Marketing today should start with building up a database of your existing, best customers – Don’t waste too much time seeking out new ones, which always takes longer and is 5x more costly. And every promotion designed for existing customers must accomplish two critical objectives…
FIRST, it must produce a sale.
DUH, right? Every promotion is designed to make sales. But when you’re talking about promotions for your customer list be it a cellphone number or email, they do more:
The number of promotions you send to your customers — and, equally important, the quality of the copy in those promotions — increases the number of times each customer will order from you this year.
So how many times should you contact existing customers?
Great question!
Well, back in the bad old days before the Web, nearly all of our contacts were through the mail. My theory was, “Out of sight, out of mind” — so I made sure my customers had something from me in their mailboxes every blessed week.
First, we mailed to them only on the first of each month. When we added a mailing on the 15th, response and average sale notched higher and cancellations dropped.
When we added a third mailing — more improvement in ROI and longevity. Finally, we went to a weekly mailing schedule and, once again, all our numbers improved.
Put simply, by quadrupling the number of times each customer heard from us, we more than quadrupled our orders and revenues — AND, miraculously, our cancellation rates declined.
Why? I’ll get to that next. First, I should mention that we had a high average sale and good margins, so we could afford to spend a fortune on printing and postage in those days. Back then it was expensive to, up to $1 per recipient by the time we accounted for the catalogue, stamps and effort. And even today, if you’re selling high value items to selected, high value customers, $1 per recipient can still be a real bargain.
Direct mail still works well. In fact in many markets it’s the best option. But today with e-mail that costs a few cents and texts not much more, there’s simply no excuse not to talk to your customers every week. Done well, the payback can be incredible with one text campaign giving the business a 1,650% ROI (read here), although a ‘modest’ 200-500% ROI is more typical of text campaigns.
The SECOND objective of every contact you have with your existing customers:
It must make them feel closer to you… - intensify their loyalty to you…
- and make them eager to hear from you again.
We call it “bonding”. Many of you that already belong to a club or subscription product/service have a strong loyalty to that brand, fashion shop, food establishment or a winery. This is what marketing is all about. Showing love back to the customer by keeping them informed with information or offers they care about…..
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