Consumers are more empowered than ever before. Whether sat curled up on the couch with a tablet on their lap, stood waiting for a bus with a smartphone in their hand or on a rail journey with the laptop plugged in, people are online all the time. They can find the best deals, the newest offers, the latest trends there and then. How on earth are you and your business meant to keep up?

Well each touch point with a customer will tell you something about them. The method of communication used – a customer may have completed a webform, visited a website, clicked through from an email, sent a

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Not all your customers are the same, they all differ – and they do that in all sorts of ways. You may have important clients that invest heavily in your products and services, or casual clients that spend a small amount of money with you every now and then. Some customers may focus on one tiny area of your product portfolio; early adopters may just buy the latest gadget out there regardless of price whereas another customer group will hunt out what’s on special offer, happy to buy last year or end-of-season models for a cheap price.

With this in mind, it’s clear that a blanket

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I have just finished a college course. It kept me busy for over a year and was a fairly intensive thing to do on top of working full-time at OpenCRM and so in all honesty I can’t really say that I’m missing the added workload right now. I learnt a lot during the past year, and one thing I noticed was that every new skill picked up or knowledge gained not only provides you with answers but also opens doors to many more questions. In short, it highlighted the fact that learning never reaches the “Game Over” stage – we are always located somewhere on the learning curve.
Far from being

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To stay that social media is evolving on a daily basis is pretty much stating the obvious. It’s probably one of the fastest moving areas that any business owners and marketing team tries to keep up on, and also one which raises more and more questions the further you delve into it.

One mistake I have seen businesses make time and time again is to wear these social media site logos on a shop front/ email template/ side of van like a badge of honour – as in “Quick, put the Facebook logo up there!”. Well, simply putting a logo in a prominent position is like stating you can contact us

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Or to put it another way, how to maintain an active customer base. This post is inspired by an interesting statement concerning inactive customers – that the probability of a customer being active in the future is reduced by half for every additional year of inactivity. (Source: Journal of Interactive Marketing, Volume 27, Issue 1, February 2013, Pages 28–35)

The immediate response to this might be to not let your customers slide into inactivity! There are a number of measures you can take to prevent this. First and foremost you can ensure that you continue offering your product range or

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