Customers don’t always
buy on the first try.
Most customers don’t buy right away. If they haven’t bought from you yet, keeping in touch with them to remind them you have a product or service they want is critical. Also, once the trust is built and purchases are made, staying in touch makes them repeat customers.
RSS (real simple syndication) makes staying in touch easier than ever. And for your competitors.
How do you Stay in Touch?
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Staying in touch, especially in our digital age, is a delicate balance of annoying someone and making them your friend. Too much contact turns people off, too little means loss of sales. Note: when we speak of customers below, we mean potential customers, existing customers, and both products and services.
Let’s define some goals for staying in touch.
- Make it easy for the customer to find you again.
- Make it easy for you to reach out to customers.
- Be insistent, but not pushy. This is where SPAM comes into play, right?
- Your message must be clear, branded, and specific to customer’s needs.
Since social media marketing was invented (if you can call it that), staying in touch, especially on a topical level, has never been easier. Since everyone is now doing social media marketing, it’s never been more difficult. You have both more competitors and more ability to get the word out there. Therefore, being relevant and creative has never been more important.
Primary Tactics
- Creative Writing: Shine brightly among competitors. All else being equal, the creative and sensitive writers win. They listen to their customers better, write to them, and dare we say entertain them.
- RSS: Allow your customer to choose their commitment level. RSS has made it easy to keep in touch with your favorite writers, merchants, gurus. Without using RSS, you won’t attract a significant portion of consumers or readers. What’s more, RSS, if setup correctly, allows customers to select the level of ‘following’ they do of you. Do they want to know of every product you introduce, a particular produce line, or only Product X? RSS also allows far more efficient viral marketing, they ability for customers to tell other customers where and how good you are. This will be talked about more in Building Referrals, the 7th step successful websites must take.
- Email Marketing: The newsletter is still very useful. Also very targeted to the most used information exchange medium out there; email. A great ‘keep in touch’ strategy uses both RSS and email marketing to make sure your information is read and products are known. Viral marketing can also be engaged here.
Secondary Tactics
- Social Media Tracking: Know where your traffic is coming from. As important as the message itself is knowing how successful the message is. Social tracking should be pooled across various syndication points and tracked. This shows you what channels are most useful to you, and your customers.
