CHAPTER 3
Entice to Stay in Touch
“Make sure to join our e-mail list for some great specials and news from us!!!”—Request to join In a Pickle Restaurant’s e-mail list
—www.facebook.com/InAPickleRestaurant
Now that you’ve delivered a WOW! experience, it’s time to encourage customers to stay connected with you. You want to connect so you can build ongoing relationships that, over time, will generate engagement and lead to positive referrals and repeat sales. If you don’t make a connection, you’re relying on people to remember you and your name, which is a losing proposition.
If you’re like me, you sometimes can’t remember what you had for dinner last night, let alone the name of the company you did business with six months ago. Case in point: we once hired a branding company to do work for Constant Contact. This company delivered great service and expertise, so I was very happy with them. But they didn’t keep in touch with me. Now, eight years later, I’ve forgotten their name. So even though I’ve been asked a couple of times if I know a good branding agency, all I can say is, “Yeah, we did work with this great branding company once, but I lost track of them.” Opportunity lost.
It’s just good business practice to keep in touch with customers and clients. Building these connections is important for two reasons. One, it drives repeat sales. Keeping in touch via e-mail, social media (or even—dare I say it?—direct mail) helps draw people back to your business. And it keeps you top-of-mind. ...
