Online Tools for
Building Client Relationships
The number one truth about success is business is this:
It's all about relationships.
It's about your relationship with your customers or clients. It's about your relationship with your employees. It's about your relationship with your vendors. It's about your relationship with other business people.
If you're in network marketing, you know that relationships are important, and your upline has probably talked with you about the importance of relationship building, yet most network marketers still don't do it right.
If you're a small business owner in an enterprise that does not use multi-level marketing as a marketing strategy, you probably understand the importance of your relationship with your customers, but you may have limited those relationship-developing activities to traditional marketing and customer service activities.
There is more. SO much more.
Think about the characteristics of one of your most satisfying relationships. List the words that describe it.
Was it caring? Did it involve frequent and ongoing communication? Did it involve both give and take? Did the other person involved communicate with you only when there was something in it for him or her? Or did he or she communicate genuine concern for you?
There really is no secret to establishing and maintaining positive relationships with clients, but it won't just happen by itself.
Read more about Relationship Marketing.
Some common customer communication mistakes include 1) only contacting them to sell them something (if at all), and 2) being inconsistent in communication.
Also, email has replaced the handwritten note and even the phone call as the most common method of communicating with customers. Unfortunately, the flexibility that email affords you also distances you from your clients.
These days, fewer than 50% of emails are opened and fully read. Many are caught in spam filters, and those that are opened are typically only scanned by the reader.
There is no doubt that handwritten cards and postcards are better for communicating concern and for giving that personal touch, but there are some barriers - time and cost. We'll come back to those in a minute.
Here's the up-side to greeting cards and postcards:
1. They almost always get delivered, opened, and read. It's true. The postal service is much more reliable than email. And people will throw out junk mail, but greeting cards are opened and read at least 99% of the time.
2. Greeting cards make people feel good. Isn't that what you want? You want your customers to a) think of you often and b) feel good when they think of you.
3. They add a personal quality to a business relationship. People do business with other people they like and trust.
There is an online tool that allows you to:
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