Turning your contacts database into new and repeat business
Spring has sprung and thoughts turn to baseball, fun in the sun, budding romance, and how best to market to your database of contacts.
It's important to market to your database regularly, but that's not to say the message should be repetitive. Use the time of year, holidays, or events like tax day, daylight savings or the end of the school year, to tailor a message that will grab their attention.
To get the best results from your marketing campaigns, import your entire database into XSites’ Contact Manager. If you haven’t done this yet, click to learn how. Doing this allows you to market effectively and consistently to all leads – whether you received their information through your XSite, a referral source or from a chance meeting at the coffee shop.
Here are three ways to use your database for some effective spring marketing:
- has a ton of timely pre-made e-mail and print campaigns. You can custom edit them to your heart's content. You can also create a series of ads that hit important future holidays and events, set it and forget it. XSellerate is the easiest, most cost effective way to use your database to its fullest to get more new business and generate referrals.
If your database is large enough, this is a great time to test how your list responds to different campaigns. Send a third of your list an informational XSellerate campaign on home improvements, a third a friendly Memorial Day greeting, and a third an idea how to use the cash from a new home equity loan. Measure the response to each. Remember: Half of marketing is measurement — there's no need to reinvent the wheel each time you send out an ad. Measure the effectiveness of different kinds of messages and build on success. And with the addition of clicktracking to XSellerate, it’s easier than ever to track the effectiveness of your campaigns. Click to learn more about how XSellerate clicktracking works.
- Team up with local vendors, such as deck refinishers, landscapers, gutter cleaning services and chimney sweeps, and ask them to come up with a special offer for your contacts. They should fall all over themselves to do this — your database is going to be made up of homeowners and prospective home buyers whose contact information they may not have. Try and get two or three special offers together this way for one campaign.
Then, market their offers to your list. Make sure you let them know who it's from, and make sure your branding is prominent. You're adding value to your relationship with your past clients and also sowing the seeds of future referrals from local partners.
- Do some spring cleaning yourself — of your contacts database. Organize your contacts if they're not already — former clients you've closed loans with, website visitors who started an application but never finished it, agents and others who have referred you business, and so on. The more information you can record about a contact the better you'll be able to target your marketing in the future.
