Direct & e-Marketing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Direct & e-Marketing - Essay Example Starting from the stage of development of a business plan to the actual operations of any venture, customers retain a pivotal importance in all activities. There are primarily three perspective of a business plan. One is from an entrepreneur's perspective, one is the venture capitalists or Financier's perspective and the third is customer's perspective. It means a business should only be viable if it provides a product or a service that can be of value to customer and can help in customer's utility maximization. When designing a product or deciding about what services the business will provide, customer segmentation is done to ensure that the right product is given to right customers at the right time. All these efforts are made to ensure that more and more customers will be attracted towards an organization's offering and a positive image can be built so that business can create good will in the market and enjoy increase in sales. However, no businessperson can turn his eyes from attracting new customers and increase its customer base but this is also true that old or existing customers also hold a special place when it comes to increase sales and revenue generation. Research shows that old and existing customers are much more effective to increase sale for an organization. A very serious misunderstanding businesspersons use to have these days is that they think if someone becomes their customer, he or she will stay with them, their organization and their product, forever, which happens not to be the case in most of the circumstances. Slowly and gradually, they lose their customer base day by day and keep on wondering why the customers are not coming back to them or why they are leaving. Many reasons have come up for this loss in customer base. Customer loses his or her loyalty when he feels that: Your offering is unfair or unjustified They have some problem or issue relevant to your product or service which remains unsolved or un attended They have a better offer from your competitor He simply feels that you have no care or attention towards your existing customers and he feels ignored. Customers repeat their purchases when they feel themselves loyal with your organization and associate themselves with your product. Still we see organizations spending most of their money in attracting new customers and clients instead of maintaining good relationship with their existing clients to pursue them for repeat purchase. "Before you spend your time and money going after new customers and clients you do not currently have a relationship with consider the following statistics: Repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers. Referrals among repeat customers are 107% greater than non-customers. It costs six times more to sell something to a prospect than to sell that same thing to a customer (Laura Lake, 2007)". Building relationship with existing customer is easy to do. The only thing organizations should keep in mind is to treat customers as a partner in their business and realize the true worth of their customers. Businesses should focus on attracting new customers but at the same time put every effort to please their existing clients. It is necessary because existing clients are the source of a positive word of mouth. A positive word of mouth is the fastest and least costly source of marketing. People tend to believe someone, who has experience your product or s