Managing your contact database

Advantages of Using a Virtual Assistant

Many of our clients don’t have enough time to keep in close contact with their customers and clients. If you want your customers to view your business as professional, approachable and sociable, then a Virtual Assistant can help. Touching base regularly with clients can help retention. It’s always a good idea to keep customers up-to-date with your business developments, new services and current offers. If you offer a particular service, you want your customer to think of you first when they need that service.

First thing is to get organised! Perhaps your contacts database is in need of some major work. Or you need to create an online contact database from scratch. This is where a Virtual Assistant can help and format your contact database in a way that’s suitable for many different uses. It could be a simple spread sheet or an Access Database for example. Perhaps you will choose to use a more developed CRM system.

Once you have a useable database, there are lots of options for communicating with customers.

  • Use mail merge with your database and send a regular hard copy newsletter including business updates and offers.
  • Load your database into services such as MailChimp to contact customers via email marketing.
  • Send Christmas cards to customers. UK based Virtual Assistants can use services such as Send a Card to do this. You can add a message letting your customers know that you will be in touch in the new year.
  • Ask your Virtual Assistant to go through the database and add all your contacts to your social media networks so that you can keep in closer contact.
  • Ask your Virtual Assistant to update the database with new customers and send them a welcome email when they first use your service.
  • Get in touch with customers who haven’t used your service for a while and send them a special message. There’s value in doing this as a lot of business can be generated from old contacts.
  • Have you gathered up a few business cards when out at networking events or when meeting clients? Why not send these to your Virtual Assistant so that they can be added to the database? You could scan them in to send them, or take a photo of them.

You may benefit further from having a structured marketing and communications plan for your business. Don’t have one? Why not get in touch and see if we can help you?