Your customers have high expectations, and if you can’t meet them, they’ll go somewhere else. Customer interaction management can assist with this. They would want to buy from businesses that make it easy to receive help when they need it, go above and above for them, and make them happy pre- and post-sales.
Customer loyalty is increasingly based on how successfully a business interacts with its clients right from the start. In today’s competitive business climate, exceptional service can result in selling more products to more people for more profit.
While it may sound simple, many businesses today are failing to provide excellent service, and customer satisfaction is declining. While customer satisfaction is declining, customer demands are rising. People demand everything, anywhere, and at any time in this fast-paced, technology-enabled culture. To help you meet and understand customers’ demands, you need to manage customer interaction wisely.
What Is Customer Interaction Management And Why Is It Important?
Customer Interaction Management (CIM) as the name suggests, is the way businesses interact with their customers. This is a system that facilitates engagement with customers. Also, CIM is a subset of CRM meaning customer relationship management. CRM is a catch-all phrase, abbreviation, and is the most diverse technological segment.
Keep in mind that CIM is more of a post-sales activity for a business. Its importance as a customer satisfaction tool through optimizing communication channels like email, phone, self-service, and chat is clear. By managing customer interaction, a company can develop a long-term consumer base. How so?
Your company can make data-driven decisions and readily focus on areas that can assist improve the end-user experience.
Customer interaction can help organizations rethink their customer satisfaction approach. This can also assist reduce client turnover.
Managing interactions effectively allows you to simply provide a great client experience across communication channels and promptly resolve issues.
Interacting with customers enables a business to study and comprehend the customer’s behaviors and pain points.
Successful interactions increase the likelihood of customers endorsing your business to others. Referrals are a great way to grow your business, so don’t be afraid to follow up with a request after a positive service interaction.
To get you started, here are some ideas to master customer interaction management:
Be Human
Your service representatives must realize that they’re not machines. Customers don’t want to interact with robots. Reps should show empathy, patience, and concern. The entire interaction will appear insincere if it feels rehearsed or formal.
Individuality and creativity will endear you to your customers while remaining professional. Build rapport with the clients. This way, they will feel more at ease and certain that you will assist them.
Here are some tips to do that:
Empathize with your customers.
Focus on the positive, not the negative.
Be attentive, courteous, and receptive to your consumers.
Know your product and technology.
Keep cool.
Learn from every consumer.
First Impressions Are Key
If the first staff a customer interacts with is impolite or grumpy, it ruins the purchasing experience for them. It will make your customers look for new pastures. Put your happiest, most productive team members in charge. Your company’s first impression should be welcoming. That’s the way to get them shopping.
Consider Using Multiple Channels
Customers can reach you via a range of channels, so build a strategy that covers more than one. Customers expect to interact with your organization in new ways. Customers can contact you via live community forums, social media, live chat, and review sites. While every interaction is unique, it must nonetheless be customized to the environment.
Not every issue can be resolved on every channel. The public nature of social media makes it improper for account and billing issues. Move the customer to a more private, secure channel. Remember to not rush customers. It’s considerably easier for everyone if you can close the engagement on the same channel the customer started it.
Monitor Effectiveness
You’ll receive a full view of how your staff communicates with clients and can regularly check for quality. It’s critical to monitor your team’s and consumers’ reactions. On one side, you want to please your clients. On the other hand, you want to know which areas your staff needs to improve on.
With the correct tools, you can track productivity and efficiency to uncover gaps and opportunities for development.
Use Software And Automation
The right technology can help customer experience managers and contact center workers handle client interactions across several channels. Start off by having CRM software. There are a lot of different ones you can choose from, depending on your needs and budget.
The CIM system allows workers to easily engage with customers, updating them on case progress and requesting additional information. It can also be used to deliver upsell messages after a service interaction or appointment reminders. So, clients are always kept informed and system administrators can set it up to send messages automatically.
Keep A Good Reputation
A poor experience with an employee or another customer can lead to social media criticism. If your organization is known for horrible customer service, it’s difficult to regain trust. Avoid losing consumers due to a bad reputation by observing how others view your business.
Ask customers to complete a service survey and use their feedback to enhance customer service. Of course, few people will do a survey without an incentive. Therefore, give them a little bonus. The survey and discount will bring back customers.
Act On Feedback
You can’t just say ‘valued customer,’ you have to ask for and act on it.
Asking for feedback from consumers is an efficient technique to discover possible issues before they happen. A survey allows customers to express their opinions on your product or service in a way that makes them feel valued, and it allows you to fine-tune your processes or recognize staff who go above and beyond.
If your organization currently regularly solicits feedback, don’t overburden your customers with additional messages that could lead to survey tiredness.
