Many companies get very wound up in making sure they are constantly marketing their business but sometimes become so busy in the constant push that they forgot the importance of their existing customers.
Developing a customer database is so important to business success. It’s a simple way to reach your customers, keep them engaged and to help drive repeat purchase behaviour. We also all know that retaining existing customers is much more cost effective than getting new ones. You’ve probably all heard the leaky bucket analogy – you keep throwing more customers in the top but your existing customers are all slipping out of the holes at the bottom.
The database isn’t going to solve your problems but is going to facilitate your engagement with customers. One of the challenges that many businesses find is that they start treating new and existing customers the same and just market to them, over and over again. A continual flow of product pushes is going to result in alienating your existing customers, ultimately disengaging them from your business. Communicating with existing customers and feeding them information that interests them will help to keep them engaged.
I’m not saying don’t market to them – Marketing is crucial to your business but developing a mixed strategy that involves both communication and marketing will help to nurture your existing customers.
Communication can be multiple things:
- Market updates relevant to your business and customers
- Using social media to share third party posts relevant to your customers
- Tips and advice
- Product reviews
The key to successful communication strategies is ensuring that what you are communicating is of interest to your audience. Relevance is crucial to any marketing or communication.
What’s also extremely important is ensuring that you plan out your communications. Understand when, what and how you are going to communicate. You need to review your available channels to the information that you’re sending and determine the best way/s to send it. You can use more than one channel and look back at communication preferences to help determine where customers have asked to receive information through. This should always drive your channel decisions.
You need to also ensure that the communications are mixed in with your marketing. The marketing plan and your seasonal activities should also be considered when planning your communications. Don’t send advice to customers about summer in the middle of winter! Your communication can also aid marketing in that you could use it to educate and excite customers about something before marketing to them. This is where communication is extremely powerful – it works for you and for your customers.
Once you’ve created a plan it will help you to start preparing your content. Communication is only valuable if the content it includes is interesting, insightful, of interest to your audience and well written. All of these factors together mean that developing your communication could take some time and you don’t want to rush it. Gather your thoughts first and plan out the content and flow of information. Making sure that you have a seamless flow will make it easier for your audience to read which will result in higher engagement.
Once you’ve completed your communications, make sure that you proof read and spell check ensuring that you are presenting a high quality piece of information.
So once you have a plan, a heap of content and a strong customer database you are ready to go. Like any type of marketing or communications, don’t over do it but don’t under sell it either. You need to stay focused and keep momentum as, once you start communicating with customers on topics of interest, they start to expect it from you and it becomes an expectation of your brand. Be careful on how you approach your plan and that you have the time to dedicate to this project. Start small and then build up. This way you’re not over committing and helping yourself to learn and grow as you go. It’s as important for you to benefit and enjoy the communications as much as your customers – otherwise it will become another enduring task that you have to do rather than want to do. That will start to come through in your tone and commitment which won’t be good for your communications 🙂
Good Luck.
The Marketing Elf
April 2018
The Marketing Elf 
A good reminder from the Marketing Elf. I would say many companies forget about their existing customer and how useful they can be either as repeat business and/or customer referrals.I like the leaking bucket.
Thank you Elf
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