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Relationship management
Your customers are your biggest asset. Consider 2 rules of thumb:
- 80% of your turnover comes from 20% of your customers.
- It is 5 times more expensive to sell to a new customer than to an existing one.
What are you doing to ensure that they always consider you first when they are looking for a repeat purchase?
The basics
There are 2 things to remember about managing your customers online:
First, the customer relationship doesn't begin with a purchase, it begins with an enquiry. As soon as someone visits your site, you know that they are interested in your offering.
Secondly, if you have their email address and their permission to use it, you have the ability to market to them, using personalised targetted messages, at a very low cost.
The first step
When you look at your website, make sure that there are effective calls to action that give you the best chance of starting a relationship with your visitor. Incentivise those calls to action (competitions, special offers, even news), but do everything you can to get their email address and the requisite permission.
Adding value
When a customer gives you an email address, they expect something in return. If you are a discount retailer, they might want a regular list of bargains, but in most cases they don't just want to be sold to. Consider why the customer gave you their email address in the first place and try to meet their expectation. Think of it like any other media, they read it for the content, the commerial offers (the ads) are a secondary message.
Data collection, tracking and analysis
As you run your campaigns, you can learn about your audience. This information can be used later on to target your messages more effectively, as well as to work out exactly which messages work the best.
To find out more about how online customer relationship management (eCRM) can help your business, please call Tom on 0845 838 2328 or email info@barnesgraham.com.
