customers at the end of the year, or a growth of 4 percent for the year.
no regular communication with their customers unless it is a sales message.
The challenge to solving this problem is scale. How do we build relationships and make a large group of customers feel special and feel that we care? The answer is newsletter marketing. When you send a newsletter in which, rather than selling, you open up, share what’s going on in your life, and take an interest in topics that may be important in your customers’ lives, you now have the start of a relationship. With time and consistency, that budding relationship goes from casual to one where they feel a real connection with you. People who know, like, and trust you don’t churn out. Not only do they not churn out, but they refer friends and spend more money with you. All of this makes you more profitable. If we circle back to Churn Freedom Day and our original example business that has 500 customers, gains 120 new ones per year, but loses 100, and we add in newsletter marketing and relationship building to decrease churn to 50 customers per year, the business radically changes. Its Churn Freedom Day is now June 1. It now adds 70 new customers per year and grows at 14 percent per year. If the average customer has a first-year value of $2,000, that is an extra $100,000 per year in revenue, not to mention that existing customers typically have a much larger annual value than new customers do.
with The Newsletter Pro. Still, I wondered how many of my clients would actually be interested in what I had to say. But almost immediately, I received responses from my clients that put my anxieties at ease. Since the beginning, we’ve received all kinds of fantastic feedback. Just this week, Wilma, our director of operations, got a call from a former client we hadn’t heard from in almost five years — yes, we put old clients on our mailing list. This former client got in touch just to chat about the article Wilma was highlighted in. Lately, moments like these have become a regular occurrence. When clients call, they almost always mention something from the newsletter, whether it’s to tell us they tried a recipe we included and it turned out great, to chat about this month’s cover, or to tell us how excited they are to be featured in the testimonial section. At the end of the day, growth is better than being flat or experiencing declining growth, but 4 percent growth isn’t much to write home about unless you’re a massive corporation. With all the effort, expense, and marketing needed to grow, your business will most likely get a better ROI if, instead of creating a new email series or marketing campaign to get more new customers, you focus on decreasing churn. Newsletter marketing done right is one of the single best ways to decrease churn. Before I get into the steps involved in newsletter marketing, let’s look at some of the top reasons customers leave a business. According to a Rockefeller Corporation study, 69 percent of customers leave a company because they feel the company is indifferent to them. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, perception is reality, and your customers who leave perceive that you’re indifferent to them. What causes that? One of the leading causes is lack of communication. Business relationships are not that different from personal relationships; they need nurturing and regular communication. Most business have limited or
Think about the communications you’ve been sending over the last 6–12 months. How many of those emails, social media posts, or direct mail campaigns were simply sales pitches? Or disguised sales pitches? (A dental office sending an appointment reminder email is still a sales message.)
What do you think your number is?
In most businesses, it is greater than 90 percent sales communication, which leaves only 10 percent for nurturing and relationship-building. If you’re asking for money every time you chat with your customers, and you never call or write just to say hi or share something personal or exciting with them, why wouldn’t you expect them to feel you’re indifferent to them?
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Have You Heard the Good News?
Life and business are about relationships. I’m always eager for our clients to get to know my team and me better so we can get to know them better in return. The team at The Newsletter Pro has helped us do just that. I’m happy to recommend them, their excellent product, and their conscientious approach.
Philippians 3:13-14 – “Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” II Corinthians 12:9-11 – “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
It’s wonderful to hear from them and know that we’re using the newsletter to build real connections and stay in our clients’ thoughts.
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