Naturally most organizations place the greatest emphasis on lead generation, brand awareness, and new customer acquisition when planning marketing activities. The bulk of most marketing budgets are spent in attempt to generate new revenue. But what about the age-old notion that it costs significantly less to keep a customer you already have than obtain a new one? In today’s hectic business environment, many organizations have forgotten to pay attention to a very important group of people: the customers they already have.
Traditional customer retention activities are often tedious, labor-intensive, and frankly, quite boring. Generally a problem with retention has to occur before most marketing teams will take action to combat it. Most SMBs are strained for money and resources as it is, so customer retention marketing can easily be sacrificed.
Thankfully that does not necessarily have to be the case anymore. With marketing automation solutions now becoming much more affordable to the SMB market, communicating with customers on a regular basis is easier than ever. Now nearly anyone in your organization can create professional-looking newsletters, product announcements, press releases, and more, and automatically email them to customers at a specified date and time in the future. You can even set up drip campaigns to email subsequent announcements to customers who take specific actions such as viewing a specific page on your website or not opening the first email. We recommend to all of our customers that they communicate with their current customer base one a month with genuine, knowledge-based content that will promote your company yet provide useful information.
Staying fresh in the minds of your customers can have a very positive result IF your customers are satisfied. Your communications can remind them to buy more of your product, renew their subscription, to use it if they haven’t in a while, or encourage them to try other products or services you offer. However, if your customers aren’t actually using your product or service, regular automated communication could have a negative result. We talk a lot about the gym membership example. The vast majority of people with gym memberships don’t ever actually go after the first few months (myself included!). Yet they continue to pay because they might need it at some point, they have forgotten about it, or it is cheap enough that they just don’t bother. Regularly communicating with those people may only remind them to cancel.
The point is, if you truly understand your customer base and their needs, engaging them via regular automated emails can be a great way to increase customer retention without exerting a great deal of effort of money.
