A Super Bowl halftime ad costs $7 million for a 30-second spot. Why? Because 130 million viewers are watching. Now, you may not have the marketing budget for that kind of outreach, but familiarizing customers with your brand is crucial for growing a successful business.
Whether you shell out for a TV ad or go smaller and send potential customers emails, customer outreach is a significant way to get new customers in the door and old customers coming back. Here are some customer outreach tactics you can use to grow your business.
What is customer outreach?
Customer outreach is a marketing strategy that involves proactively reaching out to both potential customers and existing customers. Also known as outbound marketing, it can encompass many different strategies, including cold email outreach, with personalized messages or phone calls to past clients to engage them again.
For small business owners, having a customer outreach plan is an essential part of building new relationships and maintaining current customers. If you can successfully reach the right person at the right time, you can develop customer relationships that turn people into lifelong loyal customers.
For example, consider Katherine Oyer, founder of baby clothing retailer Francis Henri. She wanted to make the most of the moment a customer unboxes her product, so she thought a lot about how packaging could build connection and customer loyalty.
“We send a handwritten thank-you card in every package,” she says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “I wanted the experience of receiving a box to be almost like a gift.”
That handwritten note is a form of outreach that builds intimacy with customers and encourages them to return.
Channels for ecommerce customer outreach
If you want to build out your client outreach efforts, there are multiple channels at your disposal to reach past and current clients. Here are some platforms companies use as part of an outreach process:
Social media
Social posts, especially on a social media platform like TikTok that prioritizes new impressions, are a great way to get your brand in front of potential new customers. For an even more targeted approach to your social media outreach, you can send personalized direct messages (DMs) to high-potential leads.
Email and text
Email and text campaigns are fundamental pillars of a strong marketingstrategy for any company. These methods allow for the implementation of multiple outreach strategies, including targeting, personalization, and offering the lead something concrete like a free trial or sample.
Paid ads
If you’re searching for new customers or want to drive traffic to your site, paid ads are a powerful tool. Paid ads may be a customer’s first touchpoint with your business. You can then use more personalized client outreach to nurture them into strong relationships.
Face-to-face outreach
In-person stores, pop-ups, and online events allow for face-to-face interactions with shoppers, providing opportunities to turn them into brand loyalists.
Customer outreach strategies for ecommerce businesses
- Target the right shoppers
- Offer something appealing
- Personalize your messages
- Follow up
- Automate what you can
- Take advantage of every touchpoint
Customer outreach requires more than just creating an email template with a simple outreach message and hitting Send. Let’s examine some top strategies your sales team can use to give your customer outreach a competitive edge.
Target the right shoppers
Even the most captivating social media post in the world won’t convert someone who’s uninterested in your product. Your customer outreach campaign should focus on a specific target audience if you want to increase conversions.
To organically get to know your ideal customer demographics, spend time reading customer feedback or scrolling through customer comments on social media. Use demographic and psychographic information to segment your audience and create buyer personas so you can target different groups in ways that are most likely to appeal to them.
Offer something appealing
You’re competing against other companies in your industry that are also trying to get your audience’s attention. So how do you maintain a competitive advantage when your sales reps are cold calling or when you send your first message to a potential customer?
One way is to offer something of a greater perceived value than your competitors offer. This might include tangible items, intangible items, or a mix of both. Free gifts, coupons, discounts, referral points, expert-led research, interesting anecdotes, and humor are all ways to jazz up your outreach campaign and increase the likelihood of a purchase.
Personalize your messages
Personalization isn’t just a nice touch—it can help generate up to 40% more revenue. For the most personalized outreach, write tailored emails or DMs to individual users or small audience segments. Additionally, try techniques like abandoned cart emails or merge tags that auto-populate customer information (like their name or email address) to show audiences you value their time and business.
Follow up
If you reach out to someone directly and don’t get any response, don’t give up—reach out again. In fact, sending a follow-up email can boost response rates by up to 49%. The best reminder emails are short and friendly and include an obvious call to action (CTA) for the recipient.
Don’t forget to keep your subsequent follow-ups personal so they know they aren’t just getting a mass email. Plus, you can up the ante each time with new discounts or service offers.
Automate what you can
In an ideal world, you’d personally write and send tailored messages to every individual shopper, but beyond a certain customer count, this isn’t feasible. To execute an outreach strategy with a large volume of customers, you’ll need to balance your personalization efforts with automation.
Client relationship management (CRM) software can help you keep track of new clients and current clients without having to deal with time-consuming and repetitive tasks like writing an entire email for each potential customer. These automation services can become a critical component in increasing your reach while maintaining a personal touch.
Take advantage of every touchpoint
Social media posts and email campaigns may be marketing’s bread and butter, but don’t ignore other touchpoints that can make a big impact. Thoughtful packaging and other touchpoints, like post-checkout thank you messages, can make a big difference in your customer experience and help you achieve customer loyalty.
Customer outreach FAQ
What does outreach mean in business?
Outreach in business means contacting or messaging customers—both current customers and leads that have the potential to become new customers. Customer outreach is a holistic strategy for strengthening your relationship with customers by sending personalized messages, follow-up emails, or unique offers to entice shoppers to purchase.
Is customer outreach the same as customer engagement?
While customer outreach is primarily concerned with how a business is contacting new or potential customers, customer engagement is a measure of how your customers are interacting with your brand. A strong customer outreach approach can encourage customer engagement and potentially lead to more conversions.
How do you increase customer outreach?
First, create a customer outreach strategy that details who you need to target—whether that’s new or returning customers—what messages you will send, and which channels you will use. With a strategy in place, you can then reach out to leads and clients using techniques like emailing personalized messages and using enticing offers to encourage engagement.
