Consider a situation where you have done all your research, attracted customers to your website, revamped your social media and even converted some leads. Everything looks great until some customers unsubscribe or cancel their accounts after a while. With the existence of competition, many customers will change their preferences and switch over.
Therefore, closing leads, while extremely important, should not be your only priority. Instead, customer retention needs more focus as it is more likely to drive profits than customer acquisition. Let us delve deeper into how organizations can engage with customers better by leveraging email marketing strategies.
Integration of Sales with Marketing
Marketing and sales teams no longer work separately but operate in tandem these days. Integrating customer service and support helps streamline the process of customer communication. Manually transferring data from one place to the other is a bit time-consuming. Capturing all customer interactions directly into the central CRM can be a helpful alternative. Your customer service team needs to be informed about every customer to ensure creating a transparent system that can be beneficial to the sales and marketing teams, which ultimately helps them in customer retention. Rest assured, a salesforce marketing cloud email specialist can help you with effective customer engagement too.
Personalization
Gathering valuable data while interacting with customers is inevitable. How you use that data is what changes the game. The best bet is to leverage that data into a targeted and personalized email to resonate better with your audience. Using names and past search history in your emails can make the experience more personal for the customer and shows effort on your end. Sending them tailored offers according to their preferences is also a good way to engage your audience.
Social Media Responsivenes
Being responsive to your customers across your social media channels is key to preventing churn. What this means is that if someone asks you something on Twitter, you better respond in time. The CRM software can display customer profiles, and before responding to them, it is a good idea to look at the profile. This factor will allow you to create rapport and create more business with them.
Integration of Sales with Customer Service
Customer service is often called the new marketing, i.e. it is deemed extremely effective in retaining customers. Bridging the gap between sales and customer service helps solve customer problems better due to the proper transfer of information among the departments.
As we have already established the importance of timely responses above, integrating CRM with the customer service platform can be a great option to make the process more efficient. In addition, this approach will give the necessary access to your customer service team to resolve things better.
Tracking of Customer Interactions
If your clients have not been active in a while, there is a good chance that they are on their way out. Tracking customer interactions in the CRM software is as simple as searching the dates and sorting them according to the date of the last contact. To ease things further, you can automate this whole process so that potential churns are highlighted beforehand and brought to your notice at regular intervals. You can Also you can check Salesforce doc gen for generating custom documents etc.
Keeping track of the interactions will help you know what works and what doesn’t for your sales and marketing strategy. If you witness them leaving, you can always try to win them back by offering irresistible deals. These insights are invaluable and can help save your organization a whole lot of business.
Identification of Inactive Customers
Inactive subscribers in email lists are an untapped resource for most businesses. Many business owners don’t pay enough heed to them and let them go easy. If not dealt with, they can prove to be detrimental for click-through and open rates. Think about what can make them stay in business with you, and you can strategize accordingly. Email lists are prone to regular degradations and might need integration with CRM.
Segmenting the inactive subscribers and then hitting them with re-engagement emails is a good option to engage these people. These emails can include discounts, offers, contests etc. creativity is key here as these customers have seen it all and have one foot out of the door. Make your offers relevant to them so they get on board again.
No Virtual Bombarding
Once you have acquired a new customer, it can be quite tempting to send them reminders of how great your company is via offers. However, this approach constitutes upselling and is generally considered not to be the best idea. Instead, thank them for their business and leave it at that. It also helps build trust that can be further enhanced by showing appreciation by sending them cards, discounted items, and the like. Using CRM integration, you can send them personalized items and impress them in the long run.