More Meaningful Marketing, Part 3

Now, let's talk about the most often neglected marketing opportunity: your current customers.

If you think about a customer that has purchased from you not as an individual sale, but as a lifetime of sales, the value of that customer should be greatly increased. As we stated in part one of this series, in Customers For Life, Carl Sewell figured that each customer was worth $300,000. This is a very good way to look at the value of a customer, but you can increase that dollar amount to over $1 million if you think of each customer not as an individual customer, but a network of customers.

Have you ever found a place of business that you just loved and you told everyone you knew about that wonderful experience? Or perhaps, it was a product you just discovered that you didn't know existed before. You just have to tell people and share the experience and the excitement. The same would be true and maybe even more so for bad experiences. But, the point is that they communicate about the business, the product and/or the experience. They have their own little network. Maybe they even have a larger network where they have a popular blog or column in the paper or they are a center of influence in their business or social community. It's not just who you know, but who they know. If you open your mind to this opportunity of marketing, you may see the potential and how great it can be if you can find a way to communicate effectively to them.

The first thing besides having a good product and service, is to provide a good overall experience for the customer. As an owner or manager, you need to pay attention to the process that a prospect goes through becoming a customer in your business. See all of it and see where there may be some problems to correct to maximize the experience. The experience can be crushed at any point in the process including after the sale, which we will call the continuing experience. If you can see the value of the customer the way I have described above, you will benefit greatly by smoothing out the processes you have to raise the positive experience level of each transaction.

With that foundation, the next step is keeping track of your customer information so you can begin a communication process. Email addresses will be of paramount importance. Make sure that you have fields in your database that you can personalize so you can have notes of what you last sent them, how it was sent, last physical contact, service history and so on. In addition, you will want to coordinate communication with the service department. If all communications are coordinated for the benefit of each department, all individual agendas will be met.

Next, set up an email marketing newsletter that can go to the entire group or a large group of your customers. This will be a great way to touch each customer periodically, say about once a month. It will have a lot of valuable information and have some coupons for saving in service and parts and perhaps some affiliate coupons. Having experienced others, I highly recommend Constant Contact. It is very easy to use, inexpensive, full-featured and effective. This will be a very important tool for your success. The rest of the communications will be done via direct mail and via telephone.

You will need to have a full time employee taking care of this whole program, but it will be worth it and then some. Ideally, you would have someone who has this kind of computer skills and interest. Find someone who just loves this kind of work. They will help you expand and improve as you go. This is not the kind of job to delegate to the receptionist. We need a real player here.

Now you are set to go. You will be sending out mailing pieces every working day at least Monday through Friday. Your coordinator will be assigning calls to make via forms to fill in to the sales staff. You will have regular planning meetings with your team to enhance, improve, expand your communication prowess.

The benefits of this wise investment:

• Repeat sales are assured.
• Referral sales soar.
• Customer losses slow to a crawl.
• Service and parts sales are substantially enhanced.
• ROI is huge.
• You've created a new, effective and predictable revenue stream!

Catch the vision of more meaningful marketing.