Congratulations! You've selected Salesforce as your preferred CRM and through networking like crazy you're managing to draw a good number of visitors to your website. Your sales and marketing teams are collaborating to gather leads and converting them into customers.
But what if those customers start canceling their accounts in the blink of an eye? Is your competitor able to steal all your customers right out from under your nose? Depending on your niche and competition, customer acquisition could be 5-25 times more expensive than customer retention. This is simply because the probability of converting an existing client (60 to 70%) is much higher than new clients (5 to 20%). All things said and done customer retention is quintessential but what exactly goes into it? Obviously, there is no magic wand or formula but you can focus on five primary areas to cultivate high retention.
Leverage integrations
Gone are the days when the sales and marketing teams were competing and working in data silos. Today, integration is the first key to success with a CRM. CRM integration with support and customer service apps can help your organization streamline the critical touch points of customer interactions and communications to enhance brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.
For instance, your sales team may be relying on Salesforce and the marketing team on HubSpot Marketing Software while the customer service team is using Zendesk. Luckily, a simple solution can be found in seamless integrations between Zendesk and HubSpot Marketing with Salesforce, the world's number 1 CRM, to create and explore the innumerable advantages of a transparent data funnel through which all teams can then have a 360-degree view of every customer so everyone is on the same page.
Even simpler and more streamlined, keep all your teams working out of Salesforce. From Pardot and Marketing Cloud to Field Service, Project Management and FinancialForce tools, you're almost guaranteed to find what you're looking for within the Salesforce ecosystem.
2. Facilitate connected consumer journeys
Consumer Experience has never been so important, especially during today's challenging times of the COVID-19 pandemic where lockdowns, shutdown, and supply chain breakdowns are normal. Therefore, it is important to facilitate unified 1-to-1 journeys with consumers spending more time on channels and devices today than ever before. For this, organizations need to create and involve omnichannel experiences across multiple platforms and all devices.
According to this Salesforce report, customer journey strategies have become an integral and critical component of customer experience management and organizations must emphasize on common customer journey challenges, customer journey best practices, and customer success stories to make an impact.
3. Leverage client data more smartly and proactively
A big part of crafting memorable customer journeys is collecting, understanding, and leveraging data correctly and proactively. Many teams have more cluttered data on their hands than they can handle and realistically understand. For this, Artificial intelligence (AI) tools can be beneficial to eliminate the challenges ahead and gather and analyze data and relevant information to create purposeful and value-driven client insights.
For instance, Artificial Intelligence can be used for audience targeting and segmentation that can help organizations identify which clients are the most valuable (more likely to spend more, more likely to return, and more likely to recommend) and how, where, and when to win them with personalized strategies. This data can be utilized by sales, marketing, and customer service teams so each team can focus specifically on identifying expectations, wants, and urgency of outcome.
4. Personalize communication with customers
Personalized messages and interactions are second to none when it comes to evoking interest and winning customers. This is simply because personalization with promotional messages, email campaigns, or social media interactions makes the customers make them feel seen and considered to be the most important person in the room.
With Salesforce, you can explore Pardot Dynamic Content to personalize landing pages, forms, emails, and more. For instance, email templates can be configured to display the name of the customer in the message body or subject line of the email to target many customers but by making each customer feel like it was written personally with them in mind. You can even add to the personalization impact by further customizing the email content based on the customer's individual interests, location, or needs. Remember, everything is at your fingertips with Salesforce. All you need is to think of the countless possibilities and opportunities ahead of you.
5. Track customer interactions
A business is only as good as its data or its minute details about the customer - things about their personal interests, expectations, needs, buying patterns, purchase history, account details, etc. In other words, captured data helps to better read the minds of your customers and understand them in order to suggest the right product at the right time and place. This is exactly where Salesforce comes into the picture.
Using Salesforce, you can easily keep track of what your customers are doing, where they are, and how they are responding to evolving market changes and the entry and existence of new and existing competitors, respectively. For instance, your marketing team can make quick website or promotional message adjustments when you notice customers exiting a lead generation form or abandoning their shopping carts. You can even connect Salesforce data with other marketing data sources such as Google AdWords by using tools such as GA Connector.
If you want to harness the innumerable advantages of data for personalizing customer experience, truly listen to and understand customer needs, and add significant value to win the customers, you can reach out to our CRM Consultants at Cloud Journey Consulting Group.