My wife bought a new Honda Civic 13 years ago and still talks about the salesman who sold it to her in Columbus, Ohio. She never bought from that salesman again because she married me and moved to Canada.
When Y2K arrived, we traded her Civic for a Ford pickup truck. Then we sold the Ford and bought a Chevrolet Astro Van. Then we sold the Astro and bought a Honda Odyssey.
But my wife never talks about the guy who sold us the Ford, or the Chevy, or even the Honda Odyssey. She only remembers the nice guy from Columbus, Ohio, and she remembers him for only one reason. He stayed in touch.
The others didn’t.
That swell fellow from the Honda dealer in the Buckeye State phoned my wife for years after she drove her new baby off his lot. He’d ask about how things were going with her car. Whether she was still enjoying it. Whether she was satisfied with the service she was receiving at his service department.
His calls were friendly, low key and never a bother. He never leaned hard on my wife to refer friends and
family her way, but she made referrals anyway. He never pressured her to trade up to a newer model, but she would have given him her business anyway, except that I came along and asked her to marry me and head north to the Great Frozen Tundra.
I mention all of this because of a startling challenge that you face as a business owner or marketer. According to a study conducted by the United States Government, 68% of businesses dump one supplier and switch to another not because of price, and not because of quality, and not because of product selection, but because they have a vague feeling that their supplier doesn’t care for them anymore, and shows that lack of concern by failing to stay in touch.
If you have a neighbor who doesn’t drop by for coffee anymore, you assume the relationship has soured. If you have a boyfriend who doesn’t phone anymore, you assume the relationship has headed south (instead of north, the direction of Canada, where it should be headed).
Friends stay in touch. That’s how your customers see it. They figure that if you care about them and want their business again, you’ll stay in touch. And if you don’t, you won’t. Or perhaps I should say it this way: Your customers don’t usually think, “If he doesn’t want my business he won’t stay in touch.” Instead, they infer from your behaviour, “If he wanted my business he’d stay in touch. Since he hasn’t, he doesn’t.”
The problem with staying in touch with customers, of course, is twofold, particularly if the interval between
sales is measured in years (such as house and car purchases). First, you may not know what to say. And second, you may lack the discipline to stay in touch with customers years after a sale, knowing they are not likely to buy.
That’s where drip marketing is so effective. Drip marketing isn’t Chinese water torture. Drip marketing is the commercial equivalent of drip irrigation.
Farmers and gardeners can walk out to their fields and gardens and water them manually, assuming they remember to do so at the right time, and use only as much water as is needed, or they can install pipes over their crops and drip small amounts of water on their plants over long periods of time. Not too much, and not too little.
Drip marketing is an effective way to stay in touch with customers because the process is usually automated. Your sales people don’t have to schedule follow up calls with hundreds of customers. Instead, they enter the customer’s email address into a program, usually an autoresponder, that sends informative, helpful, pre-written messages to customers over time. These messages include tips, resource guides, news, special reports and invitations to events. No hard sell. Not much soft sell, for that matter, either.
With drip marketing, staying in touch with your friends becomes automatic, and therefore more likely to happen. Customers who receive your drip marketing messages might not be like my wife and still be talking about you 13 years after the sale, but you never know.
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