Why?
These customers or clients that used to do business with you, but are currently inactive bought from you before because you solved a problem of theirs or you improved their lives in one way or another. Your job as a marketer is to find out why they stopped doing business with your company and see how you can get them to once again become one of your customers.
As I said a moment ago, you have to continuously promote to your current AND inactive customers. One of the best ways I know to do this is by doing a direct mail or E-mail newsletter on a regular basis and sending it out to all your current and past customers and clients.
Your customers love to know what’s going on in your organization that affects them and the more you keep in contact with them and share ideas about how you can help them make more money, keep more profits or solve the problems that you solve for them.
When you do your newsletters-- inform, educate and give value to the people getting your newsletter. Don’t hold back. You need to let your customers and clients know clearly and measurably how you can be of value to them.
20 years ago, when I first got into the advertising business, it was said that the average person need to be exposed to your message a minimum of 3 times in order to respond favorably to your offer or sales message.
With everyone being overloaded with advertising messages from everywhere these days the studies are now showing that your potential customers and clients now need to be exposed to your sales message a minimum of 7 times in order to respond favorably to your message or offer. That’s why you need to constantly be in touch with your potential customers.
Off line you can keep in contact with your customers and clients in a number of ways like newsletters, personal letters, sponsoring events, radio, TV or print advertising, sending them articles that pertain to their business and hundreds of other strategies.
Here’s an idea you can use that is “dirt cheap” and is an incredible way to cost effectively use the power of the internet to keep in regular contact with your customers and clients. It’s personalized E-mail newsletters that you send out on a regular basis to your customers.
I’m not talking about SPAMMING anyone and sending thousands of people in your city e-mail that they didn’t request or want. I’m talking about an e-mail mailing list that you set up using easy to use autoresponders that you can use to create an e-mail mailing list.
The advantages of doing this are…for less than $20 per month you can send personalized e-mail messages to everyone on your mailing list as often as you like.
What’s the advantage in this for your company?
Let’s say that you start having your field salespeople start collecting e-mail addresses of all your potential clients and customers and you have 1000 e-mail addresses that your salespeople have collected from people who WANT to get information from your company.
If you sent a physical newsletter to your mailing list of 1000 potential
Clients and customers the cost would be about $350 just for the postage not counting the cost of putting the newsletter together.
By doing an e-mail newsletter you can harness the power of the Internet to promote and sell your products and services and you don’t even have to have a web site. As I said earlier, it’s less than $20 per month and you can have an unlimited number on your list. They can get off quickly and easily if they ever want to stop getting info from you.
There are several companies out there that give you the ability to send out e-mail to a mailing list. The company recommend and use to do our weekly newsletters is called aweber systems.
Copyright 2001 Susie and Otto Collins.