How to Use Customer Outreach to Connect with Your Audience (2024)

A Super Bowl halftime spot costs $7 million for a 30-second spot. Why? Because 130 million viewers are watching. You may not have the marketing budget for this type of outreach, but getting customers familiar with your brand is crucial to building a successful business.

Whether you spend money on a TV ad or downsize and email prospects, customer outreach is an important way to acquire new customers and recapture old ones. Here are some customer outreach tactics you can use to grow your business.

What is customer approach?

Customer outreach is a marketing strategy that proactively reaches out to both potential and existing customers. Also known as outbound marketing, it can include many different strategies, including cold emailing with personalized messages or making phone calls to previous customers to re-engage them.

For small business owners, a customer contact plan is an essential part of building new relationships and maintaining existing customers. If you can reach the right person at the right time, you can build customer relationships that turn people into loyal customers for life.

Consider, for example, Katherine Oyer, founder of baby clothing retailer Francis Henri. She wanted to make the most of the moment when a customer unwrapped her product, so she thought a lot about how the packaging could build customer engagement and loyalty.

“We send a handwritten thank you card with every package,” she says in an episode of Shopify Masters Podcast. “I wanted the experience of receiving a box to be almost like a gift.”

This handwritten note is a form of outreach that builds familiarity with customers and encourages them to come back.

Channels for contacting e-commerce customers

If you want to expand your customer outreach efforts, you have multiple channels to reach past and current customers. Here are some platforms that companies use as part of an outreach process:

Social media

Social media posts, especially on a social media platform like TikTok that prioritizes new impressions, are a great way to introduce your brand to potential new customers. To further target your social media reach, you can send personalized direct messages (DMs) to potential leads.

Email and SMS

Email and text campaigns are cornerstones of a strong marketing strategy for any business. These methods enable the implementation of multiple outreach strategies, including targeting, personalization, and offering concrete offers such as a free trial or a sample to the lead.

Paid ads

If you’re looking for new customers or want to increase traffic to your website, paid ads are a powerful tool. Paid ads can be a customer’s first point of contact with your business. You can then use a personalized customer approach to build strong relationships.

Personal contact

In-person stores, pop-ups and online events enable personal interactions with shoppers and offer the opportunity to convert them into brand loyalists.

Customer engagement strategies for e-commerce companies

Contacting customers requires more than just creating an email template with a simple contact message and hitting send. Let’s look at some top strategies your sales team can use to give your customer outreach a competitive edge.

Target the right buyers

Even the most engaging social media post in the world won’t convert someone who isn’t interested in your product. If you want to increase conversions, your customer outreach campaign should focus on a specific audience.

To get to know your ideal customer demographic naturally, take the time to read customer feedback or scroll 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 the ways that are most likely to appeal to them.

Offer something appealing

You’re competing with other companies in your industry who are also trying to grab your audience’s attention. So how do you gain a competitive advantage when your sales reps are making cold calls or when you send your first message to a prospect?

One option is to offer something that has greater perceived value than what your competitors are offering. This may include tangible items, intangible items, or a mix of both. Free gifts, coupons, discounts, referral points, expert-conducted research, interesting anecdotes, and humor are all ways to spice up your outreach campaign and increase the likelihood of a purchase.

Personalize your messages

Personalization isn’t just a nice gesture – it can help generate up to 40% more sales. For the most personalized outreach possible, write tailored emails or DMs to individual users or small audience segments. Additionally, try techniques like abandoned cart emails or merge tags that automatically populate customer information (like their name or email address) to show audiences that you value their time and business.

Follow up

If you reach out to someone directly and don’t get a response, don’t give up – reach out again. In fact, sending a follow-up email can increase response rates by up to 49%. The best reminder emails are short, friendly, and contain an obvious call-to-action (CTA) for the recipient.

Don’t forget to keep your later follow-ups personal so they know they’re not just getting a mass email. In addition, you can increase your stake every time with new discounts or service offers.

Automate what you can

In an ideal world, you would personally write and send tailored messages to each individual buyer, but above a certain number of customers, this isn’t feasible. To implement an outreach strategy with a high volume of customers, you need to balance your personalization efforts with automation.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software can help you keep track of new and existing customers without having to deal with time-consuming and repetitive tasks like writing an entire email for each prospect. These automation services can become a crucial component in increasing your reach while maintaining a personal touch.

Use every touchpoint

Social media posts and email campaigns may be the bread and butter of marketing, but don’t ignore other touchpoints that can have 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.