It?s a fact that your customers are your best leads. This means that the most likely people to purchase your products and/or services are the ones who have paid for them before. It?s also a fact that it costs far less money to keep a customer than it does to go out and get a new one. These are the two reasons that using direct mail postcards to keep in touch with your customer database is a must. There are a few rules to follow when marketing to contacts in your company database.
Rule #1: Collect all of their information. It sounds like a no-brainer but you would be surprised. The more information that you have on your customers the more likely it is that you will be able to get in touch with them to let them know about specials or to remind them it?s time for their next service. Also, don?t neglect to ask for your customers' email addresses, everybody has one and most will give it up pretty easily.
Rule #2: Don?t treat your customers like prospects. Make sure when you collect the information in your database you differentiate between people who have placed an order in the past and people who have not. Customers want to feel like you are paying attention to them and when they have placed a few orders with you and are still getting your "10% for First Time Buyers" postcards they tend to feel unappreciated. Bottom line, if they don?t qualify for an offer you are sending out, don?t send it to them.
Rule #3: Don?t let your designs get stagnant. When you are mailing to databases of people that you have never spoken to before it is OK to send them the same postcard multiple times. It helps to increase recognition and will eventually increase your response rate. Dealing with customers and prospects that you have already spoken to (meaning they already know most or all of the details of your business) you need to mix things up a bit. Your mailings should be attention getting and informative. If you have started offering a new service recently, a postcard designed to let your database know about it would be a smart move. The main point is to keep your company in the front of their mind and to keep them reading your postcards.
If the promo that you send to your database gets too repetitive your customers will lose interest and at that point you are just wasting your money on postage because your postcards won?t get the attention that you want.
One of your main goals should be to educate your customers about how your product or service works and this will in turn help them to get more use out of your entire line of products and services. Many times it is as simple as sending out mailings that make your customers aware of all that you can do for them.
Take, for example, a California based software company called Fort頓ystems. Not only do they use direct mail postcards to acquire new business, they know how to use them to effectively market to their current customer database as well. To fully understand how you will need a little background information.
Fort頓ystems is one of the current leading companies in Medical Practice Management and Billing Software. This means that their software will essentially run an entire medical office. The software can be purchased in any one of four levels, depending on budget and number of doctors working for the practice.
Once a medical practice becomes a customer of Fort頓ystems the marketing strategy is changed to reflect the rules above. They are no longer trying to convince the doctor to become a customer, they are now educating them on how better they can be served by Fort頓ystems? products. Now the customer receives direct mail pieces concerning:
? Updates on software upgrades (example 1) ? Notices when they are running specials (example 2) ?
Joe Niewierski, VP Marketing at PostcardMania, became a published writer after graduating with a BA in Advertising from USF. Joy Gendusa founded PostcardMania in 1998; her only assets a computer and a phone. By 2004 the company did $9 million in sales and employed over 60 persons. For more free marketing advice, visit <a href="http://www.postcardmania.com" target="_blank">http://www.postcardmania.com</a>
This article has been accessed 11 times since 2005-08-17.
