Foster relationships with prospects and clients.
Email marketing refers to the practice of sending multiple promotional pieces and marketing communications over time to your clients, prospects (not leads) and affiliates. Email marketing creates an orderly process for managing prospective customers at various stages of a sales process, across a marketing and sales force.
Think of your clients or prospects as plants in your company’s garden of opportunity… Your time and resources in the form of marketing communications are the water for your garden. Too little communication, your clients will wilt and forget you. Too much communication, they’ll drown and tune you out. Give your clients and leads modest but regular attention and watch them flourish bloom.
Email marketing also applies to existing customers. It can promote customer retention and referrals. It places emphasis on building long term relationships. It involves understanding the customer’s needs and providing a range of products to customers as they need them. The more points of contact between the organization and prospect or customer, the stronger will be the bond, and the more secure the relationship. Many companies involve the whole team to help build a trusted advisor relationship.
Retaining existing customers costs 10% of the cost of acquiring a new customer so it can often make economic sense to pay more attention to existing customers. Specific customer retention efforts outside of nurture marketing include: customer valuation, customer retention measurement, determine reasons for defection, and developing and implementing a corrective plan. Focus groups, questionnaires and telephone polling are great ways to start building your customer retention plan.
The simple fact is, email marketing works by keeping your name in front of decision makers thus increasing the awareness of your solutions, as well as the chances that they will remember you when a need arises to solve a problem. Regular communication (every 3-6 weeks) is the key to client base nurture marketing. It is important that your clients and prospects know all that your company has to offer, so they don’t look elsewhere for a solution that you may be able to provide.
Email Marketing Tools / Elements:
Email marketing tools may include: company newsletters, industry articles or white papers, success stories, educational or informational events and other non-sales oriented activities.
- Email newsletters
- E-Mails with a targeted message
- Success Stories
- Industry Articles / White Papers
- Press Releases
- Invitations to special events, i.e.: Conferences, Training Classes, Seminars / User Conferences, Holiday Gatherings, etc.
- Holiday Emails
Value
- 23% – 306% more qualified leads
- 108% – 260% more revenue
- 25% improvement in client retention