A few final words about getting to know your customers:

Potential customers

To cement a relationship with potential customers, keep track of inquiries that come in on your website.  What are potential customers curious about?  What problems do they have with products purchased from your competitors? If there are common themes to the questions you are getting, you can be sure you are learning how you can serve both current and future customers better.

Provide a free source of information on your website.  Use a blog, FAQ page, or articles to answer the most frequent questions you get. When people turn to you for information, they will see you as a reliable source, and may begin purchasing products from you as well.

Lost bids

Do you keep track of jobs you bid on, but didn’t get?  What about customers who have stopped using your products and services?  Don’t lose these people's contact information and any other information you gathered from them in the course of preparing your proposal. Following up with a lost prospect or former customer may help you to attract business if the person is not happy with the product or services of the company currently serving him.

I once bid on a project to write a business coaching series for a consultant who helped other companies achieve their full potential.  I was not the successful bidder, but I kept the consultant’s e-mail address.  In December, I sent him a holiday greeting, asking if he had gotten his project completed.  I didn’t offer to lower my price or to re-do the project, I simply followed up to see if there was anything else he needed.

As it turned out, he and the other writer had not worked well together, and the consultant was so happy I had taken the initiative to follow-up, he hired me to do the rest of the series – a $10,000 contract!

I had another client who worked with me fairly steadily for over a year, then appeared to have dropped off the edge of the earth.  After awhile, I learned of a huge snowstorm that had hit his town, so I e-mailed him to be sure he and his family were okay.  This gave him an opportunity to reply to me and say he had been bought out at his first company, but was now starting a new company and wanted my help. If I hadn’t taken the initiative to e-mail him, my company wouldn’t have been at the top of his mind as he looked for a website copy writer.