Building Effective Client Relationships

Building your online presence and drawing readers to your brand is essential for driving business development. Showcasing your expertise through email newsletters accelerates word of mouth and strengthens relationships.

An effective client newsletter will be delivered on a timely basis, include education content and showcase your expertise. It basically validates why people do business with you.

Even with the growing popularity of social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, email continues to be one of the most effective ways of building and retaining those valuable customer relationships. How can you use this valuable resource to your benefit? Here are a few tips that you can incorporate into your newsletters that will keep you in the front of your customer’s minds.

Be Consistent: Be careful – consistent doesn’t mean spamming. But, being too infrequent with your communication will likely cause your customers to forget who you are.

Make It Personal: Send new subscribers a note a few days after they sign up and ask about their interests, career, goals and what they hope to gain from your newsletter. This helps you to cater your newsletter to their needs.

Encourage Interaction: Include polls, surveys and other ways for your readers to interact not only with you but other readers as well.

No Hard Sell: Yes, the purpose of your newsletter is to increase traffic and boost sales but nothing turns a reader off quicker than the hard sell. Fill your newsletter with relevant content and an occasional plug and you’ll see results soon enough.

No newsletter is perfect the first time you send it out – not even the second time. Keep tweaking each issue and listen to what your readers are telling you and before you know it you’ll have people tripping over themselves to subscribe.

Keys to Create Brand Awareness

 

For your business brand marketing is the most important step you will take.

Use the same logo, colors and fonts in all future marketing media.

Consistency is key. Streamline all of your marketing materials by using consistent branding across all platforms. This will allow your target market to recognize you instantly, whichever way they connect with you.

Tell your story – why you are in business and how your business came to be.

Your clients and customers want to know who you are, why you do what you do, and how you came into business. They want to like you, and be able to trust you. Your market needs to meet the person behind the brand, before they will buy what you are promoting.

Make sure you work to keep your name in front of your market.

‘Out of sight, out of mind’, right? This also applies in business. If your market can’t see you or your brand on a regular basis, you won’t be at the forefront of their mind when it comes to needing your services.

Provide hints & tips for the clients on your database.

Send newsletters with helpful information through to your database either in print or via email. Keep in regular touch with your potential clients, and show them you are the key person in your field with expertise and knowledge.

Increase your content output.

Link your newsletter back to your website to allow your market to connect with you on several platforms. Create a blog, write articles, use this content to increase your brand awareness online as well as in print.

 

Follow-up for Profits

 

If your email is every going to be opened, 90% of the time it’s going to be opened within a day after you sent it.

If you don’t receive an answer to your first email you have a 20% chance to get a reply on your 2nd email and a 25% chance for a reply on your 3rd.

The conclusion is a no-brainer! Follow up is essential and you should start as soon as 24 hours after your first email.

Here are a few tips to remember when writing your email:

Keep it short: Emails with three or fewer images and approximately 20 lines of text result in the highest click-through rates from email subscribers. ~Constant Contact

Your emails must be mobile friendly. Your email marketing service (ie Constant Contact, Aweber) very likely will take care of this for you. Be sure to use this functionality to preview how your message looks on mobile devices. Remember, one column is best for mobile readability.

Use a custom email template. Your template should incorporate your branding – logos, tagline and social links. You may be able to have your service provider create one for you or outsource this service to a professional.

Keep it personal. Your clients expect a personalized experience. Even a small business can use merge features to address readers by their first names.

Consider when you are sending. Remember the guidelines regarding the best times to have your message delivered to your reader’s inbox. (Missed that blog post? Read it here.)

 

Using these best practices for email marketing in your follow up will increase your responses. Let us know your results in the comments!

Need help with email marketing? Contact a marketing company that specializes in email marketing or you can also hire a virtual assistant.