Customer relationship management (CRM as the popular acronym) is a marketing strategy which can help develop your relationship with, well your customers! We’ve all heard the stats that it’s considerably (six times) more expensive in cost courting and securing new customers versus retaining an existing customer. With that in mind, let’s cover a number of customer relationship management tips.
Customer Relationship Management Tips
Businesses spend a great deal of time working to attract new customers with expensive advertising and marketing budgets while largely ignoring their existing customers. Most business owners operate under the incorrect assumption that their existing customers will remain loyal without any additional attention or support once that customer makes their initial transaction with that business.
That’s not the reality and oftentimes businesses lose customers to competitors when they could have been salvaged if only that business had nurtured that customer relationship a bit through customer relationship marketing.
What Is Customer Relationship Management?
First let’s identify what it is. Customer relationship management is ultimately a marketing strategy which works to nurture and strengthen the ties which you have with existing customers rather than turning your attention to potential customers in your target audience/demographic.
Now let’s talk about some things which you can do to improve your relationship with your customers.
Customer Relationship Management Tips
Customer Support – Quality customer support is one of the most important and direct ways to retain and impress your customers. Whatever your product or service is and no matter how good it is, there will be customers which need support.
Customers remember quality customer support nowadays because it’s so seldom experienced. Do your best to over-deliver on your customer support in quality and responsiveness and you’ll keep your customers coming back and raving about you for years to come.
Discounts/Incentives – Offering incentives to existing customers is a great way to say that you care about them and their future business. You can do this through a number of reserved correspondence outlets such as social networks and your email list; basically anywhere which is away from the general public to make them feel special.
Email List/Segments – Your email list is a great way to build a relationship and keep in touch with your customers. Create a segment for your existing customers who have made a purchase from you in the past and send them emails to talk about new offers your business is promoting with discounts and incentives in the future. Also make sure to give them free information now and again so that every mail you’re sending isn’t just packed with offers.
Once you see which kinds of offer emails individual customers are opening and the links they are clicking on, then you can break your existing customers into more specific segments so that you’re sending them offers they would be interested in and just as importantly so that you’re not sending them offers for things they’re not interested in.
You can do all of the segmenting and tracking things I’ve mentioned quite easily in Aweber to get all of your analytics. I talk more about how powerful segments can be to your online business in this post.
Social Networks – Social networks are effective ways to remain in touch with your customers. Get (force) them to like you on Facebook through incentives and offer helpful posts and special discount links exclusively to your followers on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. It makes that customer feel appreciated and exclusive at the same time.
The more active you are in your correspondence with your customer, the more relevant you’ll be in that customer’s mind. This is a victory in itself and increases the likelihood that the next time they need the product or service which you provide, the more likely they are to go with you versus a competitor and the more likely they are to automatically go with you versus even looking into a competitor.