How much do your customers know?

This week I received a text from a friend of mine telling me that one of the companies I work with had gone through a bit of a rebrand. Now in and of itself, this was not particularly interesting, which may explain why he texted it to me as opposed to just picking up the phone and giving me a call.

On a side note, I find texts to be very annoying things, especially when they start turning into whole conversations that would have been a whole lot quicker and less thumb destroying than simply talking. Seriously, texting is destroying our language - there are people out there who actually say LOL! You heard me - they don't physically laugh, they actually say LOL. And get this - why do people now say OMG? It takes the exact same amount of time to use the actual words. What's more, if someone doesn't know what OMG means, you then need to explain it to them, which would seem to make the whole abbreviation utterly redundant! So many morons - so few alibis.

Anyway, back to the point of this week's blog. I called the company in question because, as luck would have it, they happen to be a client of mine, and I asked them why it was that I was finding out this information through a rumour mill as opposed to some form of direct communication.

"Well you've opted out of our newsletter", was their reply. Fair enough, I did indeed opt out of the newsletter, but that's only because there's only so much junk my mailbox can receive before my computer becomes truly self aware and starts attacking the human race with offers of discounted double glazing and Viagra.

But therein lies the problem. Sometimes customers are interested in little bits of information from their suppliers - I mean it might not be all that often, but the occasional gentle nudge could go a long way to bringing about some new business. A customer who you haven't spoken with in three years may well be in the market for some sort of upgrade, but when was the last time you actually asked them if they were interested?

It all stems from what I talked about a little bit last week - a short term view. We want business NOW, and if someone tells us that they're not going to be in the market for another year, we tell them we'll call them in a year. Some of us will - MOST OF US WON'T.

What's worse, our competitors will call that customer in a year and then - and I suspect you know where I am going with this - BANG, we lose out to our competitors.

Just because someone has opted out of your newsletter does not mean that they are not interested in hearing from you. They're just not interested in hearing from you every 5 minutes. Face it, there are plenty of newsletters and mailers that I get from people with whom I have a good working relationship, but I don't read all of them. The truly important information will find its way to me, and I'm not talking about a sales mailer or some 5% off special offer which, let's be fair, is really neither special or that much of an offer.

No, I'm talking about the information that's actually going to make a difference to me should I choose to act upon it. Something that addresses a prior concern like "hey, you know you bought that software from us two years ago, well lots of customers said they wished it could do x, y and z and we're pleased to tell you that it now can."

See how powerful that was? They showed that they had listened to their customers and acted on the information. Well as I am a customer too, it's just possible that they may have addressed some of my issues too, so it would be stupid to not at least check it out wouldn't it?

Your existing customers will always be your very best resource - it's seven times harder to land a new customer than it is to cultivate an existing one (seriously, how exactly did they work that out? You know you read these statistics in all the sales training stuff and you blindly accept it as fact. I want to talk to the person that put that statistic together - does anyone have his details?)

In any given year, and at any given moment within that year, more than 50% of the people that you contact will not be in a position to buy. Does that mean you drop them from the database? Of course it doesn't. What it means is that you need to keep in front of them until they are in that position, whilst at the same time not being a pest. It's a fine line, but it's not difficult to walk it.

Of course, you could always send out the information in a much more creative way. Do you realise that there are thousands of promotional items which will fit very neatly into the very same envelope that you're using to send out a newsletter? If you're spending your days stuffing envelopes, you really should be stuffing them with something that's more likely to yield a response.

As for email marketing, well I've posted about that before - it needs to form part of your marketing plan, but it must not account for all of it. Junk email filters are commonplace and I use them across all of my email accounts. What shocks me is that, when I last checked, 94% of all emails sent to my home account in one month was junk. That is an astonishing figure, but just look at what it is doing to the email habits of the recipients - unless we recognise the name of the sender, we may well be skipping over information that would otherwise be useful to us.

We can all do so much better than that, and I want to help, because until that check from the Nigerian Lottery clears, I am going to need to keep working.

Have a good week.