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Using email marketing and live chat to build customer loyalty
Movies often romanticize the not-so-long-ago "old days" when people took the time to shake hands, smile, and make eye contact at the corner general store. And in the "old days", consumers stayed loyal to a certain store precisely because it was on their corner.
In today's world, it may seem like there is barely enough time to stay on top of running a business, let alone for perceived luxuries like personal interaction over every transaction. But because the internet has made it so easy to hop from one vendor to the next, the onus is on business owners more than ever to provide a level of service that will earn their customers' loyalty and trust.
Trust is an essential ingredient in online shopping. Before even considering making a purchase, a consumer has to trust in the quality of the merchandise, the origin of the product, the fairness of the price, the security of his credit card number, the service of the merchant should anything go wrong?. The larger the purchase, the more trust is needed. A positive experience will earn you a repeat buyer who will also refer new business your way.
The best way to gain the trust and loyalty of your customers is to build relationships with them on line. The question is how build relationships in an efficient, automated way, so that you don't end up sacrificing other parts of your business. In order to build relationships you have to create dialogue.
In other words, listen to what your customers are telling you so that you can go beyond mass marketing ("one-to-many") and into truly individualized, "one-to-one" messaging. Investing the time to do it right will pay off. Multiple case studies show that marketing messages that are personalized, targeted, and well timed are far more likely to convert into sales, and can potentially "increase net profits by an average 18x more than broadcast mailings" (JupiterResearch, 2005).
Two communication technologies that have come a long way in their short history are live chat and email marketing. Used to their advantage, they can help you listen to your customers and respond accordingly, thus creating true dialogue ? all in an automated way.
Email ? From mass blast to personal relevancy
In its early days, email marketing gave entrepreneurs a quick and easy way to communicate with their customers. Email marketing ?broadcasts' or ?blasts' were (and still are) an affordable and effective way to boost sales, as they cost just pennies to send and often pay for themselves with a single sale. As customers become more email savvy, it is increasingly rare to find businesses relying solely on broad, non-targeted email blasts. Readers know what they want (and what they don't), and it's up to email marketers to provide messages that are targeted to the individual if they want readers to open and read them. Creating one-to-one dialogue with customers is becoming the new standard in email marketing.
At the heart of this evolution is the idea of relevancy: delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time. The first step in achieving relevancy is to tailor messages to demographic attributes (like age, gender, geographic location), or to the relationship you have with an individual (staff, friends & family, leads, previous customers).
Relevancy is also about timing. Reaching out to contacts as they hit critical points in your sales cycle can generate 15% more conversions, and are twice as likely to get conversion rates of 5% or more than broadcast mailings (JupiterResearch, 2005). The right email marketing product will let you schedule campaigns in advance. Take your message automation to the next level by setting up automated, ongoing campaign-sending rules. You only have to set the rules once to have campaigns automatically launch at key lifecycle moments, triggering welcome messages, firstpurchase coupons, reminders to lapsed customers and product replenishment messages.
Finally, relevancy is about reader-expressed interest. If you sell multiple products or have mixed target markets, be sure to set up separate publications for each, or run surveys to learn what subjects your readers care about most and segment accordingly.
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