Keep-in-touch marketing - more ideas

If you've already my other posts on marketing as building relationships, you'll have an idea of how important it can be to keep in regular contact with your prospective, current and past customers.

So try and avoid untargeted ‘image advertising' and use relationship-building tactics instead. Make sure you keep in touch with your past customers on a regular basis with useful information, such as books, tips booklets, articles of interest, press releases, as well as cards or postcards to mark specific occasions such as the anniversary of their first purchase.

Given below are some more ways of keeping in contact with customers.

For new customers, assemble a "welcome package". Send a "thank you for investing" letter along with a "welcome to xyz company" package with thank you letter, "how to get the best use out of your [new product]" report and some other helpful tools that nurture the relationship and offer post-purchase reassurance. This is a very powerful tool in increasing referrals and minimising refunds.

You could also make post-sale courtesy call two days after a customer purchase to assess customer satisfaction and iron out any initial problems as well as minimise after-purchase regrets. Or to gauge feedback after a purchase you could send a two week review letter with feedback form. If you do this, you will probably also want to include an offer to maximise the response. As an extra customer service measure, you might want to send a 6 month review letter asking for their feedback and mentioning that you will call to review their situation.

You might want to offer free after sales service and/or technical support, such as implementing a free product maintenance check to add value to customers, identify any product problems before they get out of hand, and to open up the opportunity for referrals and repeat sales. Depending on your business type, you could also introduce a "hot line" advice or technical support service to minimise operator errors and ensure that they are getting the best use out of the product. This also identifies any product or service challenges which can be rectified either immediately or in the next product or service offering, for example.

For potential customers, start a prospect nurturing campaign to maximize appointment numbers and sales conversions. This will normally include a series of 4 or 5 strategically developed follow up pieces. This idea works because research shows that 80% of sales are made after the 5th contact.

To use keep-in-touch marketing tools in the most effective way, you will want to systemize your communications with customers. For example, set up a "rolling" communications schedule that maps out future client contact at various time periods after their purchase - 2 days, 14 days, 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, etc. You could also introduce a "calendar-based" communications schedule where you contact clients in certain months - some are nurturing pieces or calls, others are sales letters (newsletters, financial year offers, pre-Xmas offers, etc.).

Other ways of following up with potential and existing customers include newsletters (online or offline) and scheduled email autoresponders that enable you to follow up prospects in a systematised way, on autopilot (the autoresponder we use is Aweber - http://www.aweber.com).