If your organization currently asks for feedback, make sure you do so in 1:1 dialogue with clients. No matter how anonymous it is, qualitative feedback will help you develop your services, and buyers will enjoy the opportunity to express themselves.
Conclusion
There’s never a wrong timing to improve your customer interaction, and it will only get better after you put in place a customer interaction management plan.
Prioritizing your clients will always benefit your business. Therefore, begin exploring ways to engage them on a deeper level immediately.
A CRM can prove to be very beneficial to your business. Considering the perpetually growing influence of digital marketing, it’s no surprise that new marketing agencies are constantly emerging. And if you want to be a relevant player in this competitive market, scaling your operations is the only way to stay in the game.
In today’s digital world, new technology and tools are frequently introduced. For a successful marketing agency, it is crucial to recognize the potential of such tools and leverage them to your advantage. For example, customer relationship management (CRM) tools like Daylite can prove to be highly beneficial for your organization.
When you’re a budding business, it might be possible to manually keep track of your clients and prospects. However, as your organization grows, this is no longer a feasible option.
Are you on the fence about deploying a CRM system for your organization? In this post, we’re sharing various ways a CRM can help you effectively scale up operations. Let’s dive in.
Everything in One Place
One of the biggest advantages of CRM software is that it allows you to keep all information about your clients in one place. Hopping from Excel sheets to emails to phone calls can be confusing and lead to missed deadlines and other administrative errors. Instead of maintaining disjointed files, you can make the most of CRM software to efficiently organize data.
Track All Communication
Your employees are likely working on multiple clients at the same time. How can they keep up with every customer interaction? With CRM software, of course. Every internal and external communication occurring over emails, phone calls, and other platforms can be efficiently recorded on a CRM system. Even if you are using LinkedIn for sales, a CRM can streamline your communication.
Furthermore, CRM software is an indispensable tool for a growing organization. As you add more reps to your team, a CRM will ensure smooth communication without any hindrances. You can easily bring new employees up to speed with ongoing projects.
Develop a Client Onboarding Process
A client onboarding process is necessary to align your business needs with clients’ needs. Without a dependable client onboarding process, you risk losing a client and all the resources you spent on them.
Using CRM software, you can develop a repeatable client onboarding process that encourages clients to continue to buy new products and services from you. It is also possible to customize the onboarding process to meet the requirements of a particular client.
Speed Up Lead Generation
Has your agency reached a point of stagnation with lead generation? Without quality leads, your business can quickly lose its momentum. CRM software collects data from integrated platforms and helps discover qualified leads. Access to accurate data helps reps to nurture leads and close more deals.
Scope of Integration
The scope of CRM extends beyond just record-keeping. A CRM offers integration of various platforms that can ultimately help you deliver a personalized customer experience. Especially for a marketing agency, CRM software can be used to integrate social media, email marketing, outbound marketing, Google My Business, and other platforms.
Easily Customize Proposals & Contracts
Personalization is pivotal if you want to make your prospect feel seen. But customizing each proposal or contract can take up too much time. Fortunately, there are CRM systems that can speed up the process.
Moreover, CRM software not only helps maintain records but can also be used to analyze consumer behavior. Just like LinkedIn prospecting tools, these metrics come in handy for marketing agencies. They can utilize this information to create personalized content and tailor CTAs to persuade prospects.
Automate Administrative Tasks
Certain administrative tasks such as logging calls or any client interaction can be time-consuming. Moreover, these tasks can keep you from focusing on core activities and impact your productivity. This software saves you from redundant data entry. You can automate collecting, recording, and summarizing data.
Collect and Use Insights
Customer feedback is important to ensure a seamless experience. A CRM system can improve your customer experience endeavors with the support of internal reviews and surveys. Instead of customers leaving negative feedback on public forums, you can invest in CRM software for effective reputation management.
Facilitate Global Access
Several organizations around the world were forced to operate remotely because of the COVID-19 outbreak. And organizations without the right tools struggled to communicate and smoothly transition to a remote work setting.
On the other hand, organizations with CRM systems flourished. CRM makes it possible to sync updates from the entire team and access any required information, no matter where you are in the world.
Maintain a Paper Trail
Misplacing even a single important document can be costly for your organization. From employee to customer documentation, a CRM system enables your organization to keep a clear and easy-to-access library of all documentation. Whether you are a new or an established agency, CRM is certainly worth the investment.
Set Up Reminders
When you’re juggling several clients and prospects at the same time, a CRM tool can be paramount for your organization.
When a lot is going on, it is easy to forget to follow up with a certain prospect. And all the resources and time you invested in convincing the prospect to choose your service goes down the drain.
