Finding Places to Make Valuable Connections
What makes my Bobby Flay experience different from my experience with most other businesses is that Bar Americana leveraged my great experience into a connection. Most businesses don’t take advantage of the multitude of opportunities they have to leverage the experiences they create. Instead, most businesses leave future connections to chance and hope that someone will return after a first touch. Accordingly, this results in the whole experience ending soon after the customer walks out the door. Most of the time extending an experience and making a connection is as simple as collecting contact information at every touch point.
Your email marketing list is the engine that powers your ability to connect with your customers, build lasting relationships, and ultimately build trust. In short, it is a critical business asset.
Finding the sources of your most valuable future customers requires a little investigative work on your part. In the following sections, I’ll explain what makes a valuable connection and show you where to find them. Some are obvious, others are elusive, all are critical to your success.
I enjoy meeting people, so every time I connect with someone it’s valuable to me. It’s crucial, however, to recognize the difference between making connections that are valuable to you and making connections that are valuable to your business.
You probably already know that you need to get your message in front of a lot of people to attract enough customers to stay in business. But collecting email addresses from everywhere and everyone doesn’t spell success unless it results in value to your business. If you’re meeting with or communicating to a lot of people, you need to learn to recognize the value opportunities so you can focus on them and avoid spending time collecting information that won’t result in value.
What differentiates a “connection” from a “valuable connection” is simply whether you have the ability to continue the dialog beyond the initial connection in a way that is likely to result in sales. Here are some questions you should ask yourself to determine whether you should spend time collecting information. If you can answer “‘yes” to all of the following questions, it’s a valuable connection.
1. Is the contact information valid and direct to the decision maker? Don’t collect email addresses such as [email protected] or [email protected]. Those email addresses are too generic and aren’t likely to result in a personal connection.
2. Is the person you’re collecting the information from interested in what your business offers? Some businesses insist that everyone is a prospect, but this simply isn’t true. If your target doesn’t have financial means, is already loyal to someone else, or just made a similar purchase and seems reluctant, don’t waste your time. There are plenty of opportunities to collect from interested prospects.
3. Is the place where you’re collecting the information conducive to establishing a relationship? For example, being confronted with the decision to sign up for a financial planner’s email list during a trip to the bank is more likely to be perceived positively than being confronted with the same decision during dinner at a restaurant with the family. Therefore, placing an email sign-up list or guest book on the counter at all the banks in town will result in a more valuable connection for the financial planner than placing a sign-up card at all the restaurants in town.
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