It goes without saying that when loyal customers spend and visit more frequently your bottom line benefits. Similarly, study after study show that it is significantly cost-effective to focus on customer retention rather than on customer acquisition.
What does this mean? It means the real magic in business happens when customer relationships are both lasting and profitable.
But how do you make this a reality?
In this post, let me share five ways you can build lasting and profitable customer relationships.
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Building a customer relationship perspective
- Create a data-driven approach to customer engagement
- Choose the right customer engagement platform
- Personalize Customer Experiences
- Connecting them with vendors and manufacturers.
- Using artificial intelligence to analyze customer purchase history and provides suggestions.
- Using customer reviews and ratings to help with purchases.
- Increase Revenue from your best customers
Building customer relationships is something every company must do to succeed. After all, without customer relationships, there are no sales; without sales, there is no business.
Since it’s often the service and aftercare which truly makes a difference in how people feel toward a company, it’s critical that customer relationship management (CRM) is an ongoing focus.
The key to successful customer engagement and developing personal relationships is data.
Data has long been an obstacle for offline businesses. But no longer. You can now have access to robust customer behavioral data that you can use to connect with your customers in meaningful ways.
And encourage them to develop an emotional connection with your business so they’ll want to return more often and spend more.
With the data you capture from each purchase made, you can store them in a CRM and thus you’ll be able to continually evolve your customer experience to be more targeted and relevant.
CRM systems usually comprise a number of ‘fields’ that you can control and change to effectively, capture the data you need. Sorting data into this set field configuration gives your data a structured way of operating.
A customer engagement platform is an experience-focused software suite designed to make life easier for consumers, and improve profits for brands. The platforms bring together a whole host of intuitive technologies, all of which combine to create a hassle-free shopping experience for every customer who visits a brand’s store.
Customer engagement platforms can be used to automate messaging, and are fully equipped with data that has already been gathered on customers. This means that brands can send out automated, personalized communications to potential leads and repeat customers, with every interaction specifically designed to appeal to them personally.
Customer-focused research has repeatedly warned of the rising importance of customer engagement. The State Of The Connected Customer Report, published by Salesforce , noted that “54% of customers think companies need to fundamentally transform how they engage.”
Remaining hidden behind a curtain and never giving direct answers might work well for God, but it would definitely not work for you. To manage profitable customer relationships, you have to interact with your customers. Social media is often a great platform to do so, so make sure you have a strong presence there.
Here is an example of why Amazon is one of the most successful eCommerce platforms in the world today.
Amazon emphasizes customer experience – both on the front end (online store) and back end (technology). Whether it’s technical teams pushing the boundaries of machine learning or business teams launching new voice ordering capabilities, there is innovation on behalf of customers on a massive scale.
They create brand new experiences for customers by:
Based on consumer behavior analytics, they are able to manage the traffic during sales and plan their marketing strategy as well.
Who are your loyal customers? Do you have faces that you can recognize and maybe even know their names? That is a great start! It means you are doing something right and that people like your business enough to visit more than once.
However, if you want to increase your revenue from these customers in sustainable ways, you need to capture the data that helps you get to know them even better.
With the help of customer engagement platform, you can capture and use customer data to strategically boost an increase in visits by checking with those who visit your store most often.
With every purchase your customers make, you gain rich insights into their behaviors and preferences, enabling you to know them like never before and offer experiences that build trust and an emotional connection with your brand. That’s the secret sauce to standing out from the competition and creating a repeatable revenue source from your most loyal and best customers.
Conclusion
With the right customer engagement platform, it’s easy to identify your loyal customers and encourage them to spend and visit more thereby creating a lasting and profitable relationship.
