Did you manage to enjoy an extra hour in bed yesterday? It’s not every day that we get 1 extra hour that we can do something useful with (even if that is only sleep!!) but it got me thinking, if we really could turn back time to the launch of your company and you could change just one thing for the better out of the starting gates what would that be? Let me share mine with you….
I didn’t even have to think about this one, it was an easy decision. My one thing I would have done better from the outset would be better data capture. How boring!
But everything that you do demands that you know your client data, because without it how can you market effectively to them? How I wish I had started this process earlier and actually had a plan in place to capture data and separate it into lists.
But it’s not too late, here are some ideas that might work for your business:
- First, of course, is detail what your client has purchased from you. It’s your responsibility to share your other products and services with your clients – they won’t know what you do unless you tell them. Once you have detailed this you can market everyone that has purchased item A to think about item B and vice versa. Cross Selling can be very effective.
- Detail important dates, birthday dates might work for some businesses, anniversary dates of when the company first started to work with you. You can then send cards in the post with either an offer or discount or just a birthday card is a nice touch.
- Always capture contact details, make sure you can access it with your mobile phone so you are never out of touch with your important customers, click to call is a great feature!
- Profile Information age, gender, profession, hobbies. This really helps with marketing personas you’ll get to know what your best customers look like.
- What’s their biggest business issue / problem, if you know this then you can really put together some content and services to help them.
There are plenty of ways to seize these details: business cards, orders placed, online forms, surveys. Whatever you do though, make sure that you have a plan in place to capitalise on your data capture: Effective marketing depends on it!