Eggblogg

Why it's worth spending marketing budget on talking to your existing customers

The other day I got asked about our email marketing services. 'We need to target architects and interior designers in Sussex', he said. I had to disappoint him, as I explained we deal only with permission email marketing, in other words, communicating with customers/members/suppliers or prospects who have given you their permission to do so.

For many small businesses, getting new business is about getting new customers: perhaps they have a service or product that only gets bought once, or not very often (funeral directors or estate agents for example).

But a much neglected area of marketing is customer retention. If there's even a possibility that people might buy from you more than once, then customer retention is worth putting some budget against. If there's a good chance they'll come back again and again, and bring their friends, it's definitely worth it. Plus, it's all tied up with reputation management. Even if they don't need you again, keep in touch and they'll remember you when friends & family are looking.

So before spending a fortune on Yellow Pages, print advertising, pay per click, telemarketing and so forth .... think how little it could cost to keep some of those hard-won customers and get more of their business.

For many hard-pressed SMEs, if just 30% of the marketing budget went on customer retention, I am confident profitability would increase. Not only that, so would word-of-mouth referrals and long term customer loyalty.

I'm not saying you should inundate your customers with 'offers' emails every week, though lord knows it must work for some, we all know companies who do it.

But the task of selling to an existing customer is far easier than finding, wooing and persuading someone from cold. It's also cheaper, and the good news is ... done well, this kind of customer loyalty marketing just gets more effective over time.

Shame the same can't be said of targeting the cold prospects, who, in the face of mounting junk mail and spam issues, are becoming more immune to direct mail, cold prospecting and broadcast advertising.

Why bother about generating customer loyalty? One big reason is the more loyal the customer, the less likely they are to be sensitive to price increases.

Hang on ...  marketing which allows you to put your prices up, rather than demanding you lower them? Now there's a novelty.

In my o-pun-ion... let's hear it for the puns

There's something about word-play, puns and mischievous metaphors that make me smile. I suppose it's a bit like a panto - it's best not to fight it but to get into the mood and let yourself enjoy.

I'm currently trying to restrain myself over our new company name, Eggbox. It's just too tempting to get egg-cited about all the egg-cellent opportunities it presents to talk about hatching new ideas, thinking outside of the eggbox and so forth. Ack!

One of Eggbox's clients, Drusillas Park, like to pepper their customer email newsletter with puns and obvious word-gags. And funny thing is, it works. Maybe it's the combination of cute animal pics and headlines like 'Ivor New Lady' (pygmy marmoset Ivor gets introduced to a female Kito). Anyway, the newsletter enjoys great open rates and it's clear Drusillas know their market.

But if out-and-out puns aren't really your thing there's still plenty of deadpan mileage to be had in the extended seasonal metaphor. Jordan Ayan in MarketingProfs has pumpkin-loads of fun in an article entitled Halloween Email Advice: How to Revive Your Dead Email Subscribers.

Trouble is, once you start on this route new opportunities seem endless. So best not to over-egg it.

Screw everyone except the consumer? Not in my name

"We marketers have room in our heart only for one love - the consumer. Screw everyone else." Those are Mark Ritson's words, in his latest defence of Tesco in Marketing magazine last week.

The ongoing love-in between Ritson and Tesco is puzzling. In this latest article he seems to be saying that if small independent retailers are unable or unwilling to compete with retail giants then they should consider another career. Fair enough. But to suggest that the consumer is better served by one superstore rather than a variety of small independents is odd.

Surely, the one thing that Tesco domination takes away from the consumer is choice.

"The shops that vanish after a Tesco arrives," Ritson goes on, "are, invariably, the ones that overcharged, or offered bad service, or did not provide the best products."

Oh really? Or perhaps just the ones that believed in paying suppliers a fair price rather than driving them to bankruptcy, not polluting the environment with plastic bags and excess packaging, not refusing to engage with and share responsibility for their local communities and not getting up every day with the sole aim of destroying their competitors.

Tesco isn't in the business of serving the consumer. It's in the business of making vast profits.

This banging on about the consumer is king is itself not only hypocritical but it smacks of old-school marketing, the time when nobody cared about things like social responsibility, environmental impact and ethical practices.

Come on Mark, even the CIM has got all shy about putting the word 'profitably' in its definition of marketing. I may be marketer, but I'm also a supplier and a consumer. So please don't preach this kind of stuff in my name, thanks all the same.

Monster Mash

My thanks to Lara for pointing out a news story from Ireland concerning the spamming of a list of IT professionals by recruitment firm Monster. Tom Raftery blogged about it here on October 1st, but although we've come across it somewhat belatedly it's still a cautionary tale.

And don't miss this wonderful commentary on the incident - it's the funniest thing I've read in ages. Enjoy.

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got soul

Something we've always wondered about here is how best to talk about a company's beliefs, raison d'etre, ethics if you like. It's hard to even talk about it without sounding holier-than-thou. After all, saying 'we're reducing our carbon footprint' or 'we give to charity' or 'we are a green company' can sound dangerously like spin, or jumping on the eco-ethical bandwagon.

That's why I was interested to read at The Wise Marketer about a report by Fletcher Knight, Eight key marketing trends for 2008 and beyond, in which they state that marketers 'must not only be aware of trends but also develop marketing initiatives that genuinely link their 'brand soul' to consumer expectations'.

So perhaps it's OK now to talk about this thing 'brand soul'. A bit of soul searching wouldn't go amiss in the (sometimes) dirty race to win customers and beat the competition. But let's not ignore that little word 'genuine'.