Marketing to Women in a Recession

Posted on | October 26, 2008 |

by Holly Buchanan

Wow, it’s rough out there. I was talking with a friend who’s a marketing director, and he’s faced with the daunting task of increasing new customers, finding ways to encourage existing customers to spend more money, and he has to do it all with a recently reduced marketing budget.

My advice to my friend was, if he wanted to reach women, he needed to do two things: Communicate and connect.

Delia Passi has a great post about how to reach out and communicate and connect with your female customers. As her what’s going on in her life. If you have a small enough client base, do it in person. If you have a larger base, consider a short customer survey that gives her a chance to share her thoughts with you.

The great thing about women is, when things go wrong, when they’re feeling stressed, they want to talk to people about it. They reduce that stress by communicating and connecting.

Now is the time to join in that conversation with your customers.

What specific steps can you take to communicate and connect with your female customers? I’m so glad you asked. Go back and re-read Creating Customer Evangelists by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba.

I actually purchased the audio recording and was positively eerie to listen to how dead-on their recommendations are for creating customer evangelists, especially with our current economic conditions.

Customer evangelism does three things:

It increases lifetime customer value, getting more from your current customers
It allows you to bring in new customers at little cost, largely letting your current customers do the work
It helps reduce the time it takes prospects to make a purchase decision

It’s a quick read and well worth it if you’re looking for some low-cost options for growing sales and customer relationships. The techniques will work with men as well, but I think they are especially important for communicating and connecting with your female customers.