How first time buyers can convert into a loyal customer, learn and earn. Acquiring a new purchaser is easy; the real test starts when you have thousands of competitors trying to snatch that one-time purchaser from you.
It’s no hidden fact that customer retention has always been a tough process. With the term ‘monopoly’ no longer existing in the business sphere, every company indeed takes all measures to retain its purchasers.
A purchaser travels through 6 stages to develop loyalty for an organization.
In the above-mentioned cycle, the last two steps are where the purchaser finally becomes a repeat customer for the organization. Once a potential customer becomes a first-time buyer, this is when the sales professionals brainstorm ideas to come up with a solution – How to turn the purchaser into a regular customer? How to make him travel through the 5th and 6th stages?
When a purchase is made, inevitably the company gets the primary details of the purchaser. These details are no less than an opportunity for the marketers/sales professionals to start the conversion process. What needs to be understood that instead of direct promotion (which can be a turn off for most purchasers) company newsletters or delivery confirmation emails can be a smart way to start targeted communication.
An intelligent sales executive can use order and delivery confirmation email to cross-sell/up-sell products/services. Based on the first purchase, the sales professional can choose those products/services which will likely interest the purchaser.
In reference to the subject of converting one-off customer to a repeat buyer, there’s a new trend that has come up. Most leading organizations are now following proactive personalized communication through multi-channel data.
Most often a one-time purchase does not tell much about the preference of the purchaser. In such situations, marketing/sales professionals look into other mediums. For instance, the purchaser’s interactions with social media; his likes & shares
Monitoring the purchaser’s online behavior can give volumes of information to make the conversion strategy more accurate. This is why cookies are a great way to get an insight into the customer analytics. With the help of the cookies, marketing and sales professionals can find out –
Combining the online behavior with the purchase pattern, sales professionals can further drive their communication in the right direction. Let’s say if the purchaser has mostly searched for smartphones in your website, sending him a birthday greeting with personalized special offers on smartphones can encourage him to act (make a second purchase).
The above-mentioned tactics are a few examples of proactive personalized communication. Sales professionals can use other ideas/mediums to initiate a personalized communication with the purchaser.
Before concluding, it is important to note that converting a purchaser into a customer is much easy with web based CRM solution that provides a combined view of the purchaser details and his/her transaction. With accurate data available instantly, sales professionals have the convenience to easily frame personalized content or adapt the existing ones as per the online customer behavior.
Patricia is a full time CRM consultant at ConvergeHub and part-time blogger. She has earned herself quite a fame as a specialist and market expert in CRM software. In the last five year she has worked with various companies as CRM consultant to help them move their businesses to cloud. Her expertise lies in offering cloud CRM consultation, CRM customization and integration solutions to small enterprises. For last one she is engaged in building ConvergeHub, cloud-based CRM solution for SMBs, as a consultant.Follow her at Twitter: @convergehub
