Business sounds exciting. But only when you get your strategies straight and your tools checked. Presenting you the holy grail of all business strategies: customer retention.
You must mix your marketing, social selling, brand strategies, and sales pitch and make a perfect blend to attract customers. This costs you a lot of time, resources, and money to acquire a customer. So it is only obvious that you wouldn’t want to let them go as one-time shoppers. This is why you must focus on customer retention strategies and tools.
Your retention rate entirely depends on your customer experience, since it is a strategy to transform your one-time shoppers and make them a part of your loyal customer base. Customer experience is derived from the product and the quality of your offered service. On the other hand, customer retention drives a sustainable long-term business model while encouraging repeat business and consistent profitability.
The retention question pops up only when customers have purchased a product or signed up for a service from you earlier. But retaining customers is not just about transactions, it is also about relationships. Research shows that customers view their relationships with brands similarly to those with friends. Customers like brands that are reliable, authentic, and aware of what matters to them.
This is how customer retention is done!
CRM is designed to make your buyer’s journey better. This software extensively helps you in building and maintaining relationships by documenting and optimizing captured customer data to curate personalized experiences. When it comes to CRM, we are talking about a centralized platform from which you can manage and monitor your sales process, marketing efforts, customer support, and everything that contributes to your retention strategy.
A standard-quality CRM ups your sales game as it automatically captures a lead, creates a follow-up task, and alerts the sales team. For the retention part, you can always create and assign your teammates for several tasks or meetings and schedule them on the CRM calendar or set reminders so that you never fall off the cracks. You can give access to your sales reps so that whenever a customer calls up for information, they can retrieve their profile for context.
It offers you a unified central space where you can integrate third-party applications that are ideal for boosting marketing efforts, accounting, support, and so forth. It presents you with a library of available integrations that collectively help you provide delightful customer experiences.
Everyone one of us wants to be included in an exclusive space. Loyalty and insider programs work best for customer retention. When your clients purchase products from you and get benefits or reward points in return, they see an additional value in your services. Not just from buying, you can avail of different insider programs of discount offers when they write reviews, share stories/ reels on their social media handles, or invite friends to follow your page.
You can incentivize your customers to perform impactful or profitable actions like social sharing or referrals with points, samples, store credit, etc.
You can use Yopto as your referral program tool. It helps you customize pre-built campaigns to attract your customers with loyalty programs and reward them with free shipping, discounts, or coupons once they execute valuable actions such as purchases, reviews, social follows, and more. This tool helps you create a tier-based loyalty program based on each customer’s purchase, spending, or referrals and segment them to incentivize accordingly.
Personalization is the way to your customer’s heart. Your customers don’t want run-of-the-mill generic experiences. They want uniquely customized and relevant experiences through which you can retain them. But that’s only possible when you have data.
Zoho CRM thrives in this. It has profoundly transformed the business paradigm with a client-centric approach. This cloud-based software streamlines captured customer data and touchpoint interactions so that you can customize promotions or offers as per your customer’s purchasing history. Even if there’s a change, you can interpret your buyer’s behavioral traces to get to know them more closely.
Engaging customers through personalized content influences them to be fluid and decisive when it comes to buying your products/ services. One of the best-proven hacks to execute personalization is through email marketing. For instance, personalization (let’s take the simplest one – addressing the customer by his/ her name) adds a humanized tone to your emails. You can plug in your CRM, grab insights about the recipient, and send out relevant offers to retain their lifetime value.
A good old-fashioned text message is another marketing charm. You can use Twilio as an omnichannel customer engagement tool that combines flexible APIs for cross-channel communications across digital channels (like SMS, WhatsApp messages, and voice/ video calls), first-party customer data, and global infrastructure to support you at scale.
Businesses of this generation are nothing without technology and automation. Instead of cutting out your invaluable resources over manual redundant tasks, use automation such as sending out emails, posting on social media as per schedule, or managing recipient lists. Let automation handle all that and your sales reps connect with as many clients as possible and close more sales.
Automation makes your job super easy. CRM lies at the core of modern-day businesses. Zoho offers its CRM neat with an automated pipeline that updates itself with real-time data to track your customers’ sales journey. If you see a halt in the pipeline, you can send out an automated email to encourage your customer to re-engage.
You can couple up your CRM with an email marketing app like Campaigns to maximize your email marketing strategy by setting up automated drip campaigns. These scheduled campaigns help you influence your recipients to interact, re-engage, and repeat orders. Automating the sales funnel and receiving specific data about customer interactions will help your sales reps know which part of the sales process needs improvement.
Let’s say you have purchased a product from a particular company website. Though it got delivered right on time, you’re somehow not happy with it. So you try to report the issue and get a fresh piece or money refund. But the helpdesk people on the other end failed to respond. Will you purchase another product from this site? No.
Customer service and service applications like Zoho Desk make your buyers’ experience delightful and hassle-free. With a first-call-resolution approach, you can gain their trust and improve customer satisfaction and retention rates. You can enable knowledge bases, informative articles, tutorials, or FAQs on your Help Centre page where they can find solutions to apply.
Want to be your audience’s top brand? Improve your understanding of their needs and the best way to obtain their insights is through surveys. Zoho Survey is the ideal tool with 25+ different customizable templates including skip logic and piping. Integrating this app with your CRM enables you to create and send feedback or testimonial requests to clients for post-sales engagement. Include question patterns like surveys, polls, or NPS (Net Promoter Score). The CRM immediately captures your customers’ submitted answers so that you can analyze them using various metrics and reports. You can optimize this data to identify preferences, pain points, expectations, and satisfaction levels, and use this information to improve your products, services, and processes.
To cultivate a customer-centric culture. Enhance customer experience. Retain customers and repeat business. Now align this idea with technology. And when you talk about technology for customers, you know it is all about CRM software. It lies at the cynosure of modern-day business where retention is the literal key to growth.
Take the first step. Reach out to our experts to learn more!