What is a CRM and how can it retain your customers? CRM (customer relationship management) has been around since forever. Ever since people started selling things. The first salesperson who stopped to talk to his customers, who remembered their names, and who perhaps gave them a small gift for continually using his services, was already practicing a form of relationship marketing with his customers. Making them feel special.

 

Today, with companies and projects becoming more and more digitized, person-to-person contact is becoming increasingly rare. That’s why a CRM is more important than ever. You need to build and maintain relationships with your customers. A faceless company is neither personable nor attractive, and therefore you have to work harder to fill that void to attract and retain your customers.

 

The relationship your customer builds with your company is often the reason they come back, but building that relationship today is harder than ever. In a society where data is protected, customers are more demanding and exercise their right to choose, your competition maybe just a click away.

 

A CRM is a customer-centric approach to business based on fostering strong long-term relationships. Therefore, an effective CRM enables you to collaborate with your customers to inform the business strategies you develop, drive your business processes, support your brand development and maximize your return on investment.

 

You need to understand your customers

 

Your customers should be seen as the most important part of your business. Without customers buying your products or services, your project will not have a revenue stream.

 

A good relationship with your customers is based on meeting or even exceeding their needs. You must determine what problems your customer has and provide a solution, sometimes even before the problem occurs. It’s up to you to continually give your customers a reason to transact with your company over any of your competitors.

 

But also, a CRM should not only be the implementation of technological processes focused on your customers but also encompass your own customer-driven processes.

 

A touchpoint with your customers can be something as simple as an ad, a customer conversation with your call center, a tweet, or an email. Even your business cards or invoices are touchpoints, and you need to manage them carefully to ensure that your brand is also working your customer relationship.

 

Customer touch points can generally be divided into three classes.

 

Pre-purchase

 

Pre-purchase encompasses the various ways in which companies and potential customers interact before the lead decides to transact with a company. Your objectives here should be:

 

• Generate customers
• Increase your brand recall
• Shape the perception of your brand. To do this you should highlight the benefits you offer over your competition.
• Indicate how you provide value and satisfy your customers’ needs and desires.
• Educate your potential customers about your products and services.

 

Buying

 

Buying comprises the touch points at which your customer decides to buy a product from you, use one of your services or initiate a relationship with your project. The key objectives are:

 

• Build trust
• Deliver value
• Reinforce their buying decision
• Increase their positive perception of your brand.

 

Post-purchase

 

Post-purchase is linked to all post-sale interactions between your project and your customer. In this case, you should pay attention to:

 

• Developing a long-lasting relationship with your customer
• Maximize your customer’s experience
• Delivering on your project’s value promise
• Fostering customer loyalty to your brand
• Keep your project in their top of mind
• Invite them to make recurring purchases

 

Customer loyalty, What is a CRM and how can it retain your customers? 

 

The main objective of any CRM strategy you develop for your project should be to win your customers’ loyalty in the long term. But what is loyalty? In short, it’s about gaining and retaining customers who:

 

• Have a life cycle as long-term customers that make them valuable customers for your project.
• Buy several of your products or use your services on a recurring basis
• Share their positive reviews of your project with other users
• Provide honest feedback about your products and services, and their experiences
• Collaborate with you by providing feedback on how to improve your project

 

The benefits of a CRM strategy

 

In essence, an effective CRM strategy will help you to:

 

• Increase your revenue and the profitability of your products and/or services
• Improve your customers’ satisfaction and loyalty to your project
• Improve your operational processes

 

And decrease your customer acquisition costs by keeping customer churn low. Through a CRM you can offset the need to spend on acquiring new customers by improving the retention of existing ones, which is cheaper for obvious reasons.

 

Finally, maintaining good relationships with your customers is critical to the success of your project. The cost of acquiring a new customer is much higher than the cost of maintaining a relationship with an existing customer.

 

And while an investment in CRM software can be high, this cost is offset by increased revenue from encouraging repeat purchases.

 

In summary, What is a CRM and how can it retain your customers?

 

As you can see, equipping your project with a CRM strategy is a way to complete your inbound marketing strategy.

