Whenever research is carried out into why companies or individuals have left one supplier and gone to another the dominant answer is, “I hadn’t heard from them for a while” followed by something along these lines: “I saw an advert from this other firm, and couldn’t remember who it was I used to buy from, so thought I would give the new firm a try.”

 Those comments come up again and again.  In short they say, my regular supplier took me for granted, and so I went elsewhere.

 But there’s a third comment that is made when such surveys are done – and it is getting much more commonplace.  It says this….

 ”I got sick to death of them bombarding me with email ads all the time, so I went elsewhere.”

 Which leads to the question: where is the balance?  If you can lose customers by not writing to them enough, and you can lose customers by bombarding them, what do you do?

 The answer comes in two parts.

 First, you need to make your communications interesting.  Just hitting the reader with big pictures and tales of discounts doesn’t work.   You must find a way to say something interesting to the reader each time you write, that is more than just a price announcement.

 Of course what you write about will be dependent on what you are selling.  For some it will be a discussion on issues of interest, for others with new products emerging all the time, it might be some background on whatever is new.   But if the latter is the case, you must be aware that you can’t go around claiming that each new product is the best, must have, amazing deal that they have ever seen.  You are communicating regularly with people so you have to treat them with some respect.

 Second, it is not a bad idea to have two lists.  One which writes to interested people perhaps every day, or maybe two or three times a week and another that goes out once a week, or maybe a couple of times a month.

 I am often told that “everyone will get really fed up with us if we write to them each week”, but all the evidence shows this is not so, if you make your writing interesting enough.   But not writing very often is certainly a sure fire way to lose your client base.

 It really is a down to you!

 How to avoid losing your existing client base is typical of the sort of issue that we regularly discuss and resolve with our Velocity customers.  If you would like to know more, there’s details of Velocity on www.velocity.ac – or please do call 01536 399 000.

 Tony Attwood

 Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.