What are you Doing to Maintain Customer Relationships?

by | Oct 8, 2013

You’ve worked so hard to close that big account and now that you have, your job is done, right? Maybe your job is, but it should be handed off to someone else to continue to nurture it.

Lets face it, new business is hard to develop and you’ve got a lot invested in both time, talent and promotional dollars to bring the new customer through the doors. Don’t you want to keep them?

Attracting new customers may be the easier of the task. The key lies in being able to keep them engaged and buying from you. Take off your selling hat and think about giving them value they can use in their job. This could be anything from a tip on how to do a process more effectively to sharing industry concerns. You might even want to give them a survey to keep them engaged and find out profile info at the same time.

Granted there are several ways to do that, among them using email. I recently read an article by Kevin Gao, in MarketingProfs, Email best practices for developing and maintaining crucial customer relationships by effectively using email.

Kevin outlines ways you can develop a marketing plan using emails to get the most out of them.

He addresses his 6 life cycle stages of a customer and gives examples of things we all can do leverage each stage.

  1. Prospects – Not-yet customers that need to learn more about your products/services and be persuaded to consider us.
  2. New Customer – Once you have them, you need to start developing and nurturing a relationship with them.
  3. Active customer – Make them feel welcome. Thank them for the business.
  4. Repeat customers – They have already bought into the concept that you and your products are good. Don’t overwhelm them. Keep in communication with them, but make sure they are spaced out and when you do communicate with them you give them something of value.
  5. Lapsed customers – Find out why they aren’t ordering and put a plan together to start up a regular communication with them.
  6. Inactive or abandoned customers – Should be broken into those who should not be contacted and those that might be persuaded to come back.

Do you have a plan in place to maintain key customers?

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