Comments on: Don’t turn your customers into quitters

By: jlsimons

jlsimons — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 01:04:20 +0000

Faithful Reader: You’re right, of course, but it’s always amazing to me how many marketers and companies stop relating to their customers as people. They become trends, segments, targets, eyeballs… in short, data rather than people. People are messy. Data is predictable.

I just found myself thinking about that old song, “Secret Agent Man”: “they’ve given you a number, and taken away your name.”

By: jlsimons

jlsimons — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 01:01:15 +0000

Thanks for the comment and the link, Beth. It’s a great post about Hyundai. I am a big fan of their new marketing strategy. I especially liked two pieces of data in Walter’s post:

“…marketers have a 5-20% chance of turning a prospect into a customer. In contrast the marketer has a 60-70% chance of selling again to an existing customer.”

and

“…profits rose between 30-85% in companies who increased customer retention by 5%. Other studies have shown that the cost of keeping an existing customer is about 10% of what it costs to produce a new customer.”

Trite as this may sound, the numbers really do speak for themselves.

By: Beth Pinson

Beth Pinson — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:09:57 +0000

Excellent post. Thank you for writing this. Currently the customer is running things and the economy is tight. The key is to meet the customer on a level, that makes them feel like you (as a business) care. A great example of reaching customers on their level can be found in a post by Walter Pinson called Hyundai schools us on Relationship Marketing

By: Faithful Reader

Faithful Reader — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:14:21 +0000

Good blog, Jeff, about a simple way to build and maintain lasting business relationships. Why shouldn't the tactic work as well as it does in personal relationships. Customers are just people, after all. F.R. F.R.