For many businesses, money spent on their printing can be the most cost-effective spending they do. The reasons are familiar:

Many of your mailings go to existing customers, who buy from you with regularity.

Many of your mailings go to potential customers who will start to buy from you.

However, there is a simple fact of life which we all must acknowledge:

Some of your past customers are not buying any more, and they may not ever again.

Sad, but true. What to do? You are left with a choice: do you cut them off, realizing that when you do you will truly never see any more business from them?

Or do you continue to market to them year after year in hopes that someday your persistence will pay off?

The first thing you should do is to pare your mailing lists and make sure that there are no duplications or people whose names are spelled in different ways but are in fact the same person! Taking these steps may enable you to cull your mailing list by five percent.

Making sure that you have a program whereby the addresses of customers whose mailed items cannot be forwarded are systematically deleted from your mailing list is another way to make sure that you are not chasing customers who aren’t there.

So let’s say that you have taken those steps and you still have a long list of addresses which are valid but nobody’s buying anything.

The first approach is to develop a customer survey tailored just for this type of non-buying customer. Ask them to fill it out and specifically ask them for their perceptions of your company. Ask them about whatever negative feelings they may have, or about experiences they have had in the past which were negative and damaging to your relationship.

Give your customers the option of making their responses entirely confidential. The important thing that you want to convey to these respondents is a sincere desire to understand their honest thoughts. There are several benefits of this approach:

1) You will find out some things about your company and your services which may surprise you and may upset you but which will certainly make you sit up and take notice of what you are doing wrong;

2) You may very well cause the disaffected customer to have a better opinion of you and this may actually reignite a business relationship;

3) You may find some customers who simply have no need for your products and you can drop them from your lists with no regrets.

A second approach, if you feel that for whatever reason a survey is not in order, is that you can start selectively targeting these non-respondent customers with special offers and strong incentives to do business. Or you can target them with smaller catalogs which are geared only to those products which they have bought from you in the past. All of these approaches are designed to improve your customer relations, make your mailings more efficient, and in the long run save you money.

Take your business to the next level with print services by Conquest Graphics. They can be found online at ConquestGraphics.com.

Take your business to the next level with print services by Conquest Graphics. They can be found online at http://www.conquestgraphics.com

Author Bio: Take your business to the next level with print services by Conquest Graphics. They can be found online at ConquestGraphics.com.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: business printing, saving money