Some simple mechanisms to 'retain' your customers

   Every company spends a lot of money to acquire new customers, so investing a bit more to keep them is well worth the price. It's widely acknowledged that the cost of acquiring a new customer can be upwards of five times greater than the cost of retaining an existing one. That means marketing tactics aimed at customer retention should be a priority.

One smart, effective, and efficient customer retention tactic is an integrated e-mail communications program. There are many opportunities to communicate with customers via e-mail, and e-mail fits well into the communications methods engineers and other technical professionals prefer.

To make e-mail work as a customer retention tool, you need to :

1) Get out of the promotional mindset and get into your customer's mindset. Whether they are a loyal, long-term customer or have just purchased from you for the first time, your customers want to hear from you when you have something to say that's relevant to them. They don't want to be sold to again and again. They want useful information to help them do their jobs better. This will keep your company "top of mind" with them.

2) Coordinate efforts among different departments who will use e-mail to communicate with customers. This is where the integrated part comes in. Anyone who might be sending a customer an e-mail — customer service, marketing, accounts receivable, sales — must be on the same page. Their communication efforts should be coordinated and spaced apart so that the e-mails customers receive from you are relevant and timely. There's nothing like a barrage of similar or contradictory e-mails to turn an e-mail retention program into a mess of communications that backfires and turns your customers away.

3)The key to using e-mail for customer retention is to think in terms of having conversations with your customers. Stay away from the hard selling and limited-time offers and try cultivating your relationship by providing relevant information.

Here are some examples of relevant information:

• A simple thank you e-mail for purchasing a product with links to support information or other products that are related to the one they purchased
• An e-mail with phone numbers, e-mail addresses, or links for support
• E-mails containing technical articles or links to articles about their industry or job functions
• E-mails announcing new versions of products they own
• E-mails containing customer satisfaction surveys
• An e-mail from the salesperson just "checking in" to see if the customer has any questions or needs additional help

While none of these examples are promotional in nature, several of them still perform important cross-selling and up-selling functions. E-mails on new product announcements or related products can lead to additional sales for your company. 

Happy emailing !

Thoughts & feedback welcome

Atul 

http://www.xenia-consulting.com/
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Sales funnel problems ! Rejuvenate your business with focused lead nurturing programs

Marketers world-wide spend a lot of time thinking of innovative means to create/capture new leads for their business. In most cases, they are blind-folded by their sales targets and focus only on those leads that have the potential to offer immediate business opportunities and ignore the rest.

As a result of this, businesses are under continuous pressure to create new business leads, while the ones that have been created and that could have future potential are ignored. This is a classical problem faced by many. Companies build subscriber bases, opt-in marketing lists, but don't do enough to continuously and meaningfully engage with this subscriber base.

Focused lead nurturing programs offer an easy solution to these scenarios. While your sales team works on closing potential hot leads, the marketing organization or an outsourced marketing partner can focus on creating and capturing new leads and nurturing existing leads to levels, where they are ready to do business with you. This needs sustained and focused marketing efforts through a variety of customer engaging channels.  Some of the channels that are commonly used to manage this connect with your subscriber base are :
- Electronic direct mailing campaigns
- Opt-in Newsletters
- Announcements/ PR about articles/white papers being available etc.
- Generic tools/metrics/free downloads that are relevant for the customers

While you are not actively engaged with all your leads, as a business, you should make sure that when these comapnies/contacts are ready to do business with you, they have reasons and options to engage with you.

What do you think?
Suggestions/comments welcome

Atul
http://www.xenia-consulting.com/

Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
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Unlock the potential of your strategic key accounts in 4 easy steps !

Most services organizations have a significant part of their revenues coming in from a few select strategic key accounts. These accounts are nurtured over the years by salesmen, account managers, delivery personnel and receive a good share of top management attention.

Over time, many of these accounts fail to realize their true potential. Companies usually face a number of challenges as they work to build stronger relationships with its largest accounts. Sales teams are confident of their current relationships, but still fail to up-sell the company’s value and brand to expand the business as per company expectations. Sales transactions tend to get opportunistic with little planning or strategy. Marketing is typically underused, or viewed simply as a source for collateral and sales tools.


Under constant pressure to sell, Sales and Account management teams often can’t afford to devote the time necessary to plan an account strategy based on researching the larger business issues that customers face. Instead, they develop plans in relative isolation, with too much of an inward focus—the plans are based on what has already been sold to customers and assumptions about what they are most likely to buy next.

In such circumstances, what helps is a focused Key Accounts Marketing plan. Here are some steps involved
1) Identify & validate your key accounts, with an integrated sales and marketing effort, based on metrics, budgets, past performance, and future guidance.
2) Lay out an account specific plan, that includes stakeholders, influencers to be mapped, business expansions in current engagements, adjacencies to the business, detailed contact, company and industry based research to get closer to the real business issues facing the business. This also involves exploring areas that your company is not currently into, but can easily get into to satisfy potential client requirements
3) Implement and execute to the plan with detailed reviews and metrics. Laying out the plan is just the start, execution is the real challenge
4) Assess & Evaluate - Define success metrics and track these intermittently, so that you know that you are on the right track

Well this sounds easy, but takes a lot of effort. One of the services we offer (Key Accounts Marketing) is focused on making sure that our customers can truly unlock the potential of their key accounts in a planned and systematic manner.

All the very best !
Best Regards,
Atul

http://www.xenia-consulting.com/


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Marketing outsourcing - some debates

Marketing & Sales are core functions of an organization. How can you ever think of outsourcing these functions?  Isn't this a common argument that you hear time and time again? . Even while saying so, companies will go about appointing channel networks, business associates, commission partners, who will sell on behalf of the company and help meet sales targets. Also on the marketing side, several elements of the investor relations, marketing communication, design and branding operations will continue to be outsourced to specialist companies in the domain.

Marketing strategy certainly is a core element of the business strategy and you would certainly not want your competitors to know what you are upto. But more important than laying down the strategy is to execute it to perfection to be able to realize the results. My feelings are that companies can take external help from marketing experts in both the strategy formulation as well as the operations rollout, thereby reducing the load on internal staff and resources (budgets, time etc.)

So what exactly can be outsourced and how can it be done. Lots to be thinking about. More about it in upcoming blogs