Great customer relationship management (CRM) can help make your business an enduring one. Your customers are the lifeblood of your business, but the competition for their loyalty is fierce. Stay in touch with your customer base via strategically planned emails and you will often discover that you have stronger consumer-company relationships, simplified trend tracking and analysis practices and easier to implement marketing outreach.
One of the most valuable aspects of adopting a sophisticated and efficient CRM email or e-blast system is that it gives you the ability to segment your customers by behavior, preferences and more. In short, it allows you to consistently monitor the purchasing patterns, and sometimes, demographics of your ideal target audiences.
But why is this important?
You’ve heard the phrase, “Give the people what they want.” Implementing a strong CRM system and using it to segment your audience allows you to precisely target and strategize your traditional and interactive marketing toward particular customer segments. When you strategize your marketing efforts based on this information, you will reap the highest return on your budget’s investments.
you have the info – now you can take action
Once you become familiar with the types of customers who frequent or stumble onto your business’ website, you can begin to follow, and later, logically infer their needs. Here are three ways you can use this information to maintain lively and lucrative customer relationships, heading off up and coming competitors:
- Bring lost sheep home. Sometimes customers get busy. Sometimes customers get a little broke. Whatever the reason is, some of your customers haven’t reordered your product or services in a while. If this is the case, sending an e-blast to remind them could be all it takes to get them back in your e-doors. Or, if they have left you for good, a quick, simple questionnaire could tell you if there was something you could have done better to retain their business, giving you material for future improvement.
- Target your promotions. Maybe a third of your customers always order product A; another third might order product D; and the remaining third might change it up with every order. However your customers choose to purchase from you, knowing that could make the difference between wasting your advertising dollars or hosting incredibly lucrative annual promotions. With a great CRM system, you can send specific product or service promotions to as many or as few customers as you choose. Once you identify these groups and take action, expect good results. They will be thrilled that you thought of them and their needs, oftentimes leaping to take the action you recommended to them.
- Gain new customers via referrals. Bad reputations travel faster than good ones, but if your customers already love you, why not invite them to share your services with friends? A great CRM system will allow you to send existing customers promotions that encourage the recruitment of friends to your business in exchange for a deal, or just for the joy of spreading a great service. The system will not only allow you to add these new potential clients to your e-mail list, it will give you the opportunity to track and reward your biggest brand advocates.
the new generation of customer service
Already forward thinking marketing innovators are examining and perfecting ways to streamline social media data-mining techniques to mimic the efficient and valuable way that business websites already use integrated CRM systems. However, for now integrating a quality CRM system into your existing website’s content management system (CMS) will help you greatly modernize and streamline your business’ customer service. It will enable you to keep an eye on the pulse of your customers and market, allowing you to not only predict and service existing customers, but also anticipate upcoming trends that will keep you at the forefront of the industry and at the tops of consumers’ minds.