SEM to acquire new customers, email marketing to retain

A fundamental requirement of any business is to acquire new customers through marketing initiatives and retain them for future business. As a general rule of thumb, it is much cheaper to retain a customer than it is to acquire them (or re-acquire them if you are in the position of having lost your customer).

A practical and cost effective method of driving acquisitions is through search engine marketing. You can create bespoke campaigns that appeal to your target audience, with customized offerings and incentives to click through to your website. Once the visitor clicks, a custom made landing page will be displayed in order to make good on your offer, retain their email address and request their contact details as a potential lead for your business.

Search engine marketing campaigns can be highly targeted to your audience, ensuring that every dollar is accounted for and working towards providing you with a return on investment and acquiring as many leads as possible.

Now assuming that those leads were contacted and went on to become paying customers, how do you keep them informed about updates to your products and services? Will they know that you can now offer them more value and offer new services that will likely appeal to them? This is where email marketing comes into play.

Email marketing can be used as a form of customer retention or lead retention. Many companies do business with their clients, only to lose touch and potentially further business from not keeping up to date.

A few takeaway points;

• SEM campaigns are great for driving potential leads to your website, be certain you know how to drive the costs of SEM down before engaging. It will be expensive task if you don’t understand how to do so.
• Ensure you have an up to date email marketing list and software provider.
• Stay in contact with your customers. Tell them what you are up to – some new technologies that you are playing with, whatever it may be – constant contact is the key.