Susan Wilson Solovic: Hello and welcome to sbtv.com, I’m Susan Wilson Solovic and today we’re starting a serious of programs on The Power of Relationships with Eric Groves who’s the senior vice president of Constant Contact. For those of you who don’t know, Constant Contact is the leading company providing e-mail marketing and online surveys for all type of small businesses and organizations. Welcome and thanks for joining us Eric.
Eric Groves: It’s great to be here Susan, thanks for having me.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Now as I’ve said the tittle of today’s program in our serious of programs actually is The Power of Relationships and that’s really big for all of you at Constant Contact, what do you mean about with that?
Eric Groves: Well the power of relationships really came out of a lot of the training that we do with small businesses and what we started to notice when you talk to small businesses is that when you ask them where the revenue was going to come from in the next month and the month after that. They would often say that we come from their existing costumers, yet when you ask them, what you doing to market your business.
They would turn comeback to you and say well I’m doing this to track new costumers. But there never was a piece of the equation that really addressed how they were marketing to their existing costumers. So the power relationships was really developed to help them build a marketing strategy, to pursue their existing costumers and keep them coming back.
Susan Wilson Solovic: What about prospective costumers you talked about the importance of being proactive and really engaging them and I have to say that sounds really good, but how do you do that?
Eric Groves: Well again when you’re going to that advertising approach to marketing your business, they’re drawing new businesses an new costumers to you and the thing that you have to really think about is where are they coming to you and how are they coming to you and how can you create an initial connection with those prospects. So whether their coming in from your website or your store front, you’re looking for a way to make a connection with them that you can leverage over time to build a relationship out us.
Susan Wilson Solovic: And when you’re talking about prospective costumers coming to you, I think a lot of us make the mistake of, Yes they come in the door once but once they’re gone, they’re gone. So if I’m looking for way to really engage them with e-mail marketing, can you give me some tips?
Eric Groves: Sure. When you’re sending your e-mail marketing communications out, what you’re really trying to do is communicate your knowledge and your experience as a small business owner. So unlike the big stores out there like Wal-Mart who is so impersonal when you walk through the door, as a small business owner you got something of value, which are your passion and your knowledge about your business. If you intern can take that knowledge and share it with your costumer base, then what will you have is those people will become very attracted to you and loyal to you and you’ll start to build a relationship through that connection. So sharing that knowledge is really a key.
Susan Wilson Solovic: And let’s go back and go back to the existing costumers now because you’ve said a lot small businesses the potential new business coming through their existing costumers, have you really build a strong trust in relationship with those costumers?
Eric Groves: It’s a great question. It really comes overtime and it’s been some great research out there that says after ten positive interactions a costumer has referred seven new costumers to you and that’s really when you know trust happens. So the question is how do have those ten positive interactions overtime and how can you possibly speed up that process. Well certainly if you’re a store owner, you can invite people into the store and they could have a great experience. But through an e-mail communication strategy, you can take that initial interaction and you can make it happen time after time and bring them back and really speed up the time that it takes to get those ten interactions to happen for that trust to form and for new costumers to come in your way through your existing costumers.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Because I think a lot of us who deal mostly online with our costumers, it seems very impersonal so what you’re saying is we can use this to build up that old costumer service report that we have traditionally in the bricks and mortar stores.
Eric Groves: Exactly and to share your personality. When they walk in the door and they see your face and they can interact with you. You don’t just look at them and say “hi, how you doing? And a have a nice day” you engage with them and your personality comes through. That’s the same type of thing that we coach our costumers to do in their communications, is take your personality and share it with your costumers when you’re sharing your knowledge and they’ll just become that their friend of yours and they’ll keep coming back and they’ll tell others about you.
Susan Wilson Solovic: That is really great advice; I love that getting your personality interjected into your strategies. You also mention though that costumers once build that trust well actually refer business to you. Is there anything that you can do with an e-mail marketing strategy to actually encourages that from your costumers?
Eric Groves: Certainly. Well the first thing that you can do is write really good content so they’re going to share it. Because everybody has that set of ego in the back of their head saying “oh if know something you don’t know, I want to share with other people so they’ll think I’m really smart” so good content is the best way to get your viral network going. But it’s also okay to ask them, say hey, could you refer me to three other people or could you forward on this message to three other people that you might be interested. We actually have some costumers that run contest because they know that their friends, the friends of their recipients are logical people that they should be connecting with.
And so though run a contest it says hey if you forward this of to five other people, we can see that you forwarded it off and we’re going to give an award to one of the people that forward something off this month. And it’s just a great way to kind a get fun into the mix and get other people doing, you’re forwarding your messages on to their friends.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Everybody likes to win something, don’t they?
Eric Groves: Everybody likes to win something.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Absolutely, now Eric, on your website in Constant Contact you also have tools and information in resources. Share with us a little bit about what’s there and what’s available.
Eric Grover: Sure. We have a number of different resources for our costumers and for just anybody who’s interested in learning more about e-mail marketing. I f you go to Constantcontact.com you’ll see a tab, it says learning center. There you’ll see links to our daily Webinars that we run and educational topics of how to create a campaign, how to create great subject lines. You’ll also see links to our local seminars and we’ve got what we call regional development directors in ten different cities around the U.S that run free seminars on e-mail marketing and how to build a strategy for your business. There’s also links to our hints and tips archive, where we go figure have an e-mail marketing newsletter on how to write marketing newsletters and a bunch of other resources there that you can just go through with some of our on demand and some are live.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Of being the expert you better be good at e-mail marketing, he said he’s right. Absolutely
Eric Grover: We worked hard on it.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Well Of Course, we’re going to be talking a lot of that those topics in future programs with our Power of Relationships series so be sure, we appreciate you’d being here and we hope everybody will be joining us.
Eric Grover: Yes. So looking forward to it, should be a lot of fun.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Great, and thanks for tuning in and be sure to join us again for The Power of Relationships with Eric Groves senior vice president of Constant Contact, I’m Susan Wilson Solovic and remember at sbtv.com small business is our only business.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services