This blog goes out on the day of Kent 2020 in 2011. This year, Custwin are spending time going around the biggest business exhibition in Kent, just meeting new people and catching up with the seemingly huge numbers of people that we know.
But we’ll also be seeing if some exhibitors are as customer focused as they need to be. As you’d expect, we’re giving this a ‘web’ angle.
We’re specifically focusing on which exhibitors take the time to offer us the chance to go onto their email newsletter mailing list.
Many will want to get our business cards and to put us on some sort of list, but we’re not interested in a quick burst of sales pitch activity after the event and instead are more interested in the opportunity that the exhibitors have to build up some trust over a longer period of time.
Many of the exhibitors we’ll meet will be completely new to us and the chances of us giving them business from so ‘new’ is pretty remote. However, we’re not adverse to trust being built, and a great way to build trust in a company is to make use of an email newsletter (ideally, once a month).
The Custwin email newsletter goes out once a month to people we know well but also many we don’t know, or barely know. Its purpose is to provide a selection of articles that may be of interest to readers, and to get across our views on how business should be won via websites and online marketing. It’s never a sales pitch and yes, it does work – at least one new client is gained from the newsletter each month.
So we’ll see what the figures look like after the event. Pre-event we’re estimating that of all those exhibitors we speak to, they’ll boil down to something like:
- 70% will want to get our card/details.
- Having got our details, a third of those will try to contact us in the days and weeks afterwards.
- Only 5% will specifically mention that they have an email newsletter that we could be subscribed to.
- About 10% may mention that they’re on Twitter and try to find out whether we are.
While we hope that all exhibitors do well out of the exhibition, it’s still only one day and it’ll be interesting to see how many miss out on the opportunity to build a longer-term trust-building relationship via methods such as getting people onto their email newsletters subscribers list.
We’ll do a later follow up to this blog to share the results, having given exhibitors a few weeks to make contact with us.