How to Strengthen Your Customer Relationships With Content Marketing

You may think that you have a great relationship with you customers simply because you sold lots of products, but are you truly reaching out to your customers and leads with effective content marketing and email marketing? How many customers are singing praises about how great your brand is and recommending you to everyone they know?

It's no longer good enough simply to have a great product.  As we talk about in our ebook “The Immediate Solution For Lead Generation," if you want to have a successful business, then your brand also has to have a good relationship with your customers.

Having a wonderful product is an excellent way to initiate a quality and everlasting relationship with your customers, but here are some other things you should be doing to make sure that the bond you and your customers share remains strong.

Adjust Your Marketing Content

Be Personalized

We've talked a lot about personalization the past and go in depth with it in our ebook “How To Be The King Of Content Marketing."  One thing that we cannot stress enough to our clients is that you need to personalize the material that you send out, and personalize it well.  We recently wrote a blog post that was all about stepping up your game when it comes to personalization, and for a good reason.

According to Econsultancy, 68% of all marketers say that personalization based on behavioral data does have a high impact on your return on investment. Better yet, 74% say that having personalized content means that you're bound to see an increase in engagement.

Personalization really boils down to using logic, analytical data, and the right tools to segment your lists, which usually requires the use of a fully integrated marketing automation system.  By having a marketing automation system set up, you can quickly and easily create different targets and segments that will send specific and well tailored messages to your leads based on their behavior on your site and online. This means you can send out an email that's more personal that simply throwing the lead's name into the email.

The Lyris Annual Email Optimizer Report recently revealed that 39% of all marketers who segmented their email lists had a higher open rate, experienced lower unsubscribe rates and had a higher rate of deliverability.  This means that you’ll not only have more leads and customers, but you’ll also be able to foster stronger relationships with your customers. Also, you'll eventually gain some of those “brand loyalists” that you’ve been hearing about.

Be Relatable

Email marketing is only the first frontier in terms of being personable.  If you really want to reach out, you've got to step out from behind the emails and get involved in other things, like start participating more on social media site and responding to comments on you blog.  This means responding not only to questions that people may be asking you about your products, services and company, but responding to positive as well as negative comments as well.  Here are some tips that will keep you personable and professional when replying to comments:

• Admit when you’re wrong.  We’re all human, right?  No one gets everything right 100% of the time.  So if a person calls you out on something and you realize that you were wrong, admit it.  Thank them for pointing it out and reassure them – as well as anyone reading the comments – that you and your company are doing your best to solve the problem, or prevent it from happening in the future.

• Be timely in your responses.  Nothing’s worse than letting a comment sit there days without addressing it.  Regardless of whether it’s a positive or negative comment, try to reply within 24 hours, even if your reply is simply telling them that you’ll get back to them in a day or two.

• Use relaxed language.  One of the worst things that you can do is respond to social media comments with language like, “Thank you for your question” or, “We appreciate your concern”.  This probably isn’t how you would speak to someone in person, so this isn’t the way you should be responding on blogs and social media.  Be respectful while also using friendly conversational language.  Words like, “Wow, that’s an awesome review.  Thanks!” are far more effective than a bland, run of the mill “Thank you for your comment” response.

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