Study: Attracting and Retaining Customers a Priority for SMBs
Study: Attracting and Retaining Customers a Priority for SMBs
Posted 02/15/2010 at 6:26am
| by Paul Lilly
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Everyone knows customers are the lifeblood that drive a business, and to be successful, you have to balance efforts between finding new customers and retaining existing ones. Captain Obvious has been shouting this all along, and it looks like small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) are starting to listen, a new study suggests.
Market research firm Hurwiz & Associates surveyed a bunch of SMBs and found that half of them put finding and retaining customers as the biggest challenge in 2010 and No. 1 priority. Growing revenue came in second, while improving cash flow, staying profitable, and generating better leads also made the list.
"Customers are always important, but in difficult economic times every customer relationship becomes even more precious," said Joseph Nour, CEO of Protus. "Small businesses want to avoid churning customers, since it can cost as much as five times more to attract new customers than retain existing ones. The best strategy is to build a stable customer base and then work on attracting new customers from there. Maintaining quality communications is a critical part of that strategy."
Protus provides SaaS tools for SMBs and enterprises, so Nour has a vested interest in the topic. One of the solutions Protus sells is Campaigner, an email marketing service with more than 450 professional email templates and online forms designed to help expand contact lists.
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nduanetesh
February 15, 2010 at 8:04am
...the only reason this article is here is because you get paid per article. There is absolutely NOTHING "MaximumPC" about this info.
You've been padding your stats (and cluttering my RSS reader) with articles of questionable MaximumPC-ness for a while (e.g. "Company you've barely heard of buys company you've never heard of!"), but this is just ridiculous. Including the words "SaaS" and "email" in the last paragraph doesn't cut it.
Paul_Lilly
February 15, 2010 at 9:36am
This article (and the ones it sounds like you're complaining about) fall under our 'Maximum IT' umbrella, which we've recently added to the mix. We post about 3 IT and enteprise-related articles every morning.
While probably not the solution you're looking for, you're welcome to subscribe to our RSS feeds individually (news, reviews, features, etc), leaving out Maximum IT.
-Paul Lilly
QuakindudeMod
February 15, 2010 at 8:15am
ANYONE claiming to be "Maximum" about their PC and the industry would do well to pay attention to technical companies who provide services on down to the fabricators of the parts we use. If you manage to find the pulse of the markets, you can predict where you're likely to spend more money in the future. Just like all the reporting on the RAM manufacturers woes that drove up prices, then suddenly, they dropped. Anyone who may have been paying attention to silicon purity advances, like yours truly, as well as other indicators, could have waited on buying RAM and gotten it for 75% less money.
You have to pay attention to a wide variety of sources to be informed in such a broad scoped and dynamic industry such as this.
Please keep these articles coming!
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