On your existing customers and real estate ‘heart and soul’

Here are a couple of great posts by other bloggers over the past few days. All are worth reading and all have relevance to anyone using printed newsletters as a marketing tool.

Becky Carroll wonders why so many companies give their best offers to new customers only while neglecting their existing ones. She gives some tips on lengthening and strengthening relationships with current customers.

  • Understand who your best customers are and what they need.  Make sure every company contact (including marketing and advertising) builds up the relationship with these bread and butter customers!
  • Go out and see what you can do to make it easier for your best customers to do business with you.
  • Take what you have learned from your best customers and apply it to your other existing customers.  You may find that some of them “grow up” to be another best customer.
  • Consider how existing customers will view “introductory offers” to new customers.  Enlist their help by offering them something in return for bringing you those new customers themselves.

Matt Ambrose, at the Copywriter’s Cruicible, blogs on research that shows 69% of people use the internet for researching products but only 33% will actually go on to purchase. So how do you build trust and turn more browsers into buyers? One way is:

Sharing some of your knowledge and expertise in a blog, newsletter or white paper would be a good start.

Hugh MacLeod at Gaping Void is speaking at Real Estate Connect ’07 in August. He says:

So, what should a blogging cartoonist say to a room full of real estate
folk? I have a few ideas. I don’t have much experience in real estate,
but experience has told me that with Web 2.0, so long as what your
offering is of value, the business itself matters less, what matters
more is the heart and soul of the practitioner.
(Italics are mine).