Use Customer Touch Points to Grow Your List – Part 1

Guest Contributor: Heather Maloney

Continuing to grow your Email / SMS Subscriber List by promoting your communications in all your customer touch points is very important as it does two things: 1. It ensures that you keep focused on your communications with your customers. If your emailing/sms list is continuing to grow there will be less chance that you will tire of sending your messages, and 2.It adds new prospects to the start of the sales process. Most people need to feel that they trust you and understand what you can do for them before they will be ready to buy.

Here’s 10 ideas to ensure you are making the most of all your customer touchpoints. Here’s the first 5 - how do you score yourself on each of these?

Invoices – one of the most neglected touch points in terms of promoting the benefits of your products and services. You should use a portion of your invoices to:
1. describe the benefits your products or services offer, or
2. draw attention to other products that the customer is not currently purchasing, or
3. promote special offers.
At point of sale - supermarkets do this with the chocolate bars and magazines sitting at the check outs. If you have a shopping cart facility on your website, are you suggesting related products to your customers just before they checkout? Amazon has been doing this for years. If you have a retail store, ensure that your sales staff ask customers if they are on your mailing list so that they know when the latest products come into the store, and so that they hear about sales.
New Customer Telephone Enquiries - when the phone rings and it’s a new enquiry, part of your standard process for handling the enquiry should be to ask if you can add the person to your mailing list. Make sure you describe the benefits of receiving the messages and how frequently they will be delivered. If you describe these things and then ask for permission (and the person’s email address), if the caller is at all interested in your products or services 9 times out of 10 they will be happy to be placed on your mailing list.
Meetings with Prospects - at your meeting to discuss a potential new client’s requirements, make sure you ask them if they would like to go on your mailing list. Again… advise them of the benefits and frequency of messages and most times they will be happy to be added to your list. This gives you further opportunity to build trust with the prospect.
Written Proposals - make sure you add a section at the end of your proposal that promotes other products / services you provide, which may also be of interest to the prospect. Describe the benefits of being added to your mailing list in the proposal, which will also act as a trigger for you to ask for their permission to be added when you are taking the potential client through the proposal. Next 5 coming soon!

Contributed by Heather Maloney . Heather Maloney, Founder of Contact Point IT Services and eNudge.com.au, has a Master in Technology (Information Technology) majoring in the web, and has over 16 years experience in the IT industry, most of which has been focused on delivering business benefits via the use of internet related technologies.

Heather Maloney has written 8 article(s) for us.

Visit http://www.contactpoint.com.au

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