Your CRM strategy determines ‘how, why, when, where, and what’ of your business relationships with your customers. Every year, US companies lose 136.8 billion USD due to customer switching. Thanks to the buyer-centric market, the switching cost and time are very low, and thus, it is crucial to retain your customers using CRM-centric work culture, online CRM software, automated touch points, and more.

Beyond these, what is your CRM strategy? These tools alone will not attract and retain your customers. How do you plan to use these tools and technologies to stand over and beyond your competitors? After all, all it takes is one poor experience for customers to boycott a brand totally.

Track Customer Behavior and Interaction

It is not a great idea to go by the book while creating a customer relationship management strategy. You need to formulate one based on your customers. There is no ground for guesswork here. Good online CRM software allows you to understand the customer’s buying behavior and how they interact with you.

This information allows you to understand your customers better. Thereby, you can create personas for each customer; alter your interaction to suit their needs. For instance, you can categorize your customers as price-conscious, quality-conscious, status-conscious, and brand loyal customers based on their past purchases.

Thus, your team can create different communication strategies, grievance management, and marketing for each persona. According to Accenture, 95% of surveyed individuals assured that they are highly likely to purchase from brands that offer personalized and relevant offers or recommendations.

Reward System

Customers should look forward to being a long-time customer with your brand. Beyond quality products and flawless customer service, you need a variety of reward systems. Yes, you need to personalize the reward system based on the persona. Some customers prefer monetary benefits as the reward, and some prefer first access to products, exclusive content, and others.

For instance, Sephora, a cosmetic brand, offers a three-tier reward system focusing on better savings and higher exclusivity for those who spend more. Although it holds a successful reward system, it runs an online forum to nurture engagement and suggestions.

Personalized Email Marketing

Marketing CRM software offers several methods to connect with your customers. However, the option with the highest ROI is email marketing. According to studies, an email with a personalized subject has 26% higher chances of getting opened.

You need not hand-craft a unique email to every customer. You could at least use the customer’s name and a personalized email format and template for each persona. Several online CRM software packages offer automated email marketing tools with personalization features for this purpose.

Another factor to consider here is the content. Your email should be clear, to-the-point, not too formal, and at the same time grammatically correct. Moreover, you cannot copy the email format from your competitors. It is best to hire content managers to create quality content for your emails. The same goes for your website and blog content too.

Do Not Try To Market Everything and Every Time

Say you have four products in hand. Please do not try to sell everything in the same email. A handy option that comes with any reliable customer relationship management CRM software is creating different campaigns. Do you have a site-wise offer and a total cart price-based offer? You can send two different emails without confusing the customer.

Your only communication motto should not be marketing. There are other elements to communicate like post-sales services, surveys, suggestions, an indication of abandoned carts, newsletters, seasonal greetings, and more. Get in touch with your customers through social media. Create trends or be a part of the current trends. For instance, you can advertise your brand with the ice bucket challenge or Tik Tok dance challenge. You need to make your brand a household name.

Avoid Duplication

A company, even a startup, will have thousands of potential clients and loyal ones. It is possible to have repeated data due to manual error. In some cases, the customer might have multiple subscriptions under slightly different names, like Bob R, Bob Reynolds, Reynold Bob, etc.

If you are a B2B business, addressing your mail to an ex-employee would be a grave mistake. These might sound like genuine harmless errors, but it would make your customers feel like one in a thousand. It is important to make a customer feel special and valued. Remembering their names and sending personalized information is the best way to increase customer loyalty. Make sure to use customized tools in your online CRM software to manage, regulate, and cleanse your data.

Managing your data is essential for security purposes too. Your CRM data is your liability. A breach of such sensitive data would lead to your reputation plummeting down. Thus, pick marketing CRM software with high-end security features.

Create and Use Reports

Every software in this genre comes with reporting tools integrated with a multitude of features. A manager can generate multiple reports with a click, and some software packages generate automatic reports. There is no point in creating reports if it is just another slide in your next stakeholders’ meeting. You need to understand the metrics that need reporting.

Yes, sales volume is vital, but not enough. You ought to find the KPIs of your business and customize reports to understand the entire business’s performance, each campaign, product, persona, geographical location, and employee. Such reports will stand as a pillar for your next customer relationship management strategy.

Customer Relationship as a Culture

There is no point in spending a considerable budget on implementing the market’s best online CRM software if it will end up just as an icon on your computers. You ought to invest time and resources to train employees about customer relationships, create targets for them, and cultivate motivation to improve customer relationships.

It should be a coordination of your sales, marketing, and customer service departments. The reports from CRM could be useful for your manufacturing, procuring, or even the HR department. Thus, a holistic view of CRM as a work culture would be an effective way of running a business.

If you wish to achieve such integration, the software you choose should be easier to integrate with your current infrastructure and legacy systems. Some companies prefer marketing CRM software with cloud-features for better integration.

Is This Relevant to My Business?

Around 71% of brands invest 2% of their total revenue into CRM. Do you believe that it is an overrated expense? Amazon has a subscription-based service with a personalized recommendation, immediate tracking, 24/7 chat features, abandoned cart email, and others.

On the other hand, Mercedes Benz, the luxury car brand, changed its entire distribution model in 2000 to improve customer relationships. It set up a team, created a unified channel, geographic-specific marketing, and more. In short, no brand is too successful to invest in CRM.

Conclusion

Unless you plan to sell your product only to a bunch of customers, you cannot manually handle CRM. You need to invest in reliable online CRM software that is feature-rich, scalable, easily-to-integrate, and highly secure. Once you picked the right software for your business, it is time to create your unique customer relationship management strategy. It would help if you had both a strategy and a platform to implement the strategy.

Image Credits: LinkedIn Sales Navigator