Strong customer relationships are the basis of any businesses' success, but they don't happen overnight. In fact, they typically require several stages of development.
Email marketing is ideally suited to support each stage of the customer relationship cycle by enabling affordable, consistent, and relevant communications to your newly acquired customers.
Stage 1: Acquire
Before you can begin to build a strong customer relationship, you have to acquire a new customer. Customer acquisition depends on your ability to attract attention with an initial meeting or conversation. This may take place in person, via phone, email, or social networking.
Acquiring new relationships through email is especially challenging since you can't use email to market to strangers because unsolicited emails are considered spam. So in order to acquire new relationships, you'll have to rely on other media, such as online advertising, search engine marketing, traditional advertising, and on site advertising and promotions to gain attention.
After you have acquired a new relationship, you can move to stage two - make a connection and begin to nurture your customer relationships via permission-based email communications.
Stage 2: Connect
Once you've acquired a new customer, the next step is to make a connection, which happens when you effectively demonstrate the value of your business. This means that your new customer has found something in common with you and is interested in learning more about what your business has to offer. One way to know you've made a connection is when your customer is willing to share their email address and sign up for your newsletter.
Demonstrating your value is crucial to making the connections that result in a growing email list of interested customers, so it's important to communicate the value of joining your email list at the first sign of interest. For example, if a prospect shows an interest in a specific service from your spa, you should note that your newsletter often includes special offers for that and related services, as well as advice and tips; thereby, communicating your expertise and value.
When you really connect with a customer, the impression lasts. Email marketing, when done well, provides you with the ability to not only make a connection, but to nurture it into a lasting relationship.
Step 3: Nurture
It takes six to seven touches to turn a connection into a first time customer in almost every business. By nurturing your connections, you are reminding customers about your business so they will think of you when they're ready to make a purchase.
Email marketing is a natural tool for nurturing relationships. With every email, it's important to acknowledge your connections' interests otherwise your emails will become irrelevant and people will unsubscribe from your list. For example, if you made a connection because someone trusted your expertise, send emails that share more of your expertise versus simply promoting what you offer. Content such as free tips, examples of how your customers are benefiting from your service or product, or related news or events that might interest your subscribers not only supports your subscribers' needs, but positions your business as an expert resource.
Why is this important to the success of your email marketing efforts? Consider this. Prompted by the economic downturn, many big-box retailers bombarded consumers with every email coupon, offer, and discount possible during the 2008 holiday season. The results of their efforts met with dismal failure as revealed in a joint report by eMarketer and ReturnPath, which showed 98.6 percent of consumers felt they received too many emails over the holidays. More than 30 percent of respondents said the emails were junk and 60 percent said they deleted unfamiliar and unwanted emails. What's more, just over 33 percent of respondents said the e-mails had no impact on their holiday spending.
The lesson here is that untargeted and too frequent distribution of promotional emails is not only ineffective, it can have a negative impact on your business. Remember and cater to your connections' interests and preferences when sending email communications and you'll see a consistent and positive response to your efforts time after time.
Step 4: Trust
Trust is incredibly valuable to your business; it develops over time and through many email communications, but the number of emails is less important than the types of emails you send. The more targeted, relevant, and valuable the information you are sending, the more trust will develop in your relationships. Some of the benefits of a trusting customer include:
Customers who trust you are more willing to respond to your email promotions. That means you'll motivate more purchases per email in a trusting audience than in an audience of new connections.
More purchases per email translates into less time, money, energy, and effort spent creating acquisition marketing to attract new customers into the cycle.
If you can sustain and grow your business on trust, you'll also acquire new relationships through referrals.
Trusting customers are also more willing to refer your business to their friends and colleagues.
Acquiring a new customer is an expensive, challenging process, but keeping those customers over the long term is even more challenging. With the goal to build strong, lasting relationships, marketers are best served to use low-cost tools, such as email marketing, that help them stay connected, nurture and build trust with their customers. With consistent, relevant and valuable email communications, business owners can bridge the gap between new prospect and loyal customer.
This article is based on The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing by Eric Groves, Wiley & Sons, 2009.
About the Author:
Eric Groves has more than 16 years of senior level experience in sales, business development, marketing, and Internet strategy. Eric has been a featured speaker on a variety of topics including The Power of Relationships (educating small businesses on building relationships, customer loyalty, and boosting sales with email marketing). http://www.constantcontact.com
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