Do Business Well

The first step in your strategic-planning process is to consider the kinds of questions listed below. Your answers to these questions are a reflection of the strategic goals and objectives you’ve defined for your business. If you don’t understand or can’t articulate these goals, you won’t be able to identify the criteria that will determine whether your program is a success or a failure. Continue Reading »

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A contact plan describes in specific detail how you will contact prospects and customers over a period of time to meet your specific goals. Each contact plan should contain the following sections:

A Written Contact Strategy

Your contact strategy spells out your goals and describes how ongoing customer communication will be used to meet those goals. When thinking about your contact strategy, be sure to consider the online service imperative. What are you going to offer your existing and prospective customers in exchange for giving you permission to contact them? When Wegmans Food Markets developed its contact strategy, it focused on extending the service and customer-oriented approach that you’ll find in its retail stores to email communication. It has developed a contact strategy that is focused more on delivering relevant content and information than on selling. Its goal is to ensure that it provides its customers with notification of special produce, recipes, health tips, and more in order to simplify their grocery shopping and food preparation tasks. Continue Reading »

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What kinds of things will trigger contact? In some instances you’ll plan and schedule your contacts far in advance (such as annual sales). Others times you’ll be responding to one of the following situations:

• Consumer requests contact. A customer might sign up to receive a personalized monthly newsletter or send an email asking about a new product you’re selling. When a new subscriber signs up for eHarlequin.com’s newsletter program, she immediately receives a welcome message confirming what she’s signed up for and ensuring that she will know how to modify her personal preferences if she should ever decide to change the content she wants to receive. When eBags receives an email inquiry from a customer, a skilled customer service professional looks up any relevant information and answers all My eBags membership, product, or order-related questions by email within 12 to 24 hours. An inbound email from a customer regarding an order the customer would like to return even triggers a series of follow-up emails that are automatically delivered within a few days of each other. These follow- up emails ensure that the customer’s product return is picked up, and that a replacement order is processed satisfactorily.

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