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Mining Your Prospective Customer Base: Spread Content, Gather Email Addresses, Stay in Touch!

CustomMade Staff, contributor

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Patrick’s recent post “Leveraging Your Marketing Activity with the Internet” sparked some good conversation. One comment in particular really hit home: mikeyt6214 is a marketer by profession, woodworker by hobby and he touched upon some useful tips to succeed as a Pro:

“Hi All. I'm just a hobbyist as a woodworker. My career is actually in marketing. Patrick offers lots of great suggestions here for marketing to the world at large. However, a major one that needs to be added is mining your customer/prospect base. As cabinetmakers and woodworkers, you have an invaluable marketing resource--content. By content I mean the ongoing library of work that you create--pictures, etc. Use it. Twitter, facebook, and email are easy to use and provide a method of ongoing communication that doesn't require sales calls. Make sure your web site has facebook and twitter links that direct toward joining your group. Add a field on your website for collecting email addresses and link it to a simple email marketing program like Constant Contact. Then, when you have completed new work, gotten in some fantastic new stock, or even developed a new design, shout it out to your audience. Successful marketing is all about repetition. Stay in front of consumers because you never know when they will come to a buying decision.” - mikeyt6214, November 18th

So let’s break down mikeyt6214’s advice for getting more customers:

1.    Generate Content – If you build it (and then spread it), they will come. Every time you create something, photograph it, write about it, and spread it across your website and the social media world. It may sound like a pain at first, but it’s an easy and economical way to market your business. Content leads to traffic leads to YOUR website gaining a lot more visibility.

2.    Gather Email Addresses – Once prospective customers find you on facebook or make it to your website, you’ve gotta keep track of them.  We dig mikeyt6214’s suggestion to collect emails through Constant Contact or comparable programs. One great way to draw people in is to have them sign up for your FREE monthly newsletter: you kill two birds with one stone by not only collecting emails but by keeping potentially consumers in the know about what you’re up to…
…which leads us to the third and final tip from mikeyt6214:

3.    Stay in Touch! The emails you gather are a direct portal into a qualified lead base. These folks have found you, they have an interest in your work, and they’ll buy from you if you give keep reminding them how awesome your business is. It’s all about repetition. Of course, you don’t want to abuse those emails (you know when too much is too much, think about the annoying emails you delete every day, and don’t be that company…).
“Stay in front of consumers because you never know when they will come to a buying decision.” Thanks for the wise words, mikeyt6214!

Anyone have any additional tips on mining your prospective client base, generating content, gathering emails, or keeping up with your potential clients?

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Comments (1)

mikeyt6214 writes: Hey, thanks for the props! Always happy to help out the pros who offer me so much cabinetmaking advice through this site and the magazine. Glad to know someone is listening! Not always the case when you are in marketing! :-)

Couple of things to add to the "spot on" follow up article above. Email, facebook, and twitter are essentially the same marketing mechanism just with slightly different functionality. The social networks basically just offer users a different channel for communications. So, if you create an email, just simplify it and then distribute through twitter or facebook. Also, one of the benefits of a tool like Constant Contact is that "unsubscribe" links are automatically on the bottom of the email so you don't have to manage those requests.

Next, create a plan and stick to it. Maybe you set up a schedule of announcements every two weeks. Just do it even if you don't think the announcement is very useful.

The interesting thing about this approach is that suddenly the marketing goal of your site, that show, an advertisement, etc is not selling a new piece of work. The primary goal becomes to capture an email address or follower. This greatly lowers the barrier to entry. The goal of the email or facebook update then becomes to get a new sale or opportunity to make a sale. Approach it in this manner and marketing becomes much, much easier and much more successful.

Finally, if you don't have the time or the skills or the desire, outsource it. It's not that expensive and it will only take three or four new customer to recoup the cost.

Good luck!

Mikeyt6214
Posted: 3:26 pm on November 18th

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