Automated 'snail-mail'

Email marketing, when done ethical and effectively, is a great way to turn qualified leads into prospects into clients. It gives you the ultimate chance to build up trust with your leads and prospects who will - if you do your job correctly - start to recognise your as the 'expert', as the only business that can solve their problems.

A mistake made by many businesses is dropping the conversation once the prospect turns into a client. The only message then received by your valued client are invoices. Strange not? You've put so much effort into converting your prospect into a paying client, written interesting messages to him/her, promised high quality products and/or services, answered all the questions they might have had and took away any remaining doubt. And then, when they hand over their first cheque most businesses just simply ignore them further.
Or if the client is lucky he will receive a monthly general newsletter or leaflet with offers (still better than nothing at all).

It is proven that regular contact between your business and existing clients improves the relationship, extends the time they are your clients and hence extends/improves their life-time value to your business. Email is easy and can be very cost-effective but don't forget the normal, sometimes disrespectful named 'snail-mail'. Receiving a real letter through the letter-box is in the eyes of most of your clients regarded as a great, personalised way to hear from you.

And regular contact with your highly valued clients can, like email marketing, be automated very simple. As with automated email marketing your dedicated existing client messages can be a logical sequence of interesting and worthwhile additions (the follow-up messages through AWeber come to mind, where with every message you tell and explain more to your prospect).

Every time we - supply and installation of wooden flooring - finish a particular job the end-date of that job is noted in our CRM-system (customer relationship management, part of our accounting package Mamut Enterprice3). This system allows you to design/create 'templates' you can mail-merge with address details of a selected group of clients. Again, like with AWeber, you create the content once but the CRM-system merges it time after time into a interesting, worthwhile and personalised message from you to your client.
We inform our clients regularly this way: 4 weeks after the wood floor is delivered to remind them of the maintenance care they should give their new floor-covering, 6 months later again etc. Automated, all we have to do is select the group of clients (sometimes just one client) to receive the next message in the predetermined sequence.
We do sell an awful lot of maintenance products and even maintenance services this way: simple add-ons so easily forgotten by many other businesses.

Greetings from the 1 plus 1 makes 3 experts

Karin H. (Keep It Simple Sweetheart, specially in business)

Comments

[Shuaib]

Hey Karin

Fantastic tip / reminder as usual! You are really becoming quite the expert at being an expert!!

Once again timely advice for me, as I have now whole-heartedly embraced the Aweber type email relationship marketing on your (and other's) say-so, I am noticing I am not paying as much attention to the snail-mail relationship marketing as I should do purely because it is physically much harder ( mailmerging / printing / collating > folding > inserting into envelopes > stamping/franking, putting into a sack> dragging it to the post ofice!) whereas with Aweber u just Create a Broadcast > and then press Queue Message!

It is interesting to learn about your CRM system (which is a new concept for me) and the fact that it is an integral part of your accounting package! (wow no more data duplication and integrity issues!)

Thanks as ever for the fantastic tip

Shuaib

[Karin H.]

Hi Shuaib

Because of having to duplicate data I sourced this 'business-wide' application. It doesn't fold the letters yet, but I'm sure it could do so in the near future? ;-)

Karin H