Image via Wikipedia
There’s a lot of chatter about the “death” of email marketing. I, too, had begun to think it was going by the wayside. Until….
Until I started observing the amount of small businesses and retailers who are still only focusing on attracting new customers – but not maintaining contact with their existing customers.
The old style of marketing focused on new traffic.
In the old days, it was all about traffic flow.
Traditional marketing had focused exclusively on attracting new customers. But because new customers now mostly come to you via your existing customers, if you aren’t courting your existing customers, you are dead.
Previous to the modern economic problems, customer bought based on “if I want it, I buy it.” Now, customers are more frugal, dollar conscious, quality conscious and insistent on good customer service.
A 20% conversion rate was the norm! So for every 100 customers that walked through your door, if you converted 20 of those prospects into a sale, that was considered success.
20% is horrible!
But when you had 100 customers walking in each day, that was all that was achievable realistically. Consider you have a sales staff of maybe 3-5 sales people on the floor at any given time in your average small business or retail.
How many customers can your sales staff handle effectively?
Even with 5 great salespeople, that’s a ratio of 20 customers per salesperson. Highly unlikely each of those 20 customers got the best customer experience, so no wonder that of those 20 customers per salesperson, only 4 made a purchase!
But, in today’s economy, lower traffic translates and demands more time be devoted to providing a greater customer experience for every customer that walks in the door – new or repeat.
Therefore, if your business is not constantly “touching” each and every customer at every possible opportunity, you will lose that repeat business.
Keep customers interested in your business
Email marketing is one of the easiest and best customer relationship building tools out there. And relationship building is the new “marketing” tool.
So “Hold on Loosely, but Don’t Let Go”
Since the economy has tragically weakened the “new” customer flow, you have to hold on to every customer you already have without crowding them out with the noise of traditional marketing.
Your customers are your marketers. They will be the one to toot your horn to their friends, family, co-workers and anyone else they care to tell. They’ll use word of mouth through talk, Twitter, texting, Foursquare, Google +, Facebook and more… even if you don’t have any social media accounts – yet – they do.
So, keep your business front of mind with your personalized e-mails, e-zines, e-newsletters, e-announcements, etc. whether it’s through Constant Contact, Go-Daddy, MailChimp, or whatever… USE SOMETHING!
It’s the best means to get your information to your customer short of going into their house!
