Marketing Ideas

Keep in Regular Contact With Customers and Prospects.

It is essential that you keep in touch with your customers and prospects:

• If they are customers, you'll want to keep them for as long as possible.

• You'll also want to try to up-sell or cross-sell to them at some point or encourage repeat sales to get more profit from that customer

• For your prospects and customers, just because they aren't interested in buying your product or service today, doesn’t mean they aren’t going to be interested tomorrow.

Here's a practical example of why it's important to stay in contact:

Let’s say that at the moment you’re really happy with your car. You’ve got no intention of changing it. Therefore every advert, every mailing or any contact you have with a car dealer or car manufacturer is wasted on you.

Letters go in the bin without a second thought. You pick up your newspaper when the adverts come on TV. You simply aren’t interested. And nothing will prevent you at this stage from even considering changing your car.

However 3 months later your circumstances have changed. You need to do more travelling and so you decide it’s time to look for a more suitable car.
Now every mailing, advert, or communication to do with cars is instantly given attention by you. You’re “in the market” for a new car, and you develop an insatiable appetite to find out as much as you can about the cars which would suit you best.

This happens every single day when people are buying products and services. If you don’t keep in touch regularly with your prospects you’ll never get “lucky” with the timing.

By keeping in contact once a month the chances that you’ll hit the prospect at the right time are increased ten-fold.  Your regular marketing effort will also increase the chances that your name is at the top of their mind when they come to buy even if they are not reading your marketing material.

Keep the content relevant and interesting, and add value wherever possible to increase readership.  Use email where possible to keep your print and postage costs down.