Are You Staying In Touch With Your Existing Customers?

It is no secret that your existing customer base keeps the sales pouring in for your store. These people already love you and want to do business with you. Keeping in touch with them is one of the most important things you and your sales staff need to do. How often are you touching base with these customers, though? In the past, the only good way to exclusively hit your existing customers was with direct mail and having your team call down their lists. The sales person calling down their list is still the most important, by far and away, method. There is nothing much better than getting a printed piece in your customer’s hand too, but the cost is extremely expensive. This is mainly due to pre-sort first-class postage costs. You can pay less for bulk rate postage but this gives the post office a two-week window to deliver the pieces and is risky. Email marketing (now considered old school) came along and it’s another good way to stay in touch with your existing customer base. It’s an inexpensive way to provide them with information on events, offers, new lines and favorite pieces. The downside is that typically less than 20% of the emails are being opened, which means you are missing out on reaching over 80% of your customers. This is, of course, in addition to the customers you cannot reach because your team was not able to gather their email address at point of sale. Times have changed again and you are now able to target customers in their homes digitally. You provide your vendor with an existing customer list that contains names and addresses (and emails if you have them). This list is used to find each consumer’s Internet Protocol (IP) address. Once you have these IP addresses, you can deliver banner ads to your customers in their home. Most vendors are able to deliver 60% to 70% of the IP addresses. As long as their mobile devices use their home Wifi (which most consumers do) you will be able to deliver messages on all of their devices. IP targeting costs, like direct mail, are dependent upon the number of customers you are trying to reach. The total out of pocket expense is not similar, though, and is just a fraction of what direct mail costs. Using a combination of the above methods is highly recommended for staying in touch with your customer base and encouraging them to come back in for another purchase. If you need help with any of these methods, reach out to suits@fruchtman.com for assistance.