Keeping in touch – the magic of 90 days.
Street smart business operators know that keeping in touch with customers on a regular basis is a key ingredient to growing and maintaining a successful business.
But how often is regular? What is the balance between maintaining contact versus over zealous annoyance?
Well the good news is that extensive research over twenty years, including that undertaken by famous global ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi and the Inter-Continental Hotel Group, clearly demonstrates that the magic figure is 90 days.
The research clearly demonstrated that this regular 90-day contact was the missing component in many businesses’ business development processes.
What Saatchi & Saatchi found was that the people they had been contacting by phone and face-to-face had a clear enough memory of the previous call and conversation for up to 90 days. After that, it was as though the mind had cleared itself of all memory. “Less than 90 days is fine, but never let more than 90 days go by without contact – which is approximately 60 working days” the research revealed.
Intercontinental Hotels found that guests were more likely to choose to stay with them again if they received some communication from them within 90 days after their last visit.
Even if your customers only do business with you on a sporadic basis, or even when they involve big ticket items such as cars and houses, you still have to keep in touch once every three months so that you’ll be in the running when they are ready to purchase again.
The rider to this of course is that you know who your customers are. It is vitally important that you have systems and processes in place that allow you to capture the contact details of your customers … no contact details (telephone number, email and postal address) equals no contact possible, which results in lost opportunities.
Keeping in touch with your customers via myriad communication channels is a must if you are to maintain contact in today’s overcrowded marketplace.
