Reach Customers without Spending Much Money

Make sure your community involvement is visible, and promote it through word-of-mouth advertising with your customers. Every positive effort to connect with the local community helps you establish relationships and grow your customer base.

If maintained properly, your customer database is a treasure trove of marketing information and demographics. There are several ways to use the information to help generate sales.

For example, you should be able to see when each customer visited your location and why, and what services were purchased. Based on their purchase histories, what complementary detail services do you offer that they would likely be interested in?

Follow up with customers to let them know about new services or products that may be of interest to them. Conversely, you should also be able to pull from your database which customers have not visited your business in some time. Contact them to find out why.

Your goal should be to keep your customers coming back. Knowing their individual purchase histories provides opportunities for you to contact them and extend personal invitations to patronize your business again. Studies show that it costs seven to nine times more to cultivate a new customer than it does to keep an existing client. That cost is measured in time, energy and dollars, each of which must be spent wisely.

People like to do business with people, but if there is a disconnect in the business relationship, then the marketplace becomes about price. We all know that price point is not the only criteria people consider before they buy; however, if you remove the relationship aspect from the business equation, then their decision parameters quickly narrow down to price.

If you’re constantly reaching out to your existing customers and enticing them to keep coming back, then you’re way ahead of your competitor who is focused on getting people in the door and selling them the least-expensive product.

If you are diligent about maintaining your customer database then targeted, direct mail is a logical, effective, inexpensive and measurable marketing strategy that is easy to employ. Direct mail delivered to your customer base can be targeted to the whole group, or to a specific segment of the group. Sending exclusive promotions tailored specifically for existing customers and not the general public lets them know that they are important to you. This helps solidify and build your relationship with them and makes them feel good about spending money with you.

Local print shops and many online business printers offer the design and printing of direct mail postcards at a very reasonable rate. Many also offer the value-added service of mailing the cards for you. You can save money by bundling services and taking advantage of their discounted postal rates.

A direct mail postcard also can be used to remind your customers of regular maintenance, provide information on new services, extend an invitation to a special event, provide special customer-only discounts, and so much more. This marketing medium allows you to be very creative. The postcard can serve as the coupon that the customer is required to bring into the shop at the time of service.

Direct mail also gives you a built-in tracking method. Just collect the postcard from customers when they visit, keep a record of how many are collected, and record the sale for each customer. Also, make sure you collect the contact

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