The Using Database Marketing to Drive Traffic to Your Website article contains information about combining the power of your database and your website in NZ.
Fostering repeat business
Your website is all about driving sales, but the most cost effective growth for any business is repeat business with current customers. Using your database to encourage existing clients to visit your website can be an important part of growing your relationships, and your business.
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Some sources say it is six times easier to keep an existing customer than to win a new one. A website is all about driving sales and the most cost effective growth for any business is to encourage your current customers to do business with you over and over again.
Don’t just consider your website in terms of attracting new customers - use it to retain the ones you have. Using your database to encourage existing customers to visit your website can be an important part of growing your relationship with them, generating new leads from them and giving them lots of new and positive things to tell all their friends about you.
Combining the power of your database and your website can help you to…
Develop a long-term relationship with your customers
A database will help you to understand your customers’ needs and expectations, to track these and to see how they change over time. Statistics available from most modern websites can also provide useful information for developing this understanding. Such knowledge enables you to make changes to your website to ensure you meet your customers’ expectations and communicate to their needs. Together your database and website can form the basis of a loyal customer relationship and encourage people to come back for more.
Communicate effectively with your customers:
Because you know what your customers value, and what they want, you can communicate with them on a more personal level. A database enables you to put a customer communication programme in place to communicate the right messages, to the right people, at the right time. Because you have specific information on each customer, you are able to offer targeted campaigns and special offers of interest to your specific customer or customer groups. Use quick emails to communicate with them, highlighting new information on your website, new promotions and other changes in your business. You can point the people most likely to be interested in specific offers and products, directly to the relevant pages on your website.
Focus your marketing
A database enables you to track changes in your market, your customers’ buying patterns, product sales and any changes in taste. It makes it easy to focus on and communicate with your most valued customers or customer groups, because you know which marketing campaigns are working. It also shows you when a customer stops using your service. You can use vouchers, downloads, registration forms, and online surveys on your website to help track their purchase behaviour.
Improve the level and consistency of your customer service:
A database can keep everyone in your business informed of what is happening with each customer. This enables you to offer a consistently high, professional level of service, even if the person they usually deal with is out of the office at the time they call.
Never miss a sales opportunity again:
Because all the information on potential customers or new sales leads can be stored in the same place, you will be able to track all of your sales opportunities and follow up on them. You can also monitor your clickthroughs, sales conversions and pages viewed, to indicate other potential areas of interest to your customers.
Protect yourselves and your customers from the competition:
The ongoing use of a customer database can be a major point of difference between your business and a competitor’s business. If you use your database to develop loyal relationships, you can give your customers exactly what they want, when they want it and how they want it. This is something that your competitors can not easily copy! You can use your website to deliver parts of your services such as making appointments, accessing service information, ordering products etc. Once you establish your website as a familiar, safe, efficient and enjoyable space in which to do business with you, your customers will be more ‘sticky’ and less likely to want to change.
Add value all around
While you are adding value to your customers by combining the power of your database with your website, you are also adding value to your own business. A business that knows who its customers are, retains them. If you have systems in place that use both your database and your website, you have an additional asset to put a value on when you want to sell your business.
Combining the power of an effective customer database and a dynamic and informative website can simplify much of the communication that needs to happen between your business and your customers. Think of how you can use your website to add extra value to your customers, give them information that they need on a day to day basis and help them get more value out of your products and services. Then use your database to let them know all about it.
Credit:
Helen Down - Synthesis Marketing
Synthesis Marketing - Experts in Business Growth
Online Marketing images from Flickr: drivetraffic, cornermarket and vote.
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