6 Steps to Effective Customer Relationship Management
Nurture Your Customer Relationships Simply put, customer
relationship management is a way of tracking and nurturing your
customer relationships throughout the customer's life-cycle, as
they move from prospect to customer, to repeat-buyer. Once a
customer buys from you, it is much more profitable to make
efforts to keep that customer, than it is to acquire a new one,
because there is now trust between you. If your customer is
happy with your product, then that customer is much more likely
to buy from you again in the future, much more likely than a new
prospect would be. That's why customer relationship management
is so crucial.
Don't badger your customers to death with every product and
affiliate offer you come across, especially if the products are
unrelated to the product the customer originally purchased.
Email your customers ONLY when you have something good to give
them, some really helpful information, or when you have a really
good, high-quality offer that would interest that particular
customer. For instance, don't email your Internet Marketing
customer a "Free Gift Certificate" to your gift store.
Automate Your Customer Relationship Management Well, how do you
automate customer relationship management in your e-business?
You use email, and a dynamic database. You use auto-responders
to stay in touch. I'm not talking about your regular
auto-responders that deliver a vacation or "out of office"
messages while you're away, either. I'm talking about sequential
auto-responders.
Use Sequential Auto-Responders In Your e-Business Sequential
auto-responders allow you to pre-format and load a series of
pre-typed messages to your prospects and customers. You benefit
by not having to follow-up with these customers manually each
time. Instead, your auto-responder delivers your messages on a
timed interval set by you. To your customer, it looks as if you
sent out each message yourself. This way, you stay in touch with
your customer and not let them forget about you. When they have
a need for one your products or services, your business will
hopefully come to mind first and they will re-visit your site
directly or by clicking a link in one of your emails, as a loyal
repeat customer.
Personalize Your Messages for a Warm Feel! (Mail Merge) Most
decent auto-responders have mail-merge capabilities. This is the
ability to merge personal information into your emails, like
your customer's first and/or last name or their email address,
etc. This personalizes your email messages even further and
gives your customer some "warm and fuzzies". What's more you set
all this up just one time, and any new prospects or customers
will get the same message series without you having to lift a
finger.
If the sequential auto-responder you're using has mail-merge
capabilities, then it will automatically take that customers
name and incorporate it into the email series you have set up.
Usually the auto-responder service you're using will have some
sort of tokens set up for this purpose. Look at the example
below. Let's say your customer or prospect's name is Bob.
Hello, $firstname, - That translates into: Hello, Bob.
You could also do this with a customers email address too, like
"$email". The token would be replaced with the customer's email:
bob@bob.tld Do you see the power of mail-merge?
Use Lead Capture and Subscription Boxes For instance, you could
set up a simple box on your sales or download page that asks the
customer for his/her name and email address in return for some
free product, or simply just to subscribe to your newsletter. If
you set up a page specifically for this purpose this is called a
"lead capture page". The information entered by the customer
into your subscription box can be mail merged into the follow-up
messages sent by your auto-responder.
Stay In Touch Keep in contact with your prospects and
customers. Set your auto-responder series to deliver your
messages over an extended interval. There are several e-books
and articles dedicated to this topic; however, if you want the
first, most informative and still the king of auto-responder
help, get "AutoResponder Magic". This e-book once sold for about
$17, but you should be able to find it free many places on the
'Net. It has a plethora of information regarding
auto-responders, as well as many examples you can build from.