A CRM will enable your team to keep track of all prospects and remind your employees to follow up at the right time.
Identify Trends
To effectively sell your marketing services, an agency needs to be aware of which strategies work and which don’t. You can employ CRM to extract key metrics and identify trends. These trends are useful to understand which processes deserve more attention and resources. This plays a significant role in making informed decisions down the line.
The Bottom Line of CRM
CRM is a versatile tool that is not only a useful tool for marketing agencies but also for other businesses of all sizes. The right software for your organization plays a key role in streamlining communication and managing prospects. Hopefully, the aforementioned tips encourage you to explore the endless possibilities promised by CRM solutions. Ideally, you should choose this software that will grow alongside your business and support your expanding requirements.
Author Bio:
Stefan Smulders is a SaaS Entrepreneur | Bootstrapped to €3M ARR in just 1year | Founder of Worlds safest software for LinkedIn Automation Expandi.io | Vegan | Father
Four Negotiation Tactics That Any Business Can Employ
Whether it’s asking your boss to assign you a two-day off or establishing a B2B trade, it is never easy to negotiate as one does not know the intentions of the person sitting on the other side of the table. Knowing how to negotiate is a skill that one develops from knowledge and information about both the trader and the traded. Every business needs negotiation tacticsthat can help direct their actions in the right direction to achieve the desired results. So, we are going over the 4 best negotiation tips to help you win your business deal.
Let’s take a look.
Ask open-ended questions
To know your counterpart’s threshold, you must ask them open-ended questions. Allow them to speak more so that you can understand what they want.
Let’s say that you are sitting on the table for a factory equipment deal. You can ask questions like:
How about we buy 12 instead of 10 pieces of factory equipment from you, will you offer any discounts then?
Will you provide after-sales support if need be?
Such questions will give you an idea about how much extra your counterpart is willing to offer.
Figure out their vulnerabilities
Your counterpart will try to get the better end of the deal. To counter that, you must know where their pain points are. Think like your counterpart, what they do or don’t want. Robust analysis of your counterpart will help you know more about their capabilities and pain points. So, if they try to take advantage of your vulnerabilities, you know where to hit.
Give them a number
Another strategy is called the bogey strategy. In this tactic, you give a budget to the counterpart, which is a touch lower than your actual budget. You tell them that you cannot afford anything above a certain price. Coming back to the ship example, you tell your counterpart that you can only afford to spend $1million for the ship, of which your actual budget is $1.5 million. Through this tactic, negotiation slightly bends in your favor. Even if your counterpart wants to negotiate further, they can only ask you to increase your budget a bit. In other words, you may end up buying the ship for approximately $1.1 million.
Always have your deadlines in place.
Deadlines force people to take action. However, in negotiations, deadlines are often not honored because of the lack of mutual consent between the two parties. But that does not mean that talks should go on endlessly. You must set your deadlines as your time and effort are precious. If the deal is eating up a lot of your time, try changing the mediator, manager, or the deal itself. At last, if it still does not work out then, it might be time to call it quite.
Final Thoughts on Negotiation
Negotiations are a part of daily business life. They can happen internally between an employee and their boss or externally between the two businesses. To be a perfect negotiator, you must know what you and your counterpart expect from the deal. Ask them open-ended questions to figure out what they want from your business and how far they are willing to go for the deal. Also, it would help if you spent ample time researching their vulnerabilities. Use the bogey technique to play safe and keep your deadlines intact. You must know the last date until which you are willing to negotiate. By using these techniques, you will always have the upper hand.
8 Strategies to Promote Positive Customer Reviews For Your Business
Positive customer reviews are a very important aspect to your business. Gone are the days when a catchy advertisement run across all available media platforms would direct all of the potential customers to your business. With time, trust issues have intensified quite a bit.
Today, most of your customers would go with a recommendation given by a friend or acquaintance rather than trusting the work of your sales department. They would rather trust a user’s review in the comment section than your promises and guarantees given in the description. Individual reviews feel much more relatable to them than anything else.
Naturally, the wisest strategy to operate under such circumstances is none other than generating maximum possible customer reviews. But then again, the goal isn’t as easy to achieve as it sounds.
Let us acquaint you with a few tried and tested strategies to promote positive customer reviews for your brand or business.
1. Develop customer-friendly strategies
Positive or negative-your customers won’t ever leave a review until they feel welcomed to do so. As per the latest product management trends, you need to optimize the company’s strategies and policies so that they revolve around customers. Take the first step in genuinely connecting with them!
Create an online webpage and make it user-friendly, which will serve as a quick DIY reviewing portal. You won’t have to make calls, get them to fill survey forms, or anything.
