There is loads of material available on how to attract more customers and they all convey more or less the same thing: excel at networking; have a good social media presence; participate in forums; carry out email marketing; create an engaging website and so on.

Since Diwali is round the corner and it's a time of fresh departure, I would like to share a few novel ideas that we have implemented in our business.

 1. Handling business cards

One usually goes home from a networking event with a pocket full of business cards collected during the day! But what happens to these afterwards? Perhaps neatly arranged in a folder waiting for some day to establish a contact!

We developed an Android APP (Mi_Cards) that performs multiple functions in one go. It clicks a picture of the business card and one can add a few notes on the spot. The person who exchanged the card gets an instant thanking SMS, the business card is stored in the phone memory and the entire content including the business card image is emailed to our CRM system. We return the card back to the person so that he can use it elsewhere.

 2. Sending personalised mails

How many times we would have received marketing mails with our name mentioned as ‘Undisclosed recipients’ or our ID among a few hundred. These are not personalised mails but SPAMs.

So what is the alternative? One may exclaim! “I know about mail merge and what is so new about it!” I feel mail merge is a laborious exercise and for a small company where secretaries do not exist, sending personalised marketing mails should be much more simple.

We use an Outlook plug-In for this purpose. One has to write all the mail IDs of the customers in the ‘To: ‘ box as normal. The contents are written only once in the mail body. The plug-In takes over and each person gets the mail with only his/her email ID in the ‘To:’ box

3. Video messages & white board animation

Long text no longer attracts readers. All efforts are wasted if the mail we wrote so laboriously is simply trashed. Why not try very short videos instead. We use software that helps us prepare ‘White board animation’ videos which get a much better viewing than power-point slides.

4. Scheduled emails

Many a times, and knowing the habits of our customer contacts, we schedule our emails so that these reach them at a convenient time. No point in sending marketing mails on a Monday morning when our prospective customer will be busy with his/her weekly meetings. 

5. Research & suggest

Being a software company let me share my experience in this industry. After implementing software, we try to understand our customers’ business in more depth and this has helped us suggest improvements and new ideas to our customers. Recently, our suggestion to implement a smart phone APP for field service management to a customer, helped him gain  a lot of mileage with his principal and also earned us business.

Whatever be the innovative approach that is adopted, one thing stands tall above all - it is the trust that is built with the customer. In this Diwali week, we are thankful to all our customers who have trusted us with more and more business.

Happy Diwali!

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, official policy or position of GlobalLinker.