Marketing Strategy: Customer Relationships Are Key

November 19, 2009 by Steve Wylie  
Filed under marketing strategy

Today I wanted to take a step back from Search Marketing and talk about money you could be leaving on the table.

If I could show you how to raise your sales by fifty percent without enlarging your promoting budget, would you be interested? Naturally you would, what selling pro or entrepreneur would not be interested? When you’ve finished this article you may have worked out the best way to just do that. Take a couple of seconds and think about all of the inactive buyer files you have in your file cupboard. Entrepreneurs regularly make the pricey mistake of servicing a purchaser once then presuming “they’ll stay” as a shopper or customer without maintaining and growing that relationship. A year later that entrepreneur is wondering what’s happened to that client and where they went. Why haven’t they hear from them? Did they leave? If this is so why?

There are lots of reasons a buyer or client may leave you, but the ones you’ll hear most frequently are :

* They felt your pricing was rather high or bigoted.

* They’d an unresolved complaint.

* They took a rivals offer.

* They left because they felt you did not care.

When you remember the last 2 make up the bulk of why a customer or buyer won’t use your service or purchase your products - it could be a hard tablet to swallow. After all it means they’re an inactive customer because they felt you did not care about them and your competitor did.

This appears sensible when you factor in that clients frequently buy your product or service because they have developed a relationship with you, they owned another product or yours, or they were referred to you by a mate or associate. When faced with the above facts why is it firms spend eighty percent of their selling bucks going after new customers instead of nurturing, maintaining, and keeping up the customer relationships they already have? Before you use your time and cash going after new clients and customers you don’t now have a relationship with consider the following statistical data :

* Repeat consumers spend 33% more than new buyers.

* Referrals among repeat clients are 107% bigger than non-customers.

* It costs 6 times more to sell something to a prospect than to sell that very same thing to a purchaser.

As you can see your selling bucks will go further if it’s used by you to build, nurture, and develop your shopper relations.

This is not as tricky as you suspect. Building these relations just means treating your clients as if they actually are your strategic partners and showing them that you actually care about them.

It is important to try and satisfy them with the right service and goods, supported by the right promotion and making it available at the right time and location. Purchasers can simply note indifference and hypocrisy and they just won’t put up with it. Long term customer and consumer fidelity is a long term challenge that you have to strive for each day and with each exchange regardless of how massive or little. While a growing business wishes to consistently capture new consumers, the focus and concern should be on pleasing your current consumer base. Firms that fail to nurture and keep their customer base finally fail.

You’ll also spend twice as much to get new clients as you’ll in sorting out your existing buyer base.You also will be limited in your capability to draw in new clients if you are unable to keep hold of and satisfy your present customers and clients. The final analysis is that one of the key parts in selling and business expansion is to spend the bulk of your effort and time nurturing shopper relations, so you get business from existing clients and purchasers. This is a method which will move you forward in skyrocketing your sales by fifty percent without inflating your financial position.

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