After purchase, they can review the products directly on the website instead of contacting the company. Personalizing customer service is another efficient customer-centric strategy.
In it, customers will receive custom and tailor-made solutions to their problems. Consequently, they will feel more connected to the store and would be willing to offer positive reviews.
2. Have frequent discount campaigns
Well, one quick way to urge your clientele to leave a review is to offer a gift in return. Perhaps, you can offer a discount coupon or code. It will compel the buyers and users to leave a review, and most likely, a positive review.
In case your brand is tight on budget and cannot afford to give out discount coupons to every user that leaves a review, then we suggest you consider a lucky draw. Offer a free entry to the lucky draw to those who leave a review. However, make sure that the prize of the lucky draw is inviting enough. If it isn’t, users might as well skip it. If you have a business that sells ergonomic furniture for WFH lifestyle, you could offer work from home accessories instead of discount coupons.
Also, if you run frequent discount campaigns now and then (without asking for the review), your clientele will most likely drop positive reviews. Who doesn’t appreciate getting more for less?
3. Provides spaces for customer reviews
Your website will only serve to be helpful in drawing clients until they know you and search you up. But, what about all those potential clients who do not know you?
First things first, you should create business pages on different third-party platforms. Studies show that consumers trust Yelp and Facebook quite a lot when it comes to brand reviews. You can enable your customers and potential clients to give reviews on these platforms by creating your business pages.
Build a new page or claim a business; the selection depends on you. As a seller, you can establish a presence in e-commerce stores like Amazon and eBay.
Once you start receiving positive reviews on these platforms, you can feature them on your website and social media handles too. For your ease, you can use customer feedback software. This will help you collect and analyze your overall customer feedback seamlessly.
4. Build trust
When a user reads a positive review of a particular product, he may feel encouraged to buy it. However, if he scrolls down and reads a list of only-positive reviews, clouds of doubts may surround the reader. Ornate compliments will only further intensify these doubts. Thus, shaking your potential buyer’s trust in the authenticity of your brand.
For that very reason, businesses need to share both positive and negative reviews of their customers. Share them just as is and refrain from editing. Doing so will have your audience perceive your honest and dedicated intentions.
5. Show your appreciation for customer reviews
Reciprocation in all matters is of immense importance. Your customers will only feel motivated and encouraged to provide reviews when they know the value of it.
As a business, you should make your audience and potential clients aware of the importance of review-giving. Appreciate your clients giving reviews through visual content. You can use social media tools, like Instagram and Facebook, to share encouraging infographics and posts.
For loyal customers, you can provide a special discount or send promotional products. Post about these online so that other customers feel motivated about expressing their thoughts.
6. Get to know your audience
When your clients pay a visit, be it in your virtual store or physical store, make sure that you get to know them a little more than just knowing what they need from you. Request for their email address so that you shall maintain frequent contact with them and keep them updated on the latest arrivals and trends.
We understand collecting so many emails can be rather hectic. Whether you do it digitally or manually, the struggle is more or less the same. Hence, for your convenience, you can make use of checklist software. It will serve as a tool and organize the process to make it easier for execution.
7. Host events
Another amazing way to get positive client reviews is to host events. You can come up with different events on your own or collaborate with other brands. For example, if you are a food brand, you can host a food festival in collaboration with ingredient manufacturing companies.
In these events, your customers and interested people can learn more about your business. You can organize various activities so that you can connect to your audience on a more personal level.
You can even offer samples to the audience, and ask for reviews directly. Hence, you can get lots of positive reviews to feature on your web page.
8. Focus on packaging
Customers simply love it when the packaging of the product is good. It is the extra cherry on the top that they do not expect, and can help you increase chances of positive reviews. You can make a unique and aesthetic packaging that comes with a card or something extra.
Conclusion on customer reviews
Now, of course, you can experiment further with these strategies. And devise a custom one. In actuality, it always works best this way. Begin working with any of these general strategies and add elements of yours along the way. Doing so will help you get to a strategy that yields the maximum possible results for you. Good luck!
Don’t make the mistake of neglecting the preparation aspect of any business. Peak shipping season is a great opportunity to gain more profit. Now, you can get organized with our shipping checklist to be in tip-top shape when it rolls around.
With small business shipping, being organized and on top of things is critical at all times. The margins on your business are not usually that big, so you need to ensure you always bring your A game. However, during the peak season, it’s even more essential.
Disappointing customers and annoying suppliers during the busiest periods can easily give your business a negative reputation that could last throughout the quiet periods too. This could be hugely detrimental to your business, and cost you a fortune in sales.
