Do clients of yours, of many years standing, drift off and do business elsewhere? Frustrating isn’t it?! Anyone in sales knows the hard smack of rejection this emotes. Not nice.
Consumer behaviour theory will tell you that people make purchasing decisions based on a variety of factors – with primacy and recency being high among them.
Primacy speaks to the value the consumer places on the particular service provider (“I have to use them, they are the best/hardest working/savviest…”) and recency measures how recently that service provider made contact.
Recency is about being “top of mind” when the consumer is ready to make their purchase decision. McDonald’s deploy this by advertising on bus shelters, billboards and benches around their stores knowing that their customers often “impulse buy“.
Sending regular eNewsletters to your client database should become a normal way of doing business. Keeping in touch when the client is not interested in your products means that when a contact becomes interested in buying again, you are in the frame. It’s not a replacement for selling, but it can keep them coming back for more and prevent clients slipping through the cracks. As they say, “if you don’t look after them, someone else will.”
So work your database when people are NOT interested in buying. This is the cheapest and least competitive time. And the easiest. Enewsletters involve no print costs. You can set them up, preview and then fire when ready. Do not send attachments, make it an HTML (web based) enewsletter and make it interesting and regular.
Before running out and signing up to an enewslettter program have you looked at how Word documents and Outlook email can work together to send out personalised enewsletters? It’s free, easy and each recipient can receive an enewsletter addressed directly to them. Impersonal, bcc, email blasts are NOT the way to go!
Here’s how. There are two elements to any enewsletter – the creation of the enewsletter itself (which can be done in Word) and the holding of your clients (which can be done in an Excel spreadsheet or in the Contacts part of Outlook).
Create the enewsletter – open your word document, and create it like you would a personalised enewsletter or ebrochure.
Mail merge with your contacts and SEND – have your clients’ name and email address in a simple spreadsheet or in a Contacts folder of Outlook. In Word connect your contacts with your word document using the MAILING tab, following these easy instructions:
• In Word, click MAILINGS tab and then START MAIL MERGE, email messages
• Then ‘Select Recipients’ and ‘use existing list’ (use your spreadsheet or contacts)
• Add a ‘Greeting line’, insert ‘merge fields’ (like the person’s name) and then Preview your results before ‘Finish & Merge’ and sending
• Each email is then individually sent from your InBox to each person, with their own personalized enewsletter. (“Dear Bill,..” “Dear Jane,..” etc)
Youtube has videos on this.
Keep in touch once every now and again, regular as clock work. You never know when your contacts are going to be next interested in your wares, but if you’ve consistently been keeping in touch, then you will be in the frame.
Enewsletter photos credit: MailontheMark
