Many people have asked us “how do I build stronger relations with my clients?” and “what’s the best way to touch base with my customers without wasting too many resources?” Well it’s actually easier than you think, the internet provides you with a whole plethora of free online tools to communicate with your customers and build deeper relationships with them.
Use social networks to ‘touch-base’ with customers
Social networks like linked-in and facebook provide you with free networking and relationship building opportunities though groups and fan pages. Start a group for your business and get people to join up and use your customers’ networks to strengthen your group. Remember some brand awareness is better than no brand awareness, and having a group or fan page on facebook will increase your company’s exposure tenfold.
It’s not difficult to start one and the time commitment is only a couple of hours each week, do get one started today and invite us! We will be your first facebook ‘fan’.
Be persistent about opt-in email newsletters
Based on our research, your best customers will respond positively to email newsletters. Email newsletters will enable your business to develop strong relations with customers who actually have a strong affinity to your business. Sending out emails to customers makes them feel like they are part of a group or a special ‘exclusive’ society and that a relationship which is based on mutual benefits.
Choose an email solution which suites your businesses needs, just remember the one thing you shouldn’t do is to send out 5-10 thousand emails via Microsoft outlook or Gmail.
Start a blog or join the twitter band wagon and email people the posts
Blogs and twitters are great for marketing message delivery, but if you do not publicize the blogs or twits then they are pretty much useless. We have see to many blogs with good content suffer from low traffic and few loyal visitors. So the bottom line is if you have a blog you need to tell them about the blog and get people interested in your posts/content.
One way of doing this is though email marketing, email weekly or bi-monthly blog updates to clients and friends. It will help, trust us.
--
It’s not hard to build effective relationships online, but it does take time so develop an online customer relationship strategy which is within your organization’s resources, you won’t regret it.
For anything else contact us, we’d be happy to help.
Async minds is a boutique interactive and web PR agency specialized in the synergy of marketing and technological processes. Nicholas Lin is a partner, marketing, at Async Minds and specialized in online growth strategies. He's also the author of the Bachelor's Banquet Cookbook.