Who are the people in your market area that you can get to invest in one of your products or services the easiest and in the least expensive manner? The answer, of course, is your present customers.
The problem is that most companies do not in a regular manner communicate with their customers. Instead, they spend more time, energy and certainly money trying to sell products and services to new customers and they forget to stay in touch with their present customers. I’m certainly for constantly adding new customers to my present customer base but not at the sake of ignoring my valuable present customers.
This leads to two questions. First, how frequently should I communicate (I call it touch) my customers; and then secondly, how do I accomplish this? Let’s start with our very best and most precious customers – those that own one of our residential service agreements. We touch them a minimum of 13 times a year. How? With each of the semi-annual precision tune-ups we phone to schedule the tune-up, phone to confirm the tune-up, perform the tune-up and then call the next day with a “happy call” to find out how well we did and if the customers has any information they can share with us. Doing this twice annually results in 8 touches. We send a direct mail piece each quarter and a Thanksgiving Day card each November. That’s the 13 touches a year.
All of our customers who do not own a service agreement will at a minimum receive the 4 direct mail pieces and the Thanksgiving Day card for a total of 5 touches.
Every service call and non-service agreement tune-up is followed by a next day happy call. Anyone who invests in an equipment replacement job or one our system enhancement products (accessory products to most contractors) receives a thank you card and a happy call.
Remember, these are all examples of minimum touches. I’m a fan of blogs and they are an excellent method of communicating with customers. Just think of the possible number of touches with your customers if you were also, in addition to what I have presented, frequently blogging with good content or, because of your busy work schedule, had a blogging service doing it for you. It is vitally important that you are collecting your customers’ email addresses. In the near future I’ll be writing more on collecting email addresses and sending out blogs.