Peak Shipping Times Checklist For Your Business
So, how do you get your business prepared for peak shipping season? Let’s take a look:
1. Set Your Shipping Checklist Guides According To The Season
Whether you’re planning your own stock levels and ordering, or you’re providing shipping guides to customers, you should never have a one-size-fits-all approach. Things will change depending on the time of year and the general volumes of items being shipped. Just like a hotel will have peak and off-peak rates for their rooms, you should have peak and off-peak shipping season guidelines as part of your business processes.
Peak seasons can also vary slightly depending on what industry you’re in and what is being shipped. For example, on the consumer side of things, peak season will be November to December as people gear up for the holiday season. However, the retailers will need to gear up in the months before that, meaning their main shipping season is August through to October.
Over the Christmas period, it’s also a good idea to clearly provide details as to when the last order can be placed so that it will be shipped in time to give as a gift, or use over the holidays. Being open about this up front with your customers will alleviate a lot of heartache and worry. Plus it will provide your customers with a good user experience as they know whether or not their expectations will be met. No one likes not knowing if the gift they ordered will arrive in time!
2. Ship And Store What You Can Early
Shipping during peak season can also bring with it a hefty price tag. The demand for shipping lanes and transportation goes up and those providing these services can increase their rates (and usually do). If you have any products that are not perishable and can be shipped before you hit the peak season, it might be far more cost effective to do so.
Shipping early will come with other implications, especially the cost implication of storage at the receiver’s end. You may need to look into getting a warehouse space, which costs money. However, this could still be less than the increased shipping fees. Do your homework about small business shipping timings and plan accordingly.
3. Stagger Your Shipments Based On Need
What can often hold up a shipment, especially in the busier peak times, is that an entire order can’t be made ready at the same time. This means that one part of your order is sitting waiting and won’t be shipped to you until it is complete.
Instead of placing your regular orders, look critically at what is urgent during the peak period and only order that. You can talk to your suppliers about sending part orders so you don’t completely run out of something.
If you are shipping orders to customers, consider setting up a similar option for part orders. If you speak to regular customers early on about stock issues or potential issues with shipping, you can usually find a way around the concerns together.
4. Be Aware Of The Impact Of Holidays In Regards To Your Shipping Checklist
During the peak holiday season, there are fewer working days. This means that there is a higher demand for items to be shipped, and fewer days in which to make those shipments.
The impact of this could mean a longer time for an item to arrive or a higher price tag attached because the shipping company has to pay employees to work over a holiday. There are strict regulations around this in the trucking industry and other shipping methods so it’s a crucial item to add to your checklist.
5. Change Up Your Shipping Methods
Before demand for couriers and shipping goes up over the peak season, you may want to shop around and see what other options there are. You don’t always have to use the same company or method to send your products to customers or to get items from your suppliers. You should also consider seeing if the companies you use have flexible options.
For example, if you don’t mind the products arriving between 15 and 20 days, rather than arriving within 15 days, you might get a better rate on shipping. This is because the shipping company then has a bit of breathing room to work around the massively varying shipping requests coming in during peak season.
You can also consider creating your own small business shipping delivery methods if it’s possible. Look into the logistics of hiring a driver and a van for the peak season so that you can stay in control of what you deliver to your customers. It doesn’t have to be a permanent solution – just something to help you stay on top of things when they are busy.
6. Insure Your Shipping To Prioritize Your Shipping Checklist
This often seems like an unnecessary extra cost, but it can help your business to survive if a shipment goes missing or is delayed. In peak shipping season, it is far more likely that you will face one of these scenarios and that can do real damage to your ability to make money.
With proper shipping insurance, you can easily make claims and cover any losses that are incurred. This extra peace of mind can help you to thrive through the busy seasons and grow through the quieter periods.
Peak season can make or break your business. If you ensure you are prepared for peak shipping season, you should reap the rewards. Your bottom line will improve and your customer service and satisfaction ratings will too.
Whether you are a small business owner or running a huge company, your business cycle starts with generating high-quality leads. That is exactly where the sales funnel starts from.
Believe it or not, ‘lead generation’ is one of the most underrated phases of your sales funnel that should actually be getting enough attention and should definitely be worked upon.
Did you know?
According to stats, an effective lead generation process can boost your revenue by 133%.
Before starting a sales journey, a business collects leads and not all those leads turn into paying customers.
Oftentimes, some leads just get associated with you to gather information or other purposes and do not continue with you in your journey. Therefore, it is essential that you get this phase of generating high-quality leads right from the beginning itself.
Since Lead Generation is an investment for your company, you should have an effective lead generation strategy in place to get the maximum number of high-quality leads and cut down on all those that may not be as relevant to your business.
How do you achieve that?
