Customer relationships are at the core of marketing. When you nurture relationships with your customers, you endear them to your brand or business. By leveraging customer relationship management (CRM) solution, you can stay connected with your customers for the long haul.
Keep Customer Data Organized and Accessible
The key to effectively connecting with your customers is to know important details about each one and keep all that knowledge in one place. For small businesses on a budget, it can be hard to tell whether a CRM will be worth the initial investment so try a free plan or a 14 day trial of our premium plan as a way to get started without financial risk.
CRMs exist to make sense of your contact data. For example, Insightly CRM features custom fields, filters, and tags, so you can include all the information you want to and make it easy to search. You can even upload customer files and link between contacts and any other items. This gives you much more information to work with than a spreadsheet or an address book. Analyzing data to find customer likes, dislikes, spending habits and patterns helps you decide your next steps.
Try Customer Segmenting with Behavior or Category Tags
By creating “smart” tags or grouping customers by their behavior or some other common similarity, you can create email campaigns that not only target each customer based on their interests, but on the likelihood they will act on your pitch.
Rather than blast customers with email advertisements that will make them unsubscribe from your list, use behavioral segmentation to send them offers they want to act on. This isn’t just for mailers though. Use behavioral tags to inform all contact with customers. For example, you can contact customers who actively engage via your Instagram to advertise a flash sale just for Instagram followers.
Listen to Customers
We all know that customers don’t want to be sold to. They don’t want you to talk at them. If you want to communicate with your clients, you have to listen to them. Of course, great customer service is the first line in listening and responding to your clients’ needs. You can even listen even before they reach out to you.
By looking at the contact profile you’ve created, including purchase history, interactions with your company via social media, and how frequently they engage with your brand, you can gauge how often each customer wants to hear from you. If you’re initiating contact too often, customers may unsubscribe or unfollow. You can adjust your behavior to cater to their pattern of preference. For example, if you find customers tend to unsubscribe six weeks after a purchase, don’t send an email during the sixth week.
Have a Public Conversation
If your social media outlets are on autopilot, you’re missing out big time. It’s easy for SMBs to send out one post to several different social media accounts and think that’s enough. If you cannot manage live interaction with your customers over numerous networks, consider cutting down to one or two social media accounts or hiring someone to represent your brand for you. Effective social media meansconstant, meaningful interaction.
Having a dialogue with your customers over public channels shows individual customers they are valued, and your other followers see that you value each customer as well. In addition, you get more data about customers the more you interact, which, when paired with an intuitive small business CRM, provides you with information for future marketing efforts.
When you collect and maintain holistic contact profiles, tagged or grouped in a useful, searchable manner, you can put your customer data to good use and directly engage with your customers in meaningful ways.
