A good friend and great direct marketer is David Stein of Automatic Printing. Besides being my sponsor into the Friars Club of New York, he is active in several organizations and is one of the best 'networkers' I know.
David provides marketing, sales and business development consultations, as well as printing and direct mail services. His business endeavors, Automatic Mail/Automatic On-Line and LivingLocal.Com, are full service providers offering direct mail services, website development, design and hosting, as well as marketing consulting. Visit him at [email protected]
To learn a bit more,read one of his articles below:
Thinking through Online Customer Retention
by David Stein
One of the biggest challenges of doing business online is customer retention. For business-to-business and business-to-consumer sales, the question is how to keep people coming back to buy. This is true even if your business is an online-bricks-and-mortar hybrid. You want people who find you through the Web to use the Web to keep coming back to you.
Typically, retention strategies involve a rewards program, where customers are enticed to come back through special promotions; and those who keep coming back again and again are offered promotions that get progressively better. While these programs are necessary – and work – they should not make up your entire retention program because they focus on only one kind of on-line visitor to your website: the one who's already bought from you and is looking to buy more. Important as that focus is, remember that what you do about the visitor who is not buying can be equally important.
For each of those visitors, of course, personalization will be at the heart of your strategy. The question you need to answer is what kind of personalization will work best, and it ought to be implemented. While no single answer will apply to all businesses, there are some general principles that are worth thinking about.
When someone comes to your website ready to make a purchase, the challenge is to find a way to get them to spend a little more money than they were originally intending to do. The more they buy from you-the more you show them that you are the one they should buy from-the more loyal they will become. Which means you need to think carefully about what you offer them and when you make that offer.
You need to distinguish, for example, between 1) the point in the sales process when you might try to convince a customer to upgrade ("Buy this better-featured product instead of the one you're looking at right now.") and 2) the point where you want to encourage a customer to buy products complementary to the one he or she has actually decided to purchase ("Buy this product to enhance your experience using the product you've got in your shopping cart.").
This is why the salesperson on the floor offers to show you products in addition to the one you're considering at the moment, and it's the cashier who asks if you want to buy the extended warranty on the product he or she is ringing up. Once someone has made a decision, do not introduce any uncertainty into the process; for example, do no say, "This product may be better for you than the one you've chosen."
Paying attention to details like these can help you personalize a customer's on-line experience in ways that deepen her or his relationship with you in a natural manner. Try buying something from Amazon.com, for example, and notice how closely they track what you've looked at and what you've bought and how many ways they manage to put in front of you additional information about products you might also want to buy.
For the visitor to your website who is not ready to buy, however, this strategy can go very wrong. The person who has not bought from you in the past and is not in buying mode is interested primarily in what you have to say. They will make their purchasing decisions based on the quality of what they read. For these people, you need to craft a loyalty program based more on providing useful information than on special offers. (Special offers might work in the short term, but they can also become counterproductive, encouraging people to wait to buy from you until you send them an offer.) How you provide that information and what kind of information it is will depend on your business.
The point of providing the information is the same for everybody: to demonstrate that you have the expertise, the products, the commitment to service, and the desire not merely to maintain but always improve the quality of that service. Buying from you is the only decision that makes sense.
David Stein (718-361-3091) is president of Automatic On-Line System, a full service Web design, marketing, and maintenance company.