In this guide, we are going to introduce you to 8 Best Practices that you should know to generate High-Quality Leads For Your Business.
8 Best Practices to Generate High-Quality Leads For Your Business
Don’t Create Just One Buyer Persona For Your Business
Your business caters to various audiences and in order to effectively target them, you need to create an in-depth profile of these representative fictional characters. By creating more than just 1 Buyer Persona for your business, you are widening your horizons.
For example, by studying the challenges, motivations, demographic details, and habits of your customers, you can get to really know them well and can understand what platforms they may be using and the kind of content, product, or services they may be seeking out for solving their issues.
Repurpose Your Content
Creating more content can cost you more and can take up more of your time. Therefore, recycling here comes to your rescue. You may already be having a successful blog, therefore all you need to do now is to repurpose your content in the right way to target more potential customers, tweak your messages and content and analyze what content actually engages your audience.
Some of the ways you can repurpose your content are:
You can start with newsletters for audiences to sign up with you
Turn your blog posts into effective videos and podcasts
Use some of your content for Social Media Platforms
Get creative and trendy with your content that suits the customers of today. Visual graphics, videos and podcasts are just some of the new ways to grab your audience’s attention and can be really effective sources.
Use Social Media to Its Maximum Potential
Social media is a fantastic tool to generate new leads and nurture existing ones. There are numerous approaches to using social media to raise brand awareness and authority. With the current advancement in trends, you can now even engage with your leads directly through effective chatbots, where you can solve your audience’s problems almost immediately.
Look out for platforms where your target audience is the most active and make maximum use of them. For example, if your target audience is teenagers or millennials, you should be active on Instagram as it is a popular space for your target audience. You can also make use of tools like paid ads which would increase your visibility to the audience and would help you get High-Quality potential leads.
Make Use of Clear CTA’s and Contact Forms As Well When Pursuing High-Quality Leads
Your motive should be to drive your audience into taking some action. It is psychologically proven that when you are constantly telling your audience into taking some form of action such as buying your product, engaging with your email, pressing on some link, they are more inclined to do so. Therefore, having clear CTAs is extremely important in your Emails, Landing Pages, Websites, etc.
Contact forms are also a great way to catch potential leads. It is important that your contact form is clear and uncluttered with a prominent CTA button. This helps your customers to focus exactly on what they need.
Make Use of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
One of the best ways to capture high-quality leads is by taking care of the audience that is actually searching for you and not the other way around. You always have a pool of customers that are actually searching for your products and services and this is when SEO comes into play. You need to make sure that you are appearing highly in these searches.
The closing rate of SEO leads is as high as 14.6%. Some of the ways you can appear when your audience searches for you on the search engine is by producing SEO-optimized content, creating links and backlinks, and optimizing your product pages around your persona’s needs.
Analyze Your Executions Every Now and Then
One of the ways you can improve your current performance is by analyzing your executions in your journey. When trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t, it’s critical to analyze all of your executions. This would help you make respective adjustments and improve overall performance.
Some of the key areas where you can analyze to track performance are email marketing, SEO Content Marketing, PPC outcomes, banner ads, Effectiveness of CTAs and Landing Pages, etc. This would not only help you in making adjustments but would also tell you the most effective channel for the best conversions.
Automating Your Marketing Process for High-Quality Leads
A lot of times, many high-quality leads do not get the attention they require due to the busy marketing and sales processes in the business. That’s where marketing automation saves you from losing your high-quality leads. With Marketing Automation, your workflows can be highly customized and your processes can be optimized according to your business’s needs.
Workflow automation will help you by keeping high-quality leads in the loop and by saving time when it comes to manually follow up on leads. It also aids in the tracking of your sales process by recording costs, engagement points, and other activities, which further leaves your sales and marketing managers with more time to actually build stronger relationships with the leads.
Focus on Lead Scoring in Regards to High-Quality Leads
Like we mentioned earlier, not all your leads are going to get converted to paying customers. Therefore, it is essential that you differentiate between the different types of leads that you have. These can primarily be categorized as hot and cold leads based on their scale of enthusiasm.
You need to have a system in place for grading these leads based on their engagement with your business. While some may be long or mid-term prospects, the others may be just there for the sake of it and may never even wish to buy from you. It is essential that you nurture leads accordingly.
Rank these leads and create a customized multi-layered content marketing strategy in your sales and marketing funnel based on their ranks and their needs to get nurtured. This would cut down on your efforts to market to the irrelevant leads and would help you focus on leads that can give you some return.
Conclusion
There are no hard and fast set rules of what will fetch you High Quality Leads in the Industry. There is nothing fixed in the industry that has been said to work for every business type as each business is different and has varying needs.
