Lists

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.