Reaching your neglected customers

Using Email Marketing To Reach Your Existing Customer Base If your business is beyond the start-up phase, chances are that you have served many more customers than your sales team is able to effectively cover. One office products dealer I work with has been in business for 30 years and has sold to or serviced a customer base of more than 3,000. With only 7 sales reps, the ratio of customers to sales reps is over 400:1. Using traditional sales methods, no sales person can effectively communicate with this many accounts. Instead, they naturally adopt the 80/20 rule. They focus on those 20% that bring in 80% of the business. As a result, few if any touch points were created with 80% of this dealer's customers. To reach these neglected customers, the dealer implemented a quarterly email campaign to the entire customer base. The email campaigns went out directly from Sales reps to their accounts. Each campaign was designed to drive recipients to a particular action step. Some were product oriented while others tired to identify customer problems. Other marketing campaigns incorporated white paper downloads and customer surveys. Each of the emails were quality touch points with customers. As any experienced sales person knows, more touch points results in more sales.  Because name recognition was high and subject lines were carefully chosen, open rates were consistently high (over 30%). Link rates were high (2-7%) primarily because the content touched on relevant topics and each campaign was professionally designed and personalized. Most importantly, by driving recipients to relevant forms on their web site, the dealer was able to identify and capture qualified leads. Since the email campaigns are integated with their CRM tool, qualified leads flow directly to individual sales people.