3 steps to personalizing your marketing pitch

Smart marketing today means personalizing your prospecting efforts. The true competitive advantage for businesses large and small is in taking care of your customers.

You need to be able to customize messaging, offers, or discounts, and then know immediately whether your customer was satisfied by the last interaction. That’s the route to retaining loyal customers.

So how do you get there? One way is by using today’s efficient and cost-effective online applications and tools.

1. Start by putting your business online.   Set up a company Web site so that prospects can learn your background and a convenient way to electronically manage and organize information and opportunities. If you haven’t already, begin the process by visiting the product pages of Microsoft Office Live Small Business.
2. Next, consolidate all of your customer information.   Collect all your various mailing lists, billing receipts, call sheets, and e-mail addresses into a master electronic registry that’s easy to access and manipulate. This digital list should include all sales opportunities, prospects, contacts, and (admit it!) the slew of Post-It notes you use, as well as customer preferences and purchasing histories.

   Contact Manager, an application included in Office Live Small Business, extends the capabilities of Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and is just as easy to use. It swiftly organizes all of your customer data into a convenient repository.

   Some immediate benefits of using Contact Manager to centralize all your customer touch points are:

   • Sales opportunities are less likely to fall through the cracks.  Once you’ve imported all your information and addresses into Contact Manager, you can manage sales efforts as easily as sending or receiving e-mail. More importantly, you can efficiently track leads throughout the sales cycle, from initial contact to follow-up to sales call to purchase to thank you to cross-sell queries. Plus, by consolidating your customer data, you enable quick answers for any opportunities that are time-sensitive.
   • You can create customized messages.   With a customer’s purchasing habits easy to maintain and access, you can quickly send out a personalized offer or invitation limited to a time period or a customer segment. (Learn more about best practices for e-mail marketing.) Such offers can run the gamut from annual birthday offers to refill reminders to special discounts.
   • You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you market.   All your efforts, large or small, are now quickly automated. Since Contact Manager fully integrates with other Microsoft Office applications, including Word and Publisher, you can create your own messaging templates or use Publisher’s pre-formatted ones for campaigns and e-mail marketing. You might also like these helpful templates.

     What’s more, Contact Manager offers a seamless connection to Microsoft Office Accounting applications, so that you can immediately identify a buyer’s credit, purchasing history, and background when you’re out on a sales call.

     Tip: Don't just collect data. Manage it. Make sure you have policies in place that update and scrub your lists on a regular basis.

3. Track results and fine-tune your efforts.   Once you begin sending personalized messages, don’t just sit back and wait for customers to respond. Check whether your efforts are hitting nerves.

   With Contact Manager’s help, the data you capture, the sales reports you generate, and the financial results you can now review will tell you what marketing is working for which customers and when. With that knowledge, you can further customize the key marketing templates you’ve created in Publisher. You can also adjust your efforts around a crucial bit of data in your sales cycle. Using Microsoft Office Accounting, you should figure out how long it takes for revenue to land after you make a sale. Then you can better manage your cash flow and inventory.

   Keep refining your tactics and messages. Some options to consider:

   • Create various coupons or two-for-one offers that use different codes for various messages or offers.   That way, you’ll know which ones reel in business.
   • Buy several toll-free 800 numbers and use a different number for a different offer or promotion.   Costs for 800 numbers are fairly low these days. You can also do this, of course, with different e-mail aliases or subject lines.
   • Contact your repeat customers.   Ask what makes them come back.
   • Send a postcard mailing to customers who haven’t bought anything for a while.   Offer an incentive to buy and ask why they haven’t been back.

   Then you can use that data to reward top customers and offer more personalized incentives every time you get a response, online and off.

Whether you market high-volume products or high-end services, if customers encounter a one-size-fits-all sensibility at your company, you’ve lost an opportunity. With today’s online tools, personalizing your pitch is a prerequisite for getting ahead.

About the author   Joanna L. Krotz is the founder of Muse2Muse Productions, a custom content company for business and consumer magazines, newsletters and digital imprints. Krotz has launched marketing Web sites and e-news portals, as well as created magazines and online marketing for a variety of companies. She is co-author of The Microsoft Small Business Kit, a 500-page guide to launching and running a small business.