Relationship Building, Your Website, and Your Revenues

Several years ago, sales was a fairly simple affair. You listed your company and your product or service in the yellow pages, you ran print advertising campaigns, and you had a sales team who spent time drumming up new business, and making sure that your existing clients stayed happy with the service they were receiving.

These days, while many businesses still rely on some of those methods for a part of their marketing, most use the internet more and more to find new business, and stay in contact with their clients.

While this is fantastic, in terms of the cost savings that electronic marketing offers, there is the fact that the internet limits personal contact, and your ability to build relationships. Since most customers don’t buy on first contact (or the first time they visit your website) you’re going to have to learn a little about electronic relationship building if you want to see a marked impact on your sales from your online efforts.

Why is relationship building so important though?

The fact is that buying is often an emotional, rather than a purely rational decision. Your clients tend to buy from you for several reasons, one of which is trust. They trust you to deliver the products and services they need, at a price they can afford. They trust that you are an expert in your field, and often, they trust that you have their best interests at least partly at heart. A good sales rep can definitely convey those emotions in a few meetings, but how can a visit to your website, that cannot react or respond to their questions and statements achieve the same thing?

This is where most clever website owners turn to technology. Some of the options they have at their disposal include things like RSS feeds (really simple syndication), that allows them to deliver their news directly into the email inboxes of subscribers. Another method is to offer visitors a subscription to a newsletter, or a free product in exchange for their signup, and to send them newsletters about your company, industry, product, or service.

Some websites choose to integrate community elements, such as forums, chat rooms, or social networking on their site, allowing them to stay in contact with their visitors, and their wants and needs.

All of this is designed to help the small business owner, who is using the internet as a means of marketing and advertising, to stay in contact with customers, and to build relationships with visitors to their site.

Like the traditional relationship between a sales rep and a prospect, however, this is less about hard selling. In fact, website owners who simply bombard their subscribers or members with advertisement after advertisement soon find that their subscribers dwindle quickly, and their advertising does not do them much good at all!

The secret here is to offer your visitors valuable information. This could be news, or general information about your industry or company. It could be a how to that relates to your business, product or service, or it could be the occasional special offer. You could even offer your subscribers polls and surveys, that will let you know what they like and do not like, and what they want more of, or you could run competitions that require a purchase in order to enter.

All of these things help to keep your small business, and your website, in the forefront of your prospect’s mind, and helps you to become a known entity to them, rather than some website that they visited by accident, and never saw again.

Since most sales, even in the real world, only happen after at least five separate contacts between you or your sales rep and a potential client, it is easy to see what the benefit of building a relationship with customers online is.

Another benefit is that unlike your real world sales force, who will require fuel, cell phones, expense accounts and other items, not to mention their salary for their efforts, electronic relationship building is low cost, and easy to automate. Your site, and your marketing efforts, can run while you sleep, and they are likely to be a lot cheaper than employing a sales rep, while being able to reach potential customers around the world, instead of only in your immediate geographical area!

The more you stay in contact, and the more your prospect begins to see you as a friend or advisor, the more likely they are to eventually make a decision to buy from you. Once they have, continued contact, offering tips, advice and information, makes them more likely to continue to buy from you in the long term, and a loyal customer, who returns over and over again is far more valuable than one who only buys once – as any business owner will tell you!

So, if you are not already using your website to build relationships, and stay in contact with the people who visit it, and with your existing customers, then it is high time you made electronic relationship building a priority. After all, as they say, out of sight is out of mind, and if your visitors do not remember your site, they cannot be expected to buy from you!