You can always implement tactics and see what works for your business to produce high-quality leads. These are some of the tried and tested best practices that we implemented for lead generation and helped us achieve our organizational goals.
Without further ado, go on and get started with testing a few of these for your business!
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Author Bio:
Sara Williams
Sara is a content writer at PeppyBiz, a platform that provides lead generation software through which companies can stimulate and capture customer’s interest in their product or service.
A customer success plan defines customer success and what it looks like, as well as how you can aid customers to achieve that success. By customer success plan, we refer to a roadmap that guides the operations of customer success teams. These customer success plans ensure the right resources are being delivered to the customers to ensure they receive the desired value from consuming your product.
What’s the difference between customer success and customer service?
We must stress out that customer success isn’t the same as customer service. You’ll even see the terms “customer success,” “customer service,” or “customer support” used interchangeably, but they aren’t the same thing.
Customer success encompasses a proactive approach to making your customers successful. This is sometimes also referred to as “customer happiness.” By customer service, we refer to a more reactive approach to ensuring customer satisfaction. Customer service or customer support handles unanticipated issues or needs from customers. By being reactive, we mean the customer usually initiates customer service to interact with the service or support desk. Also, we can say that customer service is a tool to put out the fire, while customer success deals with the long-term experience that your customers have with your product.
Why should you create a customer success plan?
Customer success plans are essential, and you should have them for your business. Some benefits of customer success plans include increased trust and transparency with customers, alignment of customer objectives, reduce churn and increase recurring.
Here are the benefits created by outcome success plans:
Success plans reveal a precise alignment to customer objectives
Success plans enable everyone in the company, including the customer, to be able to view pertinent information on client goals and the overall progress of the company in attaining those goals. This allows a clear view of objectives, and from this central interface, work assignments can be given to the appropriate parties – be it the internal or customer team – ensuring that everyone is aligned to customer objectives and is doing their part to help the customer reach their goals.
Success plans help to identify recyclable processes for reliable customer outcomes
When you work from a template of actions, it is a great way to produce consistency and achieve desired outcomes. Such a template of actions can be fine tuned as you set up and use success plans. Improvisations in company actions may sometimes lead to unexpected results, and you want systems that are proven to be effective and can increase success and overall stability.
Using success plans increase trust and transparency with customers
Success plans expose the progress of the company’s product to the customers. This not only demonstrates the value of the product but also increases the trust customers have in the company, as customers can better assess the company’s methodology to see whether it aligns with their values and beliefs. Such transparency will go a long way to instill confidence and trust in the company’s products and processes, and that will keep a steady customer base for the company and products.
Success plans allow for easier Executive Stakeholder assessment
Success plans, especially when digitally represented, allow those in stakeholder meetings to visually illustrate the degree of progress customer teams ate making with each passing day. Such visualizations would help executive decisions as it points out the areas of progress that need emphasis and aspects that need greater scrutiny and adjustments for greater outcomes.
Success plans help reduce churn
Every company needs to have a steady customer base to succeed. Having high churn rates is not profitable for any business. It creates a situation similar to a leaking bucket where customers leave the businesses even as you’re trying to engage new customers. This offsets the top line customer growth as the customer base is kept either constant or decreases steadily despite efforts by the company to gain new customers.
Success plans help decrease churn, making growth much easier as it ensures customers are kept happy as they use company products. With sustained customer satisfaction, customers are less likely to churn, keeping the company on a steady growth path.
Success plans increase the likelihood of upsells and cross-sells
Success plans, by making customers happy and successfully impacting them positively, impact your business as it gives you more success increasing upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Upselling has to do with engaging customers to buy into more feature-rich and more expensive tiers. Cross-selling entails selling additional products to existing users. To be more successful with upselling and cross-selling, you need to make your customers happy and successful with your core product experience. That is the fundamental goal of your customer success plan. Once you’ve done that and achieved good results, you can include tactics in your customer success plan o move your customers towards premium tiers or additional products.
Using success plans increase recurring revenue
Happy customers mean greater revenue. Greater upsells and cross-sells mean greater revenue. Happy customers also increase company revenue by strengthening your brand and giving referrals. This spreads the words of your products without much of your effort, which will boost your customer acquisition trend, and you’d get more inbound inquiries. This goes to make the sales process much easier.
Applying success plans produces consistency of efforts in the customer lifecycle
Using a customer success roadmap ensures you always have the end goal of your customer in mind. This makes sure you don’t wander-off in your efforts towards meeting the customer’s expectations. Your efforts are, thus, kept consistent as you birth consistent results.
