Don't Be Annoying, Be Helpful

Once you attract a new customer, how do you make the most of that relationship? One of your first steps should always be to think like your customer.

How many times have you purchased a product from an online store, and immediately following that purchase are inundated with promotional emails? Do you spend more because of these emails or even open them? Remember that your customer base is an extremely valuable captive audience. Once you push a customer away, you lose a qualified lead that could have resulted in repeat sales for years to come.

These three customer marketing guidelines will help you get in the right mindset to stop losing your repeat business and start capitalizing on your captive audience.

Nature vs. Nurture

As marketers and business owners, we have an instinct to blast new offers and promotions out to our customers in hopes of making them repeat customers. It is in our nature to want more business, so we aggressively attack the opportunities right in front of us. This is how we start to annoy our customers, and we start losing our audience as they unsubscribe from our emails, block our messages on social media, and ignore our web marketing.

Instead of acting on our instincts and quickly trying to capture more sales, we need to nurture our customers. We will have much higher conversion rates if we provide them with helpful and meaningful content and product offers that fit their problems or needs. By listening to and understanding our customers first, we will find more qualified opportunities. Then we can educate them on the products we offer that meet their needs.

Don't Push! Pull!

Stop abusing your captive audience. Instead of pushing your messages out and pushing your products or services onto your customers, pull them to your product. This is called inbound marketing. With inbound marketing, we pull people to our products by providing them relevant content, which results in stronger leads.

This principle should also be applied while we market to our customer base. Once someone becomes a customer, it does not mean they are ready to keep buying your products and services. We need to continually pull them back in with useful content rather than annoy them with constant promotions and offers.

Educate Instead of Upsell

Don't get me wrong, upselling always has its time and place, but we do not need to try constantly to upsell. We tend to sound pushy and aggressive rather than friendly and welcoming. Just like our sales leads, our customers want to be educated on how we can fix their problems and satisfy their needs. We have to provide them with content they seek.

If you are a specialty bakery and your fruit pie customers are also looking for solutions for quick and easy family meals, they may not be thinking about you as a solution. This is where you need to educate them on how quick and easy your line of take-and-bake dinner pot pies are. This type of education not only opens the window for more sales, it also builds better relationships with your customers. 

Remember:

You do not want to annoy your customers. You want to provide them with helpful and beneficial content that will bring them back to you. The ultimate goal is for you to satisfy your customers so well that they become promoters of your brand. Always think of your re-engagement marketing as a relationship. You need to prove to your customers that you are valuable to them and that you can satisfy their needs. You do this by nurturing your customers with educational content that pulls them towards your products and services.

To learn more about how inbound marketing works, click the image below: