Demanding can come across as desperate and being desperate doesn’t reinforce your credibility and reputation, neither does it influence. There is a spate of people looking desperate for business, perhaps they are, but please stop emailing.

Demanding attention, pursuing a sale with vigour was once admired but it isn’t working. Seriously, it doesn’t. Stop using email as a marketing tool, turn that aspect of marketing into a blog, or a newsletter, or start tweeting. Use a tool that people can subscribe to because they are interested in what you have to say. Don’t suffocate prospects with email thats asks you to unsubscribe if you want to, yet, the prospect didn’t subscribe in the first place!

Emails are for correspondence not selling or marketing in its true form. There are other tools for that. Promote what you do gracefully, with dignity and in an intriguing way, don’t bombard people who really haven’t given you permission to talk to them!

What’s your churn rate? How many customers are you losing per annum? How close are you to companies in the mobile, financial, travel sector in terms of poor retention rates? True customer loyalty brings about long-term sustainable growth and that’s what really matters.

It’s interesting asking small business that question; what’s your leakage and how much are you spending on marketing to plug that leak? The results can be staggering. Some company’s I’ve spoken to have a 25% churn and are spending around 25% of turnover on new customer acquisition by buying growth, crazy and absolutely mad. In fact, it’s the most expensive route to growth.

So do you have a strategy of buying growth through promotions, sales pitches and bribery, or, are you organically growing through unabashed, superb customer experience and word of mouth.

Those implementing, measuring and growing through true customer loyalty are the ones who are spending very little on marketing and that dreaded word advertising. Increase your customer retention rate by 10% and what will that do to your bottom line?