Every stage of the customer lifecycle should have its typical customer success goals. Plans help to make sure you’re always taking steps in the right direction through the right resources at the right time. As you apply your success plans, your efforts are tailored and kept consistent, especially on processes that yield pleasant results for the company.
Making use of success plans helps mitigate unpleasant surprises
By using a plan, you can assuredly achieve your end-goals if you tread the right path. And when any unexpected requests come from your customer, you can more accurately measure in advance whether that is achievable or not. If it’s achievable, then you would know exactly what to tweak in your success plan to meet those expectations. This keeps you out of some unpleasant surprises that come as you make unplanned decisions. A success plan keeps your decisions and actions well calculated for success and mitigates any unpleasant surprise actions.
Success plans help to save execution time
The time spent repairing always out beats the time it would indeed have taken to prepare properly, which applies to businesses. The time spent to bail yourself and the company out of a crossroad is always more than when you would have taken to prepare for such situations. Planning takes out the guesswork from the equation and produces greater efficiency as you tackle firefighting issues. Planning covers any unprecedented situations and keeps you on the offensive for any possible outcome. That saves time in executing strategies when such situations do come up, as you know exactly what to do from your plan. Success plans, thus, help to save execution time.
Success plans create better outcomes with lower operational costs
Operation time and efforts reduce considerably through the use of a customer success plan. You don’t have to spend time and money figuring and guessing what you should do next when you reach a milestone. Your customer success team would always be prepared to move on to the next stage in the customer journey as they simply follow up on the established customer success plan. This greatly reduces operational costs while still maintaining efficient and productive outcomes.
Success Plan Prerequisites
Understand the Customer’s Motivation
Before you can develop a success plan, you must understand what drives the customer’s usage of your product. This goes beyond the features they are interested in and extends to the business value you provide. This assessment should also include any potential risks or barriers, key stakeholders, and any other relevant information concerning their desire to use your products.
Prepare discovery questions to discuss with the customer to collect any missing information
When necessary, you may need to physically engage the customers with questions when you need more specific information. This could be in the form of interviews, questionnaires, polls, etc., to collect any additional information useful for success planning and developing a good relationship with the customers.
Talk with the stakeholders
When it comes to the business objectives that the customer is pursuing, all stakeholders should agree, as well as on which products and services will help them reach that goal. It is good practice to keep the scope focused on 1-3 objectives. As you close out objectives, you can restart the process to define and add new ones to your list.
You can also use questionnaires to validate your existing knowledge of the customer’s business outcomes and pain points, as well as to learn about business outcomes you don’t know yet.
For each business objective, review with the customer:
What is the objective’s priority relative to the others objectives?
Which stakeholders will benefit from this objective?
How should we prioritize efforts for your teams?
Are there any quick wins?
Key contributions & responsibilities of everyone involved
Are there deadlines for individual steps or overall completion?
Understand success plans are living documents
Sharing progress with everyone involved as time goes on is important. You should keep the Sales team and the customer up to date on where the success plan objectives and tasks stand so that they can continue working on new tasks. They’d also be able to share the progress with anyone else they think should be aware.
Change in a customer’s business and strategies is normal, so the value that they need from you will change with that. To stay up to date, you should keep public your success plan so that the customers can always have a fresh understanding of their needs. You can email a report to the customer regularly (maybe once a month or some other frequency), citing the objectives and inviting them to reply if they’re out of date.
It’s also a good practice to set aside key times when you interact with a customer that would be good opportunities to review and refresh the success plan. This could be when discussing business goals feels appropriate, with the right stakeholders at the table. A good example of such a time would be at key hand-offs between teams, EBRs, or executive check-ins.
5 Simple Steps to Creating Your Customer Success Plan
When it comes to creating a success plan, here are some quick steps that can help guide the process to ensure for your company.
Step 1: Define Expectations
You must consciously aid your customers to express their expectations from your product right from the beginning. The customer onboarding phase is a great time to discover these expectations. You could also make use of strategic discussions to unravel their expectations of your product.
Next up, you must quickly demarcate which expectations are achievable and not as soon as possible. Concomitantly, you must synthesize your expectations from the customers, e.g., quick adoption, brand advocacy, etc.
This is a logical first step. You simply can’t plan if you don’t know what your end-goal and milestones are. You must establish why your customers have subscribed to your product. What are their motivations for choosing your product? What are their pain points? What do they aim to achieve? And what does success mean for them? You must know this from the start. Never assume that you know your customer’s expectations– that’s a rookie mistake! Don’t be afraid to let them (and other stakeholders) tell you. And when they aren’t so sure of their expectations, you can always define them together.
Having established what each customer expects from your product, you can begin to segment customers and create a user persona. With these subgroups in place, you would be able to create success plans best suited to meet the specificