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( votes)Businesses around the world are seeking new ways to interact and engage with their clients. It goes without saying that the more customer-centric your services are, the better your establishment is able to cater to their needs and sustain profitability in both the long and the short run.
CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is one of the approaches utilized by entrepreneurs and corporations through which they can manage interactions with current customers and probable prospects. The basic principle revolves around the retention of customers and clientele by building better relationships and ultimately boosting your sales.
Let’s take a quick look at some strategies that can allow you to track the current status of your customers and follow up with the right tactics for continued earnings.
Tips to Track & Follow-Up Customers
Client Tracking with Invoicing Tools
Perhaps one of the best ways to incorporate tracking for your customers is through various invoicing tools that businesses have developed over the years. There is a range of customer data fields that you can incorporate while filling out an invoice for them that can include numerous amounts of information on them. This can include their name, phone number, email, shipping address, and that is just the tip of the iceberg.
With continued sales, you can add in special fields to your own database that includes their personal likes and dislikes as well as other preferences. Through invoices, you are not simply asking them to pay for an order, but you’re also keeping a record of their interaction with your business. When the sale was made, how much and what product was bought, and so on and so forth. According to the Hubspot survey, 50% of SMBs are paying for an adequate invoicing solution.
Welcome Emails
Welcome emails are perhaps the trendiest of the whole lot. It shows that you care and thus creates a customer touchpoint that you need to cash in; otherwise, the opportunity will go wasted. It also shows how responsive you are, and this can create an image of yours in the mind of the customer.
Making the right impression can help you foster a better relationship. A welcome email is the first base, and you need to get it spot-on right out of the bat. A slight delay, and you might miss on the moment completely. The idea is not only to break the ice or some dull line about “thank you for choosing us!” You need to provide incremental value and make it worthwhile for them. As per Ivespcro.com’s findings, 76% of customers expect to receive a welcome email soon after subscribing to your services.
Follow-Up Sales Emails
Another email type on our list is the follow-up email that businesses these days are betting on. In fact, it doesn’t necessarily have to be sales-related at all. For instance, a frequent visitor to your e-commerce website drops an item to the cart but never clears them out, you can follow up with an email to make sure that everything is ok with them. On the other hand, a follow-up email is quintessential to your long term success as it shows that you are not there just to hog their money but to build a long-lasting relationship with your customer.
Getting their feedback is pure gold for your services, and they can provide you with all the insights you need to improve on your offerings. According to the findings of ZoomInfo emails with subject lines that have more than 3 words get a 60% drop in the open rate by recipients.
A How-to Guide
Here is a niche for you that can not only help track your customers but also develop a strong feeling of trust in them. There are lots of customers who are often confused with how it all clicks and goes down. Your best option is to provide them with a how-to guide that can answer their burning questions.
A simple questionnaire as an attachment would be good as well. The act itself is based on interacting with them in a friendly manner as possible. You don’t want to agitate them and neither give them the cold shoulder. A how-to guide can also improve your customer support services and is definitely an added advantage to your overall strategy!
Loyalty Badges
All human beings love to be appreciated and be acknowledged. It is in our DNA to be praised and awarded with things that make us feel all the better. You can change their world by starting to offer loyalty badges to your repeated buyers and purchasers.
This also nudges at the elbow of those less recurring and seldom active customers to look forward. Call it an exclusive group that only a few privileged ones have access to. The sheer curiosity and the slight envious intent it creates should be enough for your customers to mesmerize them towards your desired intentions. However, make sure that loyalty badge is not for show only; back it up with bonuses and rewards to keep their motivation levels high.
Newsletters/Press Releases
If you are a business that seeks to keep its clientele up to date with all of your offers, on-going discounts, upcoming events, and future packages, then newsletters and press releases are how you can pull it off. Promotional efforts need a great direction to leave an adequate impact on your audience, and if you want them to respond, then you have to make it all the more attractive and appealing for them.
Newsletters and press releases offer you the advantage to connect with your customers periodically where you can have all of them on the same page. In a study conducted by Trust Insights, 60.74% of press releases were sent through a wire service.
Referral Marketing
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that word of mouth to this day holds a huge potential to promulgate your business’ goodwill towards the masses. That is why we see many establishments making use of referral marketing to get the cogs moving for them.
Not only do you reward customers by sharing your business with other prospects but you also get to keep a record of their activities that provide you with additional know-how about their friend circles and who they interact with on a daily basis. Referral marketing can provide you with new leads to play with as well, which brings further light to statement, the more, the merrier.
Social Media
The most viral and widespread platform on the planet, social media has become one of the greatest tools for businesses globally to acquire customers and gain insights. Not only does it allow you to interact and engage with the huge audience with unprecedented conveniences, many platforms such as Facebook and YouTube to name a few have their own support tools to keep you informed about the activity taking place on your business pages.
At present, more and more businesses are now earnestly pooling their efforts to get their social media profiles up and running. The sheer amount of numbers and responses are unprecedented, the likes no one has ever seen before.
Ecommerce Website SEO
It has become fairly common knowledge to implement analytics to your e-commerce website. Search engine optimization and relevant tools are continuously assisting online ventures to improve their standings in both local and international markets.
The number of page visits, the overall traffic on your website, and your rankings on SERPs all show and display results regarding your efforts to up your game on the virtual realm. No matter what you are offering, even if it is Premium Jackets or skincare products, there is an audience waiting for you out there and the internet only offers to broaden that horizon for you. You will also find many success stories where improving website analytics lead to a generous amount of increase in sales and profits.
Chatbots & AI
Today it is all about response time and how quickly you can satisfy a query. Chatbots infused with Artificial Intelligence are paving the way for new and improve customer support and related services. People simply do not have the time on their hands to sit and wait for a representative to pick their call. They want answers now!
With Chatbots, you get to keep a complete track record of all the interactions customers make on your website. With their encryption protected database, you can review all queries that customers and visitors on your website are posting. This eventually leads to you better understand their concerns and meticulously handling them.
Conclusion
It is quite evident that with expanse in technology and the progress we are making in current times requires businesses to stay relevant to the on-going trends. Customer relationship management is undergoing its own share of changes with time as ventures try out new strategies to keep a hold on their clientele.
While no one can neglect the importance of retention of customers in the long run, with better methods emerging over time, every establishment seems to be in the race to get as many customers on board as possible. Hence it is fair to say that we are seeing how businesses are evolving in real-time to keep up with the pace of changes that are happening in the current ecosystem as we speak.
