Wouldn’t it be nice if your customers took care of you for once?
Current customers are the bread and butter of any small business. They’re your lifeblood, your recurring revenue, and you’ve spent years acquiring, delighting, and keeping them. And after all of your hard work, isn’t it about time they took care of you too?
You know, there’s a lot more to your relationship with them than meets the eye.
For whatever value you’re getting from each customer, it’s probably only a small fraction of their full wallet-share (That’s the total amount of money that they spend on goods like yours). Let us elaborate.
Let’s say that you’re a general grocer. If your average consumer spends $100 with you each month, but US Census data shows that the average household spends $281, you only have about 1/3 of their wallet-share. What gives? Where is the rest of that money going? Probably to the specialty grocer down the street carrying the Iberian pork, or that new Juice shop promoting cleanses. Your customers have spread their spending across many providers in order to find what they want and like.
So you mean they’re going to spend that money anyway?
Yep. The question now becomes this: Instead of spending 7 times more to acquire new customers, isn’t it a great use of your time to run marketing campaigns to your current ones to garner more wallet-share? Of course it is, and here’s how it’s done!
Marketing to your current customers
Whether you’ve filled a gap in your offerings or you’re simply trying to get people to realize the breadth of what you already have, you want to advertise in a way that feels authentic. Whereas emails can feel cheap and get lost among the clutter, consumers and businesses alike actually prefer and respond better to postcard marketing which denotes a certain quality by the nature of the fact that it had to be printed and sent with intention. It’s an offer they can touch, and it doesn’t disappear when they put their phone down.
Here are the 6 steps to running a highly successful current customer postcard campaign:
- Figure out who you’re going to target. The first step is to determine who that customer segment that you want to go after is. Maybe it’s all of your customers, or maybe it’s a small subset. Filter all of this information into a spreadsheet in this format.
- Design the offer: Visit ProspectsPLUS’s web-to-print platform to get started and select among preset designs. Remember that you’re speaking to people who already know and trust you. This is an opportunity to leverage that relationship and write in a colloquial and personal manner. Doing the opposite could cost you big points. I know that every time Comcast sends me another offer for faster internet addressed to “Dear occupant” even though I already use them, I etch another mark on the wall of my deep dislike of them. Don’t be Comcast!
Address your customers by name, acknowledge your existing relationship, and include an offer that will allow you to track the success of your campaign. Maybe that’s a URL, maybe it’s a discount code, or maybe you simply ask them to bring it in with them to the store!
- Upload customer list. If you’re having trouble at this stage coming up with enough customer addresses, you can achieve practically the same thing through neighborhood targeting wherein you simply select the area around your business using Google Maps.
- Set it for multiple sends: While it takes on average 7 marketing touches for someone to become aware of your business name, it may take the same amount to get them to become aware of a new product offering. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt and assume that you’ve done a great job on branding already and set this campaign for no less than 3 touches over the next month.
- Review and send. Have you dotted your “t’s” and crossed your “i’s”? Well go back and fix that! Once everything is good to go, set those postcards and let your marketing partner do the rest!
- Track responses and ROI: You can log back into your ProspectsPLUS account at any time to review the deliveries in real-time thanks to our USPS integration. You can measure that against the number of offers that are redeemed to figure out your overall success.
Customer success campaigns are downright easy, aren’t they? There’s no dreaming up new messaging to tackle new and unknown markets, there’s just spreading awareness among the current patrons that you already understand so well. Done correctly, your customer postcard marketing campaigns will save you boatloads of money and help you earn a greater wallet-share of your customers for lower marketing costs!
If you haven’t started your customer postcard campaign yet what are you waiting for?
Have any questions about how this works? Never hesitate to pick up the phone and talk to a real person at 1-877-222-6010!
Or if you think your customer campaign requires a little more support, Opportunity Knocks is a full-service marketing agency and partner of ProspectsPLUS who can set up and run the entire thing for you!