Why talk if you can ask your customers and leads?
Nurturing using newsletters
Nearly all marketing guru’s and bloggers praise nurturing your customers and leads with newsletters. It should be the best and most useful method for keeping contact with them.
This idea is to have customers and potential customers signing up for your newsletter and then nurture them by sending on regular time intervals a newsletter.
However sending a newsletter is a one way communication: you or your company are sending out messages about matters concerning the company.
- However your company might not be that interesting.
- Using news concerning the market will expose the achievements of your competitors.
Although you can measure the amount of opened newsletter emails, it is unclear if the content is really being read and appreciated.
How can you tell the newsletters are really making any impact on the customers or potential customers?
A newsletter doesn’t engage people to communicate or participate.
Only those people who find receiving a newsletter really annoying will unsubscribe as this requires an effort from the receiver. Thus most people don’t unsubscribe.
Use a poll for input
Getting information from your customers or potential customers is more important than to dump your achievements on them.
It is very hard to get information, questions or remarks from your customers or leads.
Normally people will only take the initiative to send a comment, a remark or a complaint if they really have a good reason, a serious issue or a problem.
Thus you will only get information and personal views from the worst cases in your market or from those who always complain.
It would be better and more effective if you could collect information from your market. The easiest way is to set-up a poll.
In order to have people completing the poll form, offer them the results: immediately and a second time including the conclusions when the poll has collected enough responses.
Thus instead of sending out email newsletters, send them a poll about the market, problems, products or solutions.
From the data differences between customers and possible customers, demographics can be analyzed and conclusions can be made.
Generating buzz
- If the replies to your poll are large enough, the results will generate even more interest.
- If the conclusions of the poll are unexpected, the results will generate interest and spark a discussion.
Thus generating a buzz about your company.
The sole problem is finding and creating new and interesting polls for your customers and leads concerning your market in order to keep them engaged.
Do you send newsletters or do you poll?
