Pursuing new business can indeed be a pretty exciting opportunity.
Capturing a qualified lead with the help of an easy to use CRM tool and then guiding it through an immersive and compelling customer journey that leads to a lucrative sale can be an extremely satisfying experience.
This is because it is always rewarding to know that you are playing a major role in generating revenue for your brand and company and this is what keeps you motivated to find new customers for your business growth .
Nonetheless, unfortunately marketing to prospective customers collected in your easy to use CRM tool is also a little overrated (at least in the grand scheme of things), that we do for our businesses.
This is because, there is a lot more to marketing than just acquiring new customers since successful brands are always focused on the bigger picture, which implies that they concentrate on the LTV (Lifetime Value) of each and every customer.
Hence (do not get us wrong) even though Top-Of-Funnel marketing and lead generation strategies are extremely critical for all businesses, nevertheless the existing customers are the most dependable source of revenue for brands, and so they should remain as the number one priority since your business just cannot grow and scale-up if you are constantly losing customers because your company provides poor or ineffectual experience to its customers.
Hence, in this article let us today step beyond just prospect marketing strategies and explore how to inspire customer loyalty using three proven methods that reduce churn and boosts business growth.
Most of us in business, associate nurturing with pushing and nudging prospects through the sales funnel. Nevertheless, while that is also certainly one example of nurturing, but in reality nurturing is not just for prospects.
This is because, the truth remains in the fact that since your customers are already investing in your company’s offerings, they are more primed for nurturing than even the hottest lead in your easy to use CRM tool.
Therefore, that being said here are a few ways you can nurture your existing customers to inspire customer loyalty.
Whenever you make a new sale or sign in a new customer, ensure to follow-up immediately over email or SMS, thanking the customer for their purchase.
Now, if your business is using a CRM like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM you must also launch an automated drip campaign using the software, providing the new customer simple directions on how they can get started with your offering(s).
Additionally, as the campaign progresses you can even add conditional logic and more details to the program to make sure that your customers are getting the very most out of your offerings.
Finally, ensure including recommended contents in all your outbound communications to take advantage of cross-selling opportunities which can help in further galvanizing your brand’s relationship with the customers.
It is extremely important that as an entrepreneur you must know a few key bits of information about all your customers, like their work and marriage anniversaries, birthdays, and obviously the history of their purchases.
Now armed with this knowledge, you can send emails celebrating these milestones and offer special discounts or any other perks based on the products and services that you offering to your customers.
For example, while an auto insurance firm might offer discounted renewal rates after three years of safe driving, restaurants and online apparel stores can provide BOGO (Buy One Get One) promotions on their customer’s marriage anniversaries and birthdays.
This is not only a great way to stay top of mind with your customers, but it also provides a signal that you care about your customers and are happy to invest in them in their success and/or for continuing business with your company.
Great brands always diversify and add new products and services to the offerings. This sort of innovation proves that they are serious about improving their existing business and are always eager to provide the best goods and services.
Therefore, whenever your business rolls out a new launch, ensure that your existing customers are the first to know.
You can also consider offering discounted pricings or free trial offer for early adopters of your brand’s new products and services.
Moreover, you can even ask your existing customers if they are willing to sign up for a waitlist, which is an excellent strategy that not only helps to build anticipation among your customers for your new launch but it also helps businesses to measure the demand for their upcoming products and services.
As a popular vendor of the best small and medium business CRM software we have observed in several surveys and studies that customers appreciate this sort of preferential treatment, therefore make sure to show your customers that they are valued by your company whenever it is possible, and at all times.
In several instances, businesses are so used to their own products and services they offer to their consumers at large, that they take their offering’s ‘ease of use’ for granted.
Another common mistake that brands most often make is to assume that their consumers are using their offerings to the fullest potential.
However, in most cases, this is not true.
Therefore to keep away from this, you can build several different campaigns for marketing to your customers to ensure sound practical knowledge and the most favorable usage of your offerings.
Earlier in this article, we discussed creating on-boarding campaigns to aid the consumers to get a hang of their products and services. Nevertheless, despite our best efforts as marketers, there are several consumers who do not open those text messages or emails (much less click on the helpful links therein).
