Connecting With Customers
Customer relationships are a fundamental—but often overlooked—component
of marketing. Few companies truly understand their customers, nor do
they accurately predict their behavior or consistently influence their
decision-making. Even fewer companies understand what "customer-focused"
means and how to achieve it.
Seven factors tend to influence customer behavior and relationships.
Although you may be familiar with several of these concepts, considering
them all simultaneously may be helpful in creating your customer base.
- Opportunities lie with customers—not with products or services.
- Customers don't buy products or product features—they buy benefits.
- The only truly sustainable competitive advantage is a superior customer
solution.
- Customer value is greater than the sum of quality perceptions and
satisfaction.
- It's more important to listen to your customers than to research
them.
- Forget market demand, and focus on customer experiences.
- Success in customer focus is measured in terms of share of the customer—not
market share.
To build lasting, valuable relationships with customers, it's not
enough to send product updates or announcements of new services. Progressive-thinking
marketers are creating and solidifying customer relationships by delivering
resources via email. Email has transformed the world of business. In
fact, I think you'd be hard-pressed to imagine working without it.
Email is recognized as the best one-to-one communication vehicle available,
providing the fastest, most cost-effective way to deliver personalized,
time-sensitive information while maintaining close relationships with
customers, prospective customers, vendors and partners. Yet, there are
certain criteria that must be met to ensure a consistent, useful e-mail
resource and communications channel for customers.
Provide relevant content. The best way to ensure that subscribers
remain on your email list is to provide them with content that is interesting
and relevant. For instance, if your company develops computer games,
you may want to provide a newsletter that contains information on the
latest games, tips and tricks and special offers on new releases. If
your site provides the latest business news, a newsletter with the latest
headlines would potentially be of interest to your prospects and customers.
Target and customize your messages. Be sure that you segment
your lists appropriately and send targeted messages to each segment.
Give your clients information about what they want and less of what
they do not want. To further customize your messages, allow subscribers
to select their own preferences for receiving email in HTML, plain text
or URLs.
Personalize, personalize, personalize. Personalized messages
sell. Talk to your readers on a one-to-one basis, and your marketing
campaign will be much more successful.
Prepare for an explosive response. Make certain that your email
system will handle the high volume your messages will generate.
Provide an automated subscribe/unsubscribe process. If customers
are not interested in your resource, make it easy for them to remove
their email address from your lists. Also make it as easy as possible
for new subscribers to sign up.
Create viable storage for customer data. Maximize the value
of your customer data throughout your organization by storing it in
a standard relational SQL database. This will allow you to better integrate
the information throughout your entire company.
Automate e-mail "bounce" resolution. Some of your
emails will bounce back to you. Rather than manually searching for correct
addresses, ensure that you have an automated process for handling those
returns.
Respond to e-mail inquires with 24 hours of contact. This may
seem obvious, but it's not so obvious to the number of large corporations
that are swamped by messages from inside and outside their companies.
Many organizations take from three to five days to respond. Sadly, some
do not respond at all! If you are slow in responding, most likely your
customer will think, "If they can't respond to my email in 24 hours,
how long will it take them to send me the product?"
Adopting these practices will help you ensure a sustainable, successful
relationship with your customers. You should always strive to be as
useful to your customers as possible and to provide the best service
you can. Customers will reward you with loyalty and sales that would
not have been possible with standard offers and discounts.
Send this article to a friend
Authored by: John Parfet, Business and Industry
Specialist, University of Missouri Extension
Source: Creating Quality Newsletter, Volume
11, Number 8, August 2002
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