Keeping in contact with your customers and servicing them beyond the initial sale is vital to the success of your company. After all it?s a steady customer base you?re hoping to achieve, not a revolving door. When most of a businesses resources and staff are focusing on increasing sales, existing customers get left in the dark, free to be sold to the competition.
Finding ways to keep in touch with your customers can be timely and costly depending on how you plan your ?customer retention? strategy. You could hire staff to service and update clients on new products and services, which can be very expensive, or, you could try Email Marketing.
Email Marketing is a persmission-based tool that is very effective in helping businesses stay in touch with their clients via email. With an interesting newsletter type design, businesses can let customers know about special offers, upcoming deadlines for orders, special events, customer recognition, notes from their sales representative and more. It can essentially be used as your electronic newsletter.
Although this method of customer retention is favored because of ease of use and low cost, it does need maintenance. For instance, while Email Marketing provides the features needed to help the user comply with the latest spam laws, businesses will need to update their customer?s email list. This isn?t a draw back for most businesses, however those who aren?t computer savvy can learn the simple steps to setting up their customer?s list.
This can also be a great tool for prospective clients. Send it to them once and if they become a customer, keep them on the list, otherwise remove them to avoid violating spam laws.
This marketing tool is also attractive to small business owners because it can be set up easily. Customers can be added individually or imported in bulk from an external file, and customer lists can be segmented into interest groups and detailed demographic information to enable more granular targeting of business news.