Keep your existing customers happy and informed!
Although I am a director of the Jurupa Valley Chamber of Commerce, I have to give a shout-out to a Chamber a little bit south and west of here for doing some good things. The Corona Chamber of Commerce, in partnership with the Small Business Administration, has put on several seminars to help small business owners. This is a help not just to its own member businesses, nor even just to business in Corona. This benefits business owners anywhere within driving distance of Corona.
I recently was able to attend one of these seminars, in which Kelly Flint, western area director for Constant Contact, presented marketing ideas. Constant Contact is one of the top email marketing providers. One takeaway I have from her presentation is that if you're doing email blasts, you need a professional email marketing service. But Constant Contact is just one, so my recommendation is to check with YOUR chamber for a recommendation. Here in Jurupa Valley, we can recommend one of our members. In Corona, I believe there are at least two members they can recommend.
Ms. Flint also reiterated something I've learned in my marketing classes. The key to successful marketing is not spending your time and money finding more and more new customers. It is to continue providing great service to the ones you've already got!
''Your customers' friends are your best next prospects," she said.
This hit home for me recently, when Jurupa Valley Pharmacy, a customer of mine since it opened in January, referred Nuevo Pharmacy to me to help them with some publicity about their completion of one year in business last month. The owners of the two pharmacies are friends, because their franchisor, Health Mart Pharmacies, asked the Nuevo owners to serve as mentors to the Jurupa Valley owners. Having now helped both of these pharmacies get well-deserved coverage - and more business - I hope they tell more friends who are business owners as well.
Word of mouth referrals like that certainly can help any business, but even for a small company like Pen Porter, more sometimes must be done to get repeat business. Pen Porter tailors its service to meet every company's needs, so my efforts to keep the customers I have - and to find new customers as well - is to keep abreast of what they are doing and remind them of how I can help publicize this. I primarily do this in one-on-one conversations and by leaving them printed brochures. But for some companies, keeping in touch through digital communications is another effective way.
Most businesses can also use email to keep their customers informed as a whole. Probably not so much if you are a service provider who tailors the services to each customer. But if you sell things - or if you can sell a specific service at the same price to all customers - you can tell your customers about these great deal.
But there are several caveats with this one. I personally recommend a business look very carefully at email before using it as a marketing strategy.
First drawback is the #1 takeway I mentioned at the beginning. You usually can't do this with your own email service, especially if you have a free one like Gmail. If you send out too many emails in one day, I can tell you from firsthand experience that Gmail will cut you off temporarily. So will Earthlink. And even if they don't cut you off, if you have more than about 10 addressees in one link, chances are those emails will end up in your intended recipient's spam folder instead of a regular folder. So you're probably going to have to pay a professional to send the emails out for you, or pay extra for internet service that will allow this.
Second drawback, mentioned by Kelly Flint, is that you MUST get permission from each one of your intended email recipients. If you asked for your regular customers' email addresses on a form clearly stating you would like to keep them informed of specials the company is having and other information about the company - and they gave it to you in the course of a business transaction, that's one thing. But if you met someone at an event, and acquired their email that way, they may resent getting all this information from you. What's more, about five years ago, the federal "Can Spam Act" mandates penalties for those who continually send unwanted emails.
I can attest to that. My former employer had the unfortunate habit of simply forwarding emails several times a week to entire categories of people in his electronic database, and didn't always respond quickly when they requested the emails stop. Nor was the database organized well enough that we always could take them out. This irritated some recipients so much they blocked our domain as a sender, meaning none of us, neither he nor his employees, could communicate with them by email when we had a legitimate need to provide information to them on behalf of our clients.Thankfully, we learned this hard lesson and with some diligence got most of these unhappy people out of the database before the passage of the Can Spam Act. We also reduced the volume of emails sent out, so that the ones we hadn't been able to take out weren't driven to reporting us.
Since this seminar, I have learned in another seminar of one more drawback to email communications. We get too many emails in this day and age. So, we may not actually OPEN your email. If that happens, it doesn't matter if you're forwarding junk, or paid someone to put your very interesting news into an attractive newsletter format. Your customers won't see it. But if you post it on your Facebook page, everyone who follows your page should see all your creativity and the important news within.
You also can use email for one-on-one communication, including telling your existing customers about a deal you would like to offer just them. Perhaps you might give a special deal to your best customers. This also works even if you tailor services to each customer. Personally though, I prefer to initiate contact with my existing customers through phone calls or face-to-face interactions. It's just more personable.
Ms. Flint presented several other strategies. I am more comfortable with these than I am with email.
1. Engagement -
This is the word of mouth conversations taking place about your business. This can happen face to face between you and a customer, you and a potential customer, and between your customer and a potential customer. It also can happen through other forms of communication.2. Social media outreach -
Businesses can take part in social media outreach with a business page. That's where, if you keep posting important information, you will have a better audience in this day and age than with email. It does depend on how many followers you have, and how often they interact with you, but it works even for a small business. Here's mine: Pen Porter Facebook page. You can also share information through Linked In, Twitter and many other social media sites. I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter, but I don't use them as much as Facebook. LinkedIn I could use more, and I'll probably do another blog post soon about ways to use it. Twitter is fun, but I don't Tweet on my cell phone, so I don't use it very much. There are literally hundreds of social media sites nowadays, as you will see on an infograpic when you click the link to my business Facebook page.
Another way to communicate with customers and potential customers is with a blog, such as I hope I am doing here. Blogs have to be updated regularly, and you also must use other means of communication (Facebook is good, Linkedin is good, word of mouth is good) to make sure people know you have interesting content on your blog. You can say more on a blog than you can on Facebook. You don't have to write as much as I normally do though! Pictures and videos go a long ways!
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