Your best future customers, are your current customers
I was in a meeting last week when I heard this phrase from Jeremy Floyd, and I love it. It captures exactly what most of us use digital marketing tools for - we want to stay in touch with our customers.
Why? Because customers who’ve already spent money with you, know you, trust you, and most likely would be willing to do it again when the time came around. Unfortunately, their buying cycle doesn’t always match your messaging cycle and they end up purchasing products and services from other companies because you slipped their mind. You weren’t there to remind them that you could handle the work for them again.
This is the worst type of customer churn, because you never know why they dodn’t come back - they just don’t buy again. If you do follow up, you may hear the dreaded, “I just forgot about you” - so hopefully this motivates you to talk to your customers today.
The good news is that you’ve got lots of options to keep your customers close. You could write a handwritten note to each customer who hasn’t bought from you in six months, send them a postcard that says you miss them, or just drop them an email. These authentic measures would without a doubt, help them remember you, but boy would they take some time. Even at just a few minutes per note, you could easily be at hours a month in writing.
Personally, this is why I recommend for all my clients to do an email newsletter, it maintains the customer contact, but won’t take hours of writing, addressing and sending. It’s certainly not as personal as the individual notes, but it could have the exact same outcome in added sales to your business.
What's your favorite method of staying in touch?
As I mentioned on the blog before, digital marketing and social media classes are one of the three ways we help businesses at Baker Labs (the other two are Contracting and Coaching).
Last week Facebook announced that they were making changes to the newsfeed. I sat down with Alexis Zotos (and fellow St. Louis transplant now living in Knoxville, TN) from WATE Channel 6 to discuss what's changing on Facebook, and why it matters to you. See the video below, but the short version is:
Digital marketing and social media classes are one of the three ways we help businesses at Baker Labs (the other two are Contracting and Coaching). Classes cover the basics of social media and digital marketing, topics like: Facebook, Twitter, Social media strategy, blogging and email marketing and over the last few years I've taught many of the University of Tennessee Professional and Non-Credit classes for the Social Media Certificate. I've enjoyed getting to meet so many people and so many great stories! From sushi chefs to corporate employees, these classes are full of interesting people! Classes are three hours long and are usually from 5-10 students.
