Any better way to acquire new customers?

The experience from a meeting last week really gives me an opportunity to share and discuss the “appropriate” ways to acquire new customers with you.

My adventure started when my marketing lady and I had an great opportunity in meeting an executive of a travel agency…

Frankly, my presentation to the senior person was not very impressive that I was told to speed it up in less than 10 minutes, which I expect ordinary executives are supposed to be interested in. However, after the short presentation, what interested me was another around 30-minute technical discussion on email marketing that my marketing lady had no clue on it or even I could hardly handle.

Our discussion revealed that the executive knows everything about email marketing, and asked me any technical know-how to “bypass” the security policies implemented by Google and Yahoo as he has been figuring out how to do email blast to around 300K contacts with free email accounts. The background of the discussion is that he did buy a server and subscribe server co-location service just for the purpose, and had tried many email blast software just with the intention to do the blast to the huge number of email addresses that he had no idea of how valid they are.

What surprises me is that it is common that, especially in Hong Kong, prospecting solutions like product catalog, email marketing, social marketing, etc. are lot more preferable than solutions about customer loyalty building for something would be seen immediately, but I can hardly imagine the situation is as severe as that.

Buying a server and server hosting service are not expensive, but how about the effort in making sure the validity of the email addresses, the risk in being treated as spam by 2 of the biggest internet service providers, or any risk in preaching any privacy policies of OFTA? In this sense, email marketing is indeed very experience, if you put in this way.

On the contrary, how would he, or we, think if most of his effort is rather spent on serving his existing customers, such as:

- Survey on their experience or any room to improve their quality of service;
- Special offer to loyal customers, or anyone who indeed honestly advises him with any improvement; or their friends, colleagues, families, etc.;
- Experience shared from one of tour members his or her wonderful experience in the past tours; and
- more…

I’m not against prospecting new customers, as we all do cold calling and email blast. However, I think customer loyalty building should be as equal, or even be more important as effort in asking a new customer to re-purchase is usually less than that in acquiring a new customer.

Undoubtedly, besides, email marketing is one of most effective and affordable marketing tools, “permission-marketing” is highly recommended, not only because of any official regulations, but also because none of us wants to receive 30 junk emails a day and miss any other important.