 

In this way, you will be accompanying your potential customers on their journey through their buyer journey. You will also improve your project’s internal procedures, and you will build trust and loyalty towards your brand, improving your customers’ purchase recurrence rates.

 

The key to good customer loyalty

 

The fundamental key to customer loyalty is the relationship with the customer, therefore, lead management actions must be focused on getting the customer to buy again or to trust the brand again to meet their needs. This is the main concept of customer loyalty.

 

Many businesses focus on increasing their contact list numbers and fattening their CRM management figures, but a large number of leads that do not respond to our messages are useless.

 

You know the saying “quality is better than quantity”? It is much more profitable to have a small number of quality customers than to have a very large database and nobody wants to hear from you again. Loyalty means working with the customer to make them believe in the brand without barriers and respond more easily to our marketing actions.

 

To make our customer trust the company, it is essential to transmit the value of the brand and offer a close relationship that solves their doubts, helps them to make good use of the product or provides extra information about the business to work on future sales opportunities. Being attentive to the needs of your customers will facilitate the expansion of your business.

 

Customer information is essential in order to relate to customers

 

Within lead management actions, what makes a good relationship with contacts lead to loyalty, is the inert information in these contacts. Hence the importance of using CRM software for data management. 

 

Today the customer values the whole experience, not just the product that gets the purchase, so it is important to work the trust in the brand.

 

How to implement a customer loyalty strategy

 

A successful customer loyalty strategy should be based on the following points:

 

Customer exclusivity, What is a CRM and how can it retain your customers?

 

We can never underestimate the power of making customers feel like VIPs. If we give them that treatment, they will come back and do business with the company.

 

Work on the customer’s feeling of exclusivity by means of:

 

Unique and relevant offers. Through a CRM program, study the products/services purchased by the customer and get information about the time of purchase, other products of interest, … and you can offer them cross-selling and complementary.

 

Personalized products and services for their situation. Create new items that solve needs you had not thought of.

 

Exquisite customer service. Keep the information of the salesperson who contacted the customer, what they talked about, what issues were left pending, etc. and contact them again with digital marketing strategies. The customer is the center of the sales strategy.

 

All companies say that the customer is the most important thing, but very few apply it in reality. That is why this first point of the loyalty strategy involves, above all, a change of mindset.

 

We put the customer at the center of everything, really considering him the most important thing.

 

The company must stop being one of those that only says this in words and be one of the few that actually puts it into practice.

 

Regular communication with the customer, What is a CRM and how can it retain your customers?

 

Customers have a lot to do and many companies, advertisements and offers are trying to get their attention all the time.

 

If there is no regular communication from the company to the customer that offers that exquisite treatment and gives them value, the customer “cools off”, a common lead management term.

 

For this communication to be regular and fluid, we again need the support of our CRM management that includes digital marketing functions, with which to plan and implement digital actions such as email marketing or the creation of exclusive launches with landing pages, for example.

 

Communicate often does not mean calling every day to repeat to the customer to buy, get in touch to propose valuable information or get information that allows you to know them in depth.

 

Ideas for communicating with customers:

 

• Pose offers that can improve their situation.
• Ask about the service offered or the arrival of the product.
• Find out how you can help them
• Etc

 

Sometimes, the value is not something material, but emotional, communicating to the customer that he has an ally, an advisor to whom he can ask his questions and concerns.  Demonstrating that we know and care about the customer will be impossible without a good database and, above all, without a CRM that extracts and displays relevant information from it.

 

Product and service quality, What is a CRM and how can it retain your customers?

 

No company can build customer loyalty with words alone; there are basic elements that every company must comply with if it wants to achieve customer loyalty:

 

• Quality product
• Policy of guarantees and / or appropriate returns and if possible, superior to the rest of the competition.
• Professional advice.
• Personalized gratitude

 

In short, customer loyalty is the most effective strategy to achieve more sales and the secret of any company that wants to improve its profitability. Offer a superior experience through the information provided by a CRM management, improving the relationship with the customer and achieving a lasting relationship.