. Cause marketing will tell them about your business values and reassure them that part of their purchase money is going to a good cause.

Information in this article is sourced from RAN ONE, Inc.

Categories : Marketing, Relationship Marketing

Tags : Charitable, Marketing, Non-profit, Relationship Marketing

Cut The Costs Of Finding And Managing Leads

Posted by Linnea Blair on

09/13/2006

Every organization with a sales force keeps an eye on the leads it generates – how many does each salesperson get and how many are converted into customers. But as most companies now appreciate, the costs of generating and converting leads need to be carefully managed or they can become a real drain on profitability.

The basic tasks of lead management are to lower the costs of lead acquisition while at the same time increasing the rate of conversion into customers. To do this it’s best if you separate the lead-getting activity from the selling activity and develop metrics for monitoring each. The two are actually separate functions and require different sets of skills and resources. Lead-generation is a marketing function, while the job of converting those leads to customers is a sales function.

Lead quality is essential

Leads are acquired in any number of ways. For marketers who purchase prospect lists the content and quality of the list should be far more important than the cost, yet how many lists are bought on the basis of price? The answer is, far too many. Those who specialize in lists know that good lists are worth what they cost. They’re regularly updated, their data is accurate, and it’s possible to nominate prospects by geographical area, by age, by occupation, or any other profile that will allow the sales team to target suitably qualified prospects. You don’t have to pay for a huge list if you’re only a small company or are restricted in your geographical coverage. Carefully targeted prospects are available on a cost-per-lead basis; it’s even possible to rent or buy lists of people who have previously responded to the same form of marketing you intend to use.

The most important metric to monitor is not the cost per lead, but rather the relationship of leads to final sales, by dividing the number of leads purchased by the number of conversions obtained from those leads. The closer this result is to ‘1’ the better the quality of the leads you’ve paid for.

Another way to improve the quality of the leads you get is to have your existing customers provide you with referrals or word of mouth. Referrals are really a way of leveraging off a high level of customer satisfaction and represent a much more likely set of prospects than leads gained from cold calling.

Raise conversion rates

High quality leads make it possible for your sales team to achieve better rates of conversion from leads to customers. This effectively lowers selling costs and will go a long way towards offsetting any additional costs incurred to ensure that lead quality is consistently high. There are many more steps you can take to improve the conversion rate your sales force achieves.

Have a system that assigns a relative value to each lead at the first contact. ‘Hot’ leads are those who are definitely looking to buy; ‘Warm’ leads are those who might buy; and ‘Cold’ leads are probably not interested in buying. Discard ‘Cold’ leads at the outset of the selling process. Concentrate selling efforts on ‘Hot’ leads. Give them priority and only after all the ‘Hot’ leads have been processed should the sales team turn its attention to ‘Warm’ ones.

Leads are often obtained through offers. Before the handover to the sales team the lead should be provided with any information they may have requested – a sales brochure or product order form for example. Have a system that records what was requested and what was provided. Be persistent. One inquiry handling expert estimates that 45% of all leads turn into a sale for someone, but only 22%- 25% actually convert within the first six months. That means that 45 out of 100 leads might eventually convert to customers if they’ve correctly handled.

Keep in touch

Another consideration is that competition usually decreases over time. The reason is simple – most businesses lose interest in a lead if it doesn’t turn into a customer pretty quickly. Patience and ongoing communication will eventually deliver all the conversions you’re going to get, but many won’t convert until several months have passed.

This tells us that every lead management system must accommodate the need to stay in touch with leads over a fairly long period of time. So communicate with leads – perhaps by telephone, email or a newsletter – until they either convert to become customers or must be reclassified as ‘Cold’.

Keep in touch for an appropriate length of time until you’re absolutely certain there’s no hope of ever converting that contact to a customer. Remember too that most businesses have competitors and if you’ve done your prospecting correctly even the people who initially reject you are somebody else’s customers. They may eventually become yours if you don’t give up.

Each member of your sales team will have a conversion rate that shows how successful they are at converting leads to sales. This metric can be used in conjunction with total dollar volumes when you’re comparing the results of individual members of your sales team and determining which salespeople are your top performers.

Information in this article is sourced from RAN ONE, Inc

Categories : Marketing, Relationship Marketing

Tags : Conversion, Leads, Marketing, Relationship Marketing

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Archive for Relationship Marketing

Build Good Relationships with a Customer Communications Plan

3 Little Secrets – The Keys To Low Budget Marketing

Are You Killing Your Credibility?

Keep Your Customers Coming Back

Good Business Deeds Can Be Good Business Deals

Cut The Costs Of Finding And Managing Leads

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