One of the most difficult issues that enterprises face is the plateau or decline of their customer base. Many companies invest significant capital in their marketing campaigns and teams and still end up with a low ROI on their efforts. Although manual processes and systems can attract and convert clients, businesses need to focus on leveraging online tools to generate the highest return for their marketing investments. Using a tool like a CRM can be a great way to market and convert more customers for your business. Some of the ways a CRM can help increase your customer base includes:
Customer retention:
The first step in growing your customer base is retaining your existing customers. Without retaining your existing customers, you will continue to spend capital to acquire new customers and your customer lifetime value will decrease. Serving your existing customers well will ensure you keep customer churn low and any new acquired customers will increase the customer base for your business. Many businesses try different strategies to reduce customer churn, but their efforts are ineffective because they don’t have insight into their customers’ behaviors.
A CRM allows you to personalize your customer experience, use a variety of customer service tools and ensure your customers are engaged while using your products. With a CRM, you can get direct access to your customers and see exactly how they are interacting with your business. This will help illuminate what retention efforts are effective and different ways you can optimize the customer experience. You can use these insights to continue to service your customers, retain them and consequently increase your customer lifetime value
Gain market intelligence:
Many companies struggle with identifying who their ideal customers are. Without a proper understanding of customer personas, marketing efforts are suboptimal and ineffective. To grow your customer base, you’ll need a thorough understanding of your customers. A CRM is a great tool to use to figure out what your ideal customers’ pain points are and how you can market towards them. This will inform your marketing strategy and help you target your new customers.
In your CRM, you can see how your current customers found your business and continue to use those platforms to find similar customers. Additionally, there are a variety of feedback tools you can use in your CRM that allow you to get input from your customers and this can help inform your strategy to increase your customer base. By using your intelligence resources in your CRMs, you can craft the perfect customer persona and use that to find and market to your ideal customers.
Referrals through customer service:
Referrals and word of mouth marketing is the single best way to increase your customer base.
With referrals, you can acquire new customers for free and this can increase your profitability significantly. In fact, referred customers are often better than traditionally acquired customers. Several studies have revealed the referred customers have a 25% higher customer lifetime value for businesses.
A CRM equips you with all the tools you need to provide the best possible customer service for your existing customers. By delighting your existing customers, you can generate free referrals and leads to your business. Your CRM can help automate many customer service activities, address tickets faster and solve customer issues in a timely manner. Additionally, many CRMs have features that allow you to create customer loyalty programs; this can add to your retention strategy and you can offer more benefits to improve your customer service.
Lead nurturing:
Another great way to increase your customer base is to improve your lead nurture process. Nurturing leads allow you to acquire customers more effectively instead of spending capital to acquire new customers. By improving your lead nurturing efforts, you can guide more prospects through your sales funnel and convert them into customers. This is a vital issue for most businesses because they lose customers by having a weak or non-existent lead nurturing process. In fact, 79% of marketing leads never turn into sales.
A CRM can help you turn cold prospects into customers through tools like marketing automation, customer intelligence and personalized sales. These tools accelerate your lead nurturing process and help reduce the manual work for your marketing team. Additionally, CRMs work well with your existing technology stack. You can use your CRM’s features along with your existing software to target prospects and guide them through your sales funnel
Social media integrations:
Marketing your business on social media is a great way to build your brand and increase your customer base. In fact, many businesses rely on social media as their main marketing channel for customer acquisition. Since social media is very low cost, businesses can generate a higher ROI for their marketing expenditure. Managing multiple social media channels can be a manual and ineffective process for your marketing team. This is why you should automate as many social media tasks as possible. Social analytics tools like Social Status can automate your reporting so it’s one less thing to worry about.
A CRM empowers your social media marketing by allowing for integration for all of your social media channels. Your CRM can serve as your one centralized platform where you can curate, analyze and improve your social media marketing. With a CRM, you can manage customer interactions on social media, analyze the effectiveness of your posts and offer customer service directly on each platform. The vast majority of CRMs allow integrations with most social media platforms; you can create an omnichannel social media marketing strategy and maximize your audience reach to convert more prospects
Social media also allows you to set up email alerts for keywords. You can use tools to send you automatic emails each time a keyword related to your business is mentioned. For example, MyTweetAlerts allows you to set up automatic emails for any keywords related to your business directly from Twitter. This helps you generate leads directly by answering questions and helping users on social media platforms.
Content marketing:
Content marketing is an extremely effective way to increase your customer base; businesses of all sizes are investing heavily into SEO to get organic monthly traffic to their blogs and landing pages. Companies that invest into content marketing are able to generate thousands of organic visitors to their site via great content and backlinks. Although this is beneficial for driving traffic, businesses are leaving money on the table by not converting their website visitors.
CRMs have extensive content marketing features that enable companies to capture the visitors on their site and turn them into leads and customers. With a CRM, you can gain insights to your audience, how they interact with your content and which part of your sales funnel they are at. By using these insights, you can optimize your content, improve conversions and turn the visitors on your site into new customers.
Email marketing:
Email marketing is one of the best ways to convert your audience into customers. In fact, email marketing generates $42 for every $1 invested. With the use of content marketing, you can build a sizable email list and add many customers to your business. CRMs allow you to streamline your email marketing by organizing your email list, automating campaigns and providing insights on engagement and conversion rates.
By coupling email automation with a CRM, you can create more personalized email content, design responsive emails and perform A/B tests to see what works best for your audience. The experimental features provided by CRMs allow you to keep testing different email campaigns and see what subject lines, CTAs and email copy perform the best. The different features available in CRMs will help your business improve its email strategy, leverage automation and increase your customer base with more conversions.
