Tedious, tiresome,
irksome and easy to avoid but utterly essential to maintain and update, your
client contact list is a critical piece of marketing infrastructure. Without
it, your ability to reach out to clients, prospective clients and target market
sectors is handicapped.
One of the constant challenges I see in many businesses is
the need to maintain and update the client contact list. Often neglected for
months or years at a time, and in some cases not done at all, it’s a simple
discipline and one that pays genuine dividends for any business that needs to
build new business (and which business doesn’t need new business?).
Whether starting afresh or tackling an existing database,
there are a few simple regimes which can give your business an edge when it
comes time to reach out to your market with important company news, updates or
marketing collateral. There’s no point getting excited about a new piece of
collateral – print or electronic – which you’d like to share with prospective
clients if you have no way of reaching them. The reality is that this happens
often, leading to boxes of un-used brochures or newsletters or email campaigns
that fail to reach their targets, simply because you couldn’t find them. So here
are some of my suggestions for creating and maintaining an up to date contact
list which supports your business marketing ambitions.
Don’t over think it.
Too often, the simple contact list has been over engineered
into a fully fledged CRM (customer relationship management) database with
multiple fields designed to tell you in great detail more about your clients
and prospects, based on their particular interests, where the contact came
from, what their last transaction with you was all about, the name of their
pets and favourite holiday destinations… you get the picture. And all too
often, though it might have seemed like a great idea to capture all this information,
this simply makes the task too onerous and hence it doesn’t happen. Further, much
of that qualitative information - in my experience - isn’t used. What I suggest
is the KISS principle which simply captures their name, surname, position,
company address and email address – the essentials for making contact. You
could add mobile contacts for SMS campaigns if you plan on doing these are part
of your marketing/communication plan. You might add one extra category if the
type of contact is important, provided you intend to segregate your marketing.
Otherwise, don’t bother.
The annual spring
clean
If you have an existing contact list which is used
reasonably often, it should be reasonably up to date. Return to senders and
bounced email addresses see contacts removed or fresh contact information
added. However, it is still worthwhile going through your list, line by line,
at least once a year. It will prompt you to remove a few contacts you no longer
want, and remind you also of people who should be there, but aren’t. It’s also
a good opportunity to remind you about people you haven’t been in personal
contact with for some time. It’s especially important to spring clean if you
don’t use your list often. Sending material to deceased people is a serious
faux pas. And yes, it happens.
The monthly refresh
Every month, your office should be pooling business cards
collected during the month and adding these to your contact list. Signature
blocks on emails from clients or client prospects also serve the same purpose,
and should be copied into your contact database. If this isn’t done regularly,
even recent client prospects can miss out on important collateral or news. And it’s
these most recent contacts that can sometimes be the most important to maintain
communication with. The alternative is to let them forget about you, which
surely you don’t want?
Make it someone’s
job.
Unless someone in your office takes responsibility for being
the list nazi, it’s quite probably going to languish. They only need to take
responsibility for collecting new information from others in the office and be
prepared to nag to see that it happens. Shared responsibility is fine in theory
but in practice, unless someone’s driving it, it won’t happen.
There are a few other tricks about sourcing and expanding
contact lists so that your business has the ability to be directly exposed to
your target market, but for many businesses, simply observing the disciplines
outlined above would be a big step forward. It should be as routine as the end
of month accounts. If your business is ignoring this essential piece of
business development infrastructure, you aren’t even able to make the most of
opportunities when they arise, even if you want to.