Therefore persistence must be your key to ensure optimal adoption of your products and services.
Now, with marketing automation integrated within your easy to use CRM tools, you can track the behaviors of the users in your CRM app or even on your website, after which you can segment these individuals based on their purchase history and/or usage and then launch an automated email campaign to familiarize them with your offerings and thereby encourage adoption.
In the contents of these campaigns, you can include direct and concise instructions and even add links and prominent CTA (Call To Action) to helpful resources that can boost usage of your offerings.
Additionally, you can even A/B test your emails to learn what is working and what is not to optimize your onboarding campaigns, which will help in making sure that your CTAs, subject lines, and contents are all resonating properly with the targeted consumers of your offerings.
Depending on your offering, your customers even might need some advanced training.
Hence it is best to make use of progressive profiling and create adaptive forms to make it easy for your customers to sign them up for a session on digital training across your preferred marketing channels like social media, on your business website, in your monthly newsletters and login page of your app.
However, remember never to overcomplicate the training materials, but just ensure that your customers just have fundamentals they require to find great usage out of your offerings and remain loyal when their date of renewal comes around or they are ready to make another purchase from your company.
Now, if your company does not have enough resources or manpower to host training sessions regularly, consider creating short videos of your weekly pro-tips and thereafter share those videos clippings on your preferred social media platforms and in your monthly newsletters.
Apart from the above-stated activities if you want go beyond, holding customer webinars can be of extreme help in improving product education and adoption of your products and services, as these digital events provide an excellent opportunity to dig in deep regarding more complex features of your offerings and guide customers through salient functionalities or use cases they might not have tried to do without your help.
We have observed that as a large portion of consumers would rather like to learn by watching than by reading through pages, webinars usually draw a lot more visitors, which even provides businesses to promote additional products and services in real-time.
Lastly, the best part of holding webinars is that you can reserve some time for Q&A sessions, where as a brand you can interact directly with the consumers on a personal level and thereby discover their frustrations that you can work to solve internally.
Without any arguments, the customer feedback loop is any businesses’ proverbial ear to the ground, which allows brands to identify their biggest fans and thereafter leverage them as advocates.
Proactive listening also allows businesses to feel the pulse of dissatisfied customers so that they can reach out to them directly to correct the issues and show that their company cares.
On a larger scale, the said customer feedback loop is the best means to collect information about your brand’s reputation, and the usability and the real value of your offerings, which is an excellent way to determine if updates or changes to your business model are having a positive or negative effect on your customers.
Now once you have a clearer understanding of the public’s perception of your brand, you can easily leverage this knowledge to boost that perception and your offerings.
This model is pretty simple (at least on papers):
Collect customer opinions via social media listening, surveys, NPS (Net Promoter Scores) and third-party review websites such as G2 and Yelp.
Next consider creating a master spreadsheet that can aid you to visualize positive, optimistic, and negative feedback.
Analyze the information by digging out patterns in the responses and then begin to map solutions to the core problems., as understanding your customer feedback will aid you segment and group your audiences when you decide to take actions based on your findings.
Apply what you have learned through sound customer outreach strategies and product and service improvements.
This whole exercise might take the form of a comprehensive public relationship initiative or a basic email campaign to improve or restore the confidence of your consumers on your business and offerings.
It is important to note over here that the customer feedback loop is both a model and an ongoing process, therefore businesses must apply this method times and again to promote a culture of excellence and thereby build a more positive perception of their brands.
Now what works for one business might not work for another, hence be sure to research multiple feedback channels and only use the ones you feel are more informative and accurate for your company.
Conclusion
USE EASY TO USE CRM AND LAUNCH GREAT CUSTOMER MARKETING CAMPAIGNS
It is a proven fact that an effective marketing campaign using an easy to use CRM transcends lead generation and passing MQLs (Marketing Qualified Lead) to sales.
Therefore, in a nutshell as sustaining and boosting growth across the business is the name of the game. Hence focusing on customer loyalty in the present times is truly the real terra-firma of this strategy.
