Get in touch - to find and keep your customers

Tips for good customer relationship management

The essence of good customer relationship management (CRM) is the quality of contact you have with both new and existing customers:

•	New business - initial and subsequent contacts are critical to converting them into fully fledged customers - people react badly to botched sales approaches and don’t easily forget them, but will notice material pitched to their needs in a positive light.
•	Existing customers - ignore them at your peril, especially the ones that make up your key account list. Stay in touch and monitor their satisfaction with your company, both to uncover fresh demand and to keep the competition at bay.

Top of page

Customer acquisition: bring in new business

Today we have an embarrassment of riches for contacting prospects - but how do you spend your hard earned marketing budget effectively? By making use of your customer data- be it a simple Outlook database or a more powerful package - you can be much smarter about getting it right - and disprove Lord Leverhulme’s famous saying: "I know half my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half."

Learn from your existing client list who your customers of the future ought to be. Helen Murdoch, who runs H M Marketing, a marketing consultancy for small businesses says: “One of the things I ask clients is who there customers are, which can come as a bit of a surprise. But without a profile it’s hard to target people with the right messages. What’s more, people think they can easily get telephone numbers and email addresses - but effort can be wasted if they’re not the right people for a particular message.”

Here are some of the weapons in the small business marketing armoury:

•	Direct mail/advertising - It’s old fashioned, but it’s a tried and tested method of generating response. It also need not be too expensive if you target named prospects properly, using bought-in customer lists if need be. The ability to create personalised letters using your CRM system is crucial here.
•	Don’t forget the possibility of editorial - a well timed press release can bring high quality enquiries for you to work with.
•	Telemarketing- hitting the phones is probably the most widely practised way of generating leads, but it is usually very badly done. Far too many calls are scattergun and fail to engage interest - companies that score with cold calls tend to use their data to at least give them a named contact and the nature of the business.
•	Email - email has become one the most important marketing tools but it is must be used very carefully for acquisition - see the section on email below
•	Website - if you haven’t got a website you are missing out on leads that can be fed directly into your database - after all, these are people who’ve found you and thus qualified themselves already.
•	Direct sales - in the old days many salespeople slogged round trading estates picking up comp slips to feed into Rolodexes. You can still do this, especially if you only work with local businesses - get seen, get information and get it in your system.

Top of page

Customer retention

Your customer database really comes into own with existing clients - after all, that is the essence of the ‘relationship’.

•	The information you hold on purchasing history, future needs (such as a forthcoming ‘compelling event’ - are they about to move office, for example?), personal likes/dislikes of buyers and so on will all help your team to sell more.
•	Regular contact is critical - your system can be set up to remind you to service an account with courtesy calls, or you can send out an electronic newsletter or a latest price list - clients won’t mind if you have demonstrated value in the past. Conversely, don’t just ring up to sell- it will be resented.

Helen’s firm is practising what it preaches. The consultancy, based in Porthcawl, South Wales, has an extensive network of associates to help small and medium-sized business improve their marketing. Murdoch now runs Microsoft Business Contact Manager (BCM), which lets her colleagues store all client data in one place. ‘Before BCM, I was using lots of bits of paper and also various Excel spreadsheets,’ she says. ‘I didn’t have a formalised system. But now, the tracking of data and relationships is excellent.’ This has proved particularly valuable when it comes to writing case studies and articles for her clients. The back-and-forth communication required to get them reviewed and approved is now logged under each client so she can see exactly what’s going on today, and what needs to be done next.

Top of page

More on email

Email is not a method you can use heavily for direct customer acquisition - it is far more useful as a tool for relationship building. After one initial email, you cannot send more to people without their permission: you’ll be ‘spamming’ and it’s illegal. Emails are, however, a low cost way of making great use of your customer database:

•	People receive emails fast and automatically - but they can chose when and where to read them
•	People are hungry for information - good material about your clients’ areas of interest will always be welcome
•	Emails are convenient- they can link through online to other sources of information and directly to goods to buy
•	Emails can directly accompany or embody the type of material normally sent by direct mail - such as newsletters

Top of page

Ten tips for customer communications

Whether you’re bagging new customers or looking after existing ones, no amount of technology will cover up a badly written message. Here are ten pieces of essential advice for good customer communications:

1. Be consistent. You probably already have a logo, and perhaps a slogan: “Cornish pasties- direct from Penrith”. so use them! Don’t reinvent the wheel- these are important parts of your brand, so stick to them.

2. Design matters. Commission a designer, or use easy-to-learn tools like Microsoft Publisher to make your website, newsletters and flyers clear, readable and consistent.

3. Spell-check everything. It’s built into Microsoft Word, it costs nothing, and spelling mistakes are an instant turn-off.

4. You know your business inside out; but your customers don’t. Try out your emails and flyers on some friends before you go to print or send out an email newsletter, to make sure you’re getting the message across.

5. Always finish with what professional marketers call a “call to action”. It’s what you expect the reader to do next. If you want them to visit your website or call you up, tell them clearly exactly what to do.

6. Make sure you’re ready for the rush. If you’re sending out 1000 emails announcing a special offer, make sure someone’s ready to answer the phone if the calls come flooding in. There’s no point going to the expense of effective marketing only to lose the customer because you’re not ready to look after them.

7. Stick to your commitment. If you start a monthly newsletter, make sure you’ve got something interesting to say every month. If you don’t think you can do that, make it an occasional newsletter instead.

8. Testimonials are gold dust. Use them wherever you can. An independent endorsement of your product, or better still your quality of service, is the best sales tool you’ll ever have. If you get complimentary letters or emails, ask whether you can make these comments public.

9. Treat new and existing customers differently. As a small company, you might not be able to give everyone an individualised email, but at least split the two camps so that your existing client base is recognised for the contribution they have made to your business. Write differently for each of these two groups.

10. Keep it simple. Like everything in life, it’s easy to put in too much effort. A succinct, two-paragraph email may be all that’s required to gain your reader’s interest. If you haven’t got anything more to say… it’s time to stop!

Top of page