A Referral Program
Includes Keeping In Touch
Regular contact helps you maintain an ongoing, positive presence in the minds of your clients and contacts.
This presence will facilitate repeat business and referrals from satisfied clients.
Keeping In Touch With Clients
Addressing the issue of frequency of contact can be challenging.By keeping in touch too frequently, you risk annoying your contacts and having your message lost in the advertising clutter.
On the other hand, not keeping in touch frequently enough makes it difficult to maintain a sufficiently strong presence to generate referrals.
A thorough knowledge of your clients will help you determine what frequency is best for keeping in touch with them.
Top
If after reviewing your client base, you are unsure as to how often to keep in touch, ask them.
Send them a simple survey asking them three basic questions:
- How frequently they would like you to keep in touch with them. (Offer 4-5 choices):
- monthly
- bi-monthly (every other month)
- quarterly
- semi-annually
- annually
- market trends
- home maintenance
- tax issues
3. What format of keeping touch do they prefer?
- hard copy (paper)
- electronic (The Internet offers two main email options. One option is simply an email that contains your newsletter; the other is a newsletter referring to your blog or other website content.)
In sending the survey, you let clients know you value their opinions. We all like to know that some one values our opinion. You could also include an advertising specialty, brochure or current newsletter.
And when you tell them about the survey influenced your keeping in touch plan, you confirm how seriously you take your contacts’ opinions.
Occasional surveys are valuable additions to your referral program.
Remember that for your keeping in touch strategy to be effective, you must distinguish yourselves from the competition.
There is little to be gained by sending messages that simply get lost in the crowd.
Top
Family and Friends
The bad news about asking family and friends for referrals is that they are generally too close to you to offer objective unbiased opinion.It’s also possible that while they know you as a family member or a friend, they may know little if anything about how you serve clients.
The good news is that they can promote your personal characteristics to people you don’t know but need to know. Let your family and friends know about the kind of clients you would welcome as referrals.
Make sure that they have business cards and newsletters (if you have them in hard copy) to give to interested prospects.
Top
Network Contacts
These are the people that everyone meets as they go about their daily lives, doing business in stores, offices and other work places.They include the contacts made through networking activities and participation in clubs, organizations, community events, social activities, religious services and so on.
While these people may know nothing about how an individual sales representative serves clients, they probably do know people the sales representative does not know but needs to know.
One final comment about keeping in touch. Once you start keeping in touch you must continue the practice as part of a referral program to generate qualified leads from your contacts.
Interrupting or even worse ending your practice of keeping in touch with out an explanation can reduce the effectiveness of your referral program.
Top
Email Marketing Helps You Keep In Touch
Email-marketing has become one of the most powerful communication tools available to keep in touch with your clients and contacts.It is faily easy to start...and once set up can function virtually automatically.
Everything you do off-line to keep in touch, can be done on-line with email marketing.
As an added bonus, everything you do repeatedly off-line can be automated on the Internet.
From a marketing perspective, an email marketing system is one of the easisets ways there is to produce consistent results.
If you are not using such a system...you should be.
TopTo Learn More...
To learn how to generate more referral business, see A Great Source of New Business...Top
