As many of you are aware, knowing your customers is crucial to your business success. As a kid, whenever I spent time in my dad’s tire store, I was always impressed that he could greet each customer by name when they walked in. More often than not, he also knew their car’s make and what tires they needed without having to ask (or look it up on a computer). I’m fascinated with communication, so I want to share more about this, but also hear what you have done to foster relationships with your customers.
Today, businesses can expand upon the “door greeting” by building customer relationships online. You can send customers birthday greetings, notices about special offers, information about new services or products … anything you can think of. If you have a brick-and-mortar business, you can use this to encourage people to come in so you can greet them personally!
It can be intimidating to move into the online-relationship world, but there are tools that can make it easier. To help you learn more about building and keeping relationships in this digital age, we recently published this article by Joanna L. Krotz: Relationship marketing: What it is and why you need to do it.
My calling was not in the tire industry, but rather in online communications. So I want to share with you some of my work. I provide Office Live Small Business customers with helpful information about the service. I aim to make the communications relevant and useful for each customer. To that end, over the next few months, the Office Live Small Business team will be focusing our newsletters, e-mails, blog posts, and additional content on customer relationships, Contact Manager, E-mail Marketing, and more. Watch for it and let us know what you think.
Now that I’ve shared what we’ll be doing, I’d like to hear from you. What types of outreach do you do? Have you used e-mail marketing? How do you remember things about your customers like my dad did?
Post your stories in the comments section below. Thanks.
Diana Lawson