Re-engaging With Your Clients

Seek new clients or work with existing clients ?

As we all know, it is a lot more difficult and less cost effective to gain a new customer/client than it is to maintain an existing one but it seem that some companies fail when it comes to maintaining those relationship.

I guess my questions is ... why is it so?

My feeling is that it is because they don't have existing systems in place to stay in touch with their clients on a regular basis and perhaps never really thought about it.

I'd love to get your feelings on that too.

Staying Connected With Your Clients/Customers

As I eluded to above there are systems available to any business to maintain connections with their client base, and I have listed a few below as an example of some of the most popular.

Normal Mail

Standard mail can be used to send out newsletters and special offers. Another good use of standard mail is to send out physical Birthday/Anniversary cards, it's amazing the impact receiving something in mail will have.

Email

This is probably the most popular online way to communicate with existing clients and can certainly be used productively if used properly and delivers content that contain's valuable content that your clients will gain benefit from. One of the additional benefits of email marketing is that you can create automated sequences to drip feed content to clients over a set period of time, but there is a lot more to email marketing... topic for a future article :)

Text Messaging

Similar to Email, Text/SMS marketing allows you to communicate with your clients/customers via their mobile phones. One of the benefits Text Marketing is that the open rate is up in the 80%-90% range. But before you engage in this form of marketing you absolutely require the clients permission to send them test messages and you also must have a way for them to opt out.

Chatbots

Chatbots are usually an automated system that interacts with the client by asking and responding to a number of questions in a sequential order. and based on those answers can deliver the appropriate response, in some cases that could be, for example, a brochure on a particular product or access to an video offering more detailed information. There are also options within the Chatbot sequence for human interaction if needed and can direct the call to a real person if the Chatbot has not answered the questions.

Messenger Marketing

This is the option to Direct Message and interact with your connections via the massaging option with the social media platform(s) you prefer, i.e LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. This is a usually a one to one communication method but some platforms do offer the option to create groups that you can direct message as well .

Conclusion

I actually use all the above systems to communicate with my clients on different occasions depending on the requirement and in some cases I will use a combination of a number of them.

For example.. I can start the process with an offer in a email that invites the client to respond via Facebook Messenger which then connects the client to my Chatbot which delivers the content that was offered in the email and I then confirm all the details via SMS and Email.

The one thing to keep in mind is to engage with your client early in the relationship and find out their preferred way to receive communications with you.

Finally I would love it if you could share your experiences and preferred way to communicate with your clients.