How well do you use your most valuable business asset?

Your most valuable business asset is your customer database. It contains all the people who trust you enough to do business with you. It costs 10 times more to get a new client than getting a sale from an existing one.

But how well do you use that asset?

• Do you communicate with your clients on a regular basis?
• If you spoke to all of your clients on a regular basis, would you get more sales?
• Do your customers know all the services and products and services you sell?

The typical answer for most small business owners, is that they do not communicate with their clients on a regular basis.

Why?

Because:

• It is too hard or
• They do not have enough time.

Which is right because the traditional systems for communicating with all your clients are too time consuming or too expensive.

If we look at some of the traditional methods of communicating with customers such as telephone calls and direct mail that is definitely the case.

Whilst you will probably talk to your best customers on a regular basis.  Phone calls are intrusive and time consuming to be used with all your customers especially if those customers will only buy once or twice a year. In addition, if you are going to call them you want to have something valuable to say, but what if you want to say don't forget about me.

Direct mail is expensive and time consuming to organise to be used on a regular basis. The costs of preparing the newsletter or brochure, printing and postage can make direct mail prohibitive for the small business owner.

Yet studies have shown that the reason that businesses lose customers is not price but that the business has stopped communicating with them.

One of the most effective ways of communicating on a regular basis with your customers is email. Email marketing has very low costs and is very easy to use.

But what about spam?

People will only think that you emails are spam if it does not have any relevance to them. The trick to email marketing  is providing your customers with good quality content that is relevant to them and segmenting your list so that you send the relevant information to each group of customers within your customer database.