Invigo Blog

Why You Should Contact Your Customers

May 25, 2020

Customer Retention: Importance of Contacting Your Existing Customers

To contact your customers or not…that is the question (not really, you should definitely be doing this!). This is such an important, and sometimes overlooked, necessity for a successful business.

Contact Your Customers Regularly

Keeping in contact with your customers is vital, particularly for businesses that rely on repeat customers. It is much more time-efficient and cost-effective to keep getting business from the same customers (recurring customers) than to solely focus on continually acquiring new one-time customers.

Recurring customers is your bread and butter, if you will. The lifetime value of services they will come to you for is what should be looked at, potential services they will have in the future…if they get treated well and not forgotten.

Clients/customers/patients, want to feel important. Also, once you acquire that business (however many dollars and cents it took to do so) it would be silly to not try and retain them.

The best way to do so, is to stay in contact with your customers.

Are You Contacting Your Customers Correctly?

The best way to know this, is to write down your current strategy and look for any gaps. Think of everything you are doing with your existing and even past customers. Include email, telephone, text, mail, how often, and the message.

Once you do that, question your methods. By questioning, the gaps or room for improvement will become more evident. You want to ensure that your efforts suit the audience and that it is timely as well.

Questions you should be asking yourself:

Are you sending email reminders to all of your clients, despite the fact that some of them are elderly and are more likely to prefer a good old-fashioned phone call?
How often are you following up? Is it too infrequent? Do they remember you?
Do you follow up with customers shortly after their visit?
If you do the follow-ups, what is their usual response, and how can you encourage them to continue doing business with you?

It’s important to evaluate your telemarketing, sales, or outbound calling strategy. When done correctly, with the right audience, it can be highly effective.

Let’s Talk A Bit About Outbound Calling

If you are calling, who are you calling?

Are you just picking up the phone and calling anybody? Plan it out. Have a list of customers, know what services they got in the past, what age they are, what their concerns where…and so on.

If you are scrambling to get business, such as if you own a clinic that hasn’t had patients come in for a while—target your efforts on those who are most likely to need your services again. It’s easier to sell to an established client than to sell to someone completely new.

Coupling Efforts

Also, using more than one point of contact will give you better results. Think about your demographic and you can couple your offline strategies.

For example: mailing postcards to a specific local demographic and then follow up with a phone call to each postcard recipient.

Not only will you be getting that person’s attention with an offline postcard and (through compelling ad copy) driving them to your website, but you will also be calling them to ask whether they received your information and would like to schedule an appointment.

The trifecta, if you will.

Consider including a direct response special offer with a time or limit scarcity in your postcard, such as, “Get a free 15-minute consultation (a $497 value), yours free if you respond within 5 days.” This is a direct offer that will have them responding to something of value.

This is just one example, however, think about different ways you can reach customers offline and think about multiple approaches. The more they hear about you, the more they will remember you. That’s a fact.

Don’t Have A Strategy for Contacting Your Customers?

If you don’t already have a strategy in place, create a specific process, and adjust it as you learn what does and doesn’t work. We do that with each of our clients, we have a proven method but we cater our approach to what works best for each demographic in each industry.