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How to retain your customers and win new ones?

Tuesday 28 August 2012, 12:10PM

By 96black

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How well do you promote your services/products to your customers? Even if you think well enough, there is always much more that you could be doing! Also how about the potential customers? There are always niche markets that you could be targeting. Are you using the full potential of your business? There is no better way to retain customers and attract new ones than by using digital marketing mix which is very transparent, measurable and cost effective. To make sure that you are ticking all the boxes to keep up with the speed of XXI century customers improve or start using below channels:

Email marketing - If you aren't using that method of communication with your clients yet, you are missing out big times. Email marketing is a very powerful tool which helps you keep in touch with your customers, cross sell your products and much more! If you do use email marketing think: personalisation, personalisation and once again personalisation! Do not spam your customers. You need to remember how many emails you get and how easy it is to delete them without even opening. Make sure that your EDM’s aren’t one of them and that your customers want to read them. To make emails interesting and attractive you need to make them as relevant to each recipient as possible. It's much better to email your customers more rarely but accurately. If you are using email marketing already check out our top tips on the email marketing best practice.

Social Media - Heard of Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest but not using them? Or maybe you have set up a business profile on one of those platforms but it's completely out of date and is not being updated regularly? Social media platforms are a great way to build special bond and dialog with your existing and potential customers. It’s very popular way for your customers to share their experiences and opinions with their friends and relatives and it can help you build your business. In order to achieve results you need to develop a good strategy for each of these channels or maybe decide to focus only on one of them? Before setting up profile on all the available social platforms ‘to establish’ your company presence think what you want to achieve and how much resources it will take. A good strategy for social media will allow you to focus on appropriate platforms and will help you measure achieved results. Remember that social media platforms are free to use and they give you possibility to communicate with a big group of existing and potential customers.


Paid Ads - Another great tool to promote your products/serivces are the paid online ads. Majority of the customers are researching products and services online prior to purchase. By putting your business in front of the customers at the late stage of their decision making process you significantly increase chances of getting their order. Paid per clicks ads on search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo) are going to cost you only when a customer clicks on your ad. Ads management system will allow you to precisely target your ads and set them up for specific times and period. Displaying your ads in Google, Bing and Yahoo search results is a great method of reaching out to potential customers and reminding your existing customers of your current offers.

Corporate Website - Your corporate website is an interactive business card that describes and represents your services/products. If your company website is old and outdated it can harm your business. Credibility and trust to your products/services is very reliable on well designed website that will be very often visited by buyers prior to purchase. Make sure that your website is presented well to all visitors regardless of what device they are using by implementing a responsive design or creating dedicated mobile website. By allowing your visitors to easily navigate your website on mobile phones you can increase your sales numbers as more and more purchases is being done via these devices.
If you already have a well designed and built website it’s worth to focus on the user experience improvements and optimisation of the content for SEO purposes. By for example adding relevant news or articles to your website you can improve your rankings in the natural searches which will give you more exposure to the potential customers. Meta descriptions and submission of site map to Google are a must on each digital marketer list. Make sure you aren’t missing it!

Unfortunately you can’t sit back and relax after implementing all of the above parts of the digital marketing mix. Remember your customers are constantly changing and you need to keep all the channels up to date and interesting to keep up with them! At 96black we specialise in digital marketing, feel free to get in touch if there is anything that we could help you with.