Most of the small businesses and entrepreneurs can find many prospects (or leads) in their own backyard -their past customers. They often forget the customers once the sale is made, payment is processed and product / service is delivered. While the profit margins may not support pampering of the customers and engaging them on constant basis (as done by few large customer centric businesses), tapping their shoulders once in a while in this virtual world is not a cost-prohibitive exercise.

Starter: Email Marketing

The moment “customer engagement” is mentioned, many of us jump to the conclusion that newsletter communications with Email Marketing is the only cost effective way. While there is no denying that email marketing is a great tool in the hands of customer engagement managers, we have to remember that email marketing is an one way street. Information is fed by the marketing organization to the customers. Email Marketing Campaign Analytics data does provide an insight into the customers’ interest and engagement. Metrics such as email open rates, click rates and unsubscription rates helps to understand whether the customers are reading the email communications and the level of interest.

High Pedestal: Social Networking Media

However there is no way to have a conversation with them. Social Networking and Web 2.0 tools such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Forums and Blogs stand taller than email marketing in the conversation aspect. You can hear their feedback, comments, opinions and complaints by listening to the customers’ conversations in the social media, if you have a good presence in these communities. With a plethora of social networking media crowding the current market place, it is often difficult to catch the conversations in all corners of the Web 2.0.

Direct Dialog: Online Surveys

Remember that we are talking about your past customers, not some unknown, futuristic consumers or generation X or Y crowd. You have all the information about these customers in your database, you had positive experience in dealing with them, you made money out of their purchases, and you have their permission to talk to them – or to tap their shoulders. Then, why do you need spys in the social networking communities or use one way communications? In fact, most of your customers would love to interact with you.

Enter Online Survey solutions and Customer Feedback Management systems. You can reach directly speak with them and request them to provide their feedback. You can segment the customers based on their profile (already available with you) and ask the right questions – relevant to them.  Online survey planning, survey questionnaire design, data collection and results analysis takes only few minutes! And it costs (almost) nothing!

Interacting with customers with online survey tool takes many names:

• Customer Satisfaction Surveys
• Patient Satisfaction Surveys
• Website Usage Feedback Surveys
• Online Shopping Experience Surveys
• Incident Response Satisfaction Surveys
• Employee Performance Feedback Surveys
• Product Satisfaction Surveys
• Warranty Service Experience Surveys
• What Else Can We Do For You Serveys

By whatever name you call it, it all means the same – getting feedback from your customers, engaging them with product updates, and preparing them for the next sale!

The surveys can be made of simple one question poll, or 5 question quick survey or 30 question deep conversation. It depends on the customer segment, purpose of survey, relevancy of the survey, and customers’ interest in taking up the survey.

Don’t Over Do It

This rule applies for any marketing strategy – whether it is the (hated) telemarketing, email marketing, social networking posts or online surveys. Make sure that the right sized surveys are sent to right customer segment (target), at right time with right content. Do it right, the customers will keep coming back to you.

Voice of the Customers

Surveys (or reserach?) show that surveys are the most preferred medium / source to obtain information from the market. Here is some statistics from the 2009 Voice of the Customer Survey conducted by 1 to 1 Media:

Satisfaction Surveys – 44%

Focus Groups – 14%

Call Recording from Contact Center – 11%

Customer Advisory Board – 11%

Pulse Surveys – 4%

Net Promoter – 3%

Branded Online Community – 1%

Social Media Sites – 1%

Other Sources – 10%

Go ahead and leverage the online surveys to hear the voice of your customers and make some more money! Online Survey solutions come in all sizes, shapes and colors nowadays. You do not need any software to install or get trained. Go online, subscribe to a survey solution and design and deploy a survey in few minutes. Do spend sometime in analyzing your customer lists and suitable survey topics before hitting the go button. The software solutions provide real time survey data analysis and reporting for you to see the results as soon as your customer clicks the ‘Done’ button.

Everyone knows that Email Marketing is used to generate leads and build lists. However, many do not comprehend the power of using a email marketing tool to increase the conversion rates. Unless leads are converted to customers, there is no meaning in acquiring a large list or buying costly leads through various sources.

Conversion Rates

Research has proved that 70% of leads acquired are either not contacted or poorly followed-up resulting in poor conversion rates. Unfortunately marketers are content with small conversion rates. The reason could be they are so used the direct marketing conversion rates (1% to 2%). In the internet world, the conversion rates can be much higher and the cost of conversion can be much cheaper.

Email Marketing

The prospects can be groomed and nurtured and converted to customers using Email Marketing tool such as LeadPro which integrates email marketing and lead management in one solution.

Email Marketing is not simply bombarding the prospects with email messages to sell products or services. The following factors are critical in email marketing:

• Relevancy of content
• Frequency of emails
• Timing of email

Sophisticated features are available with most email marketing services to target specific segments of prospects and deliver at right times. Blindly setting up automated autoresponders or drip emails without using any intelligence will result in more opt-outs or spam complaints.

Lead Nurturing

Lead Nurturing is a powerful strategy to be used with email marketing. Simple Lead Ranking or advanced Lead scoring methodologies can be used while using email marketing as a follow-up tool. The subscriber behavioral activities such as email opens, click throughs and email forwards can be used to intelligently nurture the leads.

Let us take a look at these strategies in detail in future posts.

Auto Responder services, which forms part of Email Marketing, play a critical role in Lead Management and Follow-up and increase conversion rates. While everyone use autoresponders to generate a lead, very few leverage the power event triggered drip emails (another name for auto responder emails) to nurture the lead.

If you market off-line products or services, using autoresponder service to nurture the leads will greatly enhance the conversion rates and even helps increase customer satisfaction.

This video provides a brief walk through of the autoresponder feature of LeadPro. Please note that this feature includes some powerful functions which could be used to target specific segments of of your lead list.

LeadPro is an integrated lead management system for marketers leveraging internet as a lead generation medium. Whether you are a online product marketer or brick and mortar business, Internet is a major lead generation source. Managing and converting the internet leads is a critical process for businesses to succeed in this information era.

LeadPro helps manage the leads in a central place and nurture the leads by using follow-up auto responder emails. Lead management best practices are taken into account in designing the system. The following video provides an overview of the LeadPro service – including Email Marketing and Lead Management.