Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Want to keep customers coming back? Use email!

BY CONSTANT CONTACT

Improve customer retention with targeted emails to your customers and prospects and see how repeat customers can dramatically increase your bottom line. Learn how email has made customer marketing affordable for even the smallest business. Email newsletters and announcements can be your best (and most affordable) way to increase loyalty and repeat sales.

Experts agree and evidence abounds that profitability is all about creating loyal customers and driving repeat business. And since it is roughly six to twelve times less expensive to sell to an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one, the value of customer loyalty and repeat business is just too compelling to ignore. How do you get repeat business and earn customer loyalty? Take a lesson from small businesses that long ago grasped the dynamics and importance of building customer relationships through communication. They nurture their customers over time by learning and remembering individual preferences and interests. They acquire this customer information directly from customers through personal interaction. And they keep in touch with customers on a regular basis ensuring their business remains “top of mind.�

Statistics show that it takes six to seven contacts before you can turn a prospect into a customer. All that contact can be expensive, and time consuming. That’s where email marketing becomes a critical part of your marketing efforts.

Email marketing enables you to proactively communicate with your existing customers, prospects or members instead of passively waiting for them to return to your Web site, visit your store or office, or call you on the phone. With email marketing you can solidify existing relationships, initiate new ones and convert your one-time visitors, buyers and members into repeat business and long-term customers or contributors. No matter how your visitors, prospects and customers found you; perhaps you paid for search engine placement, sponsored a newsletter, rented an opt-in list, placed a banner ad or two, distributed a flyer or sent a postcard; email marketing adds to your bottom line because it allows you to maximize your investment in those expensive and time consuming marketing efforts and improve the return on investment (ROI) of every dollar you spend to obtain new business and develop profitable customer relationships.

Email marketing offers business owners an opportunity to reach out to customers and prospects, and increase customer retention in ways that were simply not possible just a few short years ago. Whether you do it yourself, use a service, or hire an agency to handle the entire process, email marketing should be a big part of your customer relationship efforts.

Constant Contact® helps small businesses and organizations create and send eye-catching email newsletters and announcements, and track results all with an easy-to-use and affordable web-based service.