Retention and Relationships

All those investments you’ve made in customer relationships are about to come to fruition.  If you’re in a position where you know who a good chunk of your customers are, now is the time to take advantage of that fact.  Conventional wisdom says to increase advertising in a downturn, so you can take customers away from weaker competitors.  Don’t be that weaker competitor.

Response rates among existing customers will always be better than new customers.  So go talk to those existing customers using targeted offers, double/triple points (if you have them), special events, secret sales, and anything else you can think of.  Since you have email addresses (right!?) you can communicate inexpensively, and drive incremental business with very low expenditure.  So your ROI will be much higher than typical acquisition ROI is in times like these.  And by defending your best customers, you don’t have a leaky bucket problem that requires even more expenditure to address.

The WSJ reported today that we’re looking at Q3 2009 before growth turns up again.  So you have 7 1/2 months to get through.  Good luck.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 5:01 pm and is filed under General, Relationship Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.