Relationship marketing and invoices, a missed opportunity?

At Paiger, we've built relationship marketing into our plan and it's critical to everything we do. After-all, it's far cheaper to keep a customer than acquire a new one.

Our relationship marketing consists of new feature announcements, value-add content such as our Beer With Darren podcast, open-sourcing our marketing such as this blog post and regular webinar training if anyone needs an extra hand.

We make a point of interacting with our customers online, adding value to any discussions they're having. We celebrate anniversaries with them publicly (Happy 1 year of Paiger, Paul Burgin at Hunters Legal btw!)

And this is great, it helps keep customers engaged with us and the product and it helps to change from customers to advocates.

Advocates are the best form of marketing, word of mouth will always beat PPC any day of the week. Since we started taking relationship marketing seriously (we always tried to do the *right* thing anyway), we've seen a 167% increase in recommendations of Paiger with an astonishing 75% conversion rate.

Relationship marketing works.

Recently we've been looking at ways to take this even further, and we identified one department that was untouched; Finance.

Finance and relationship marketing typically don't go in the same sentence, I'll be amazed if I'm hitting any long tail keywords with this one, let's put it that way but bear with me.

Right now, we're in the middle of a global pandemic and more so than ever, businesses are being very cautious with their cashflow. Everybody knows it, but nobody talks about it.

Paiger is used by businesses of varying size, from single business owners through to the likes of Gattaca - and everybody is going through a different struggle. For some it's shareholders, for others it's literally putting food on the table.

Rather than bury our head in the sand at Paiger, we decided to be open and prompt discussions with our customers about this. You know, build relationships.

Every invoice sent from Paiger over the last 3 months has included a very simple, but effective line:

"During these unprecedented times that we find ourselves in we fully appreciate the difficulty our clients are almost certainly having, we are a small business as well and not immune to those. We want to help our clients through this period and if we work together we can all get through this. So please contact us if you need assistance with paying your Paiger invoices and we will endeavour to find a solution that works for us both."

I've also dealt with these conversations personally, every single one. It's given me a real connection with our customers, and enabled me to make a decision based on individual circumstance while ensuring our own business can continue as best we can.

It's also lead to messages like this:

"Classy invoice email"

on LinkedIn from customers who don't need the help, but appreciated it.

I know that those customers we've helped or appreciated the message, will recommend us to friends going forward - and that's worth it to me.

We're going to continue to experiment with the role invoicing can play in relationship marketing by using it as an opportunity to remind everyone about our refer a friend offer, if you'd like to keep up-to-date with our journey and find out the results of the next experiment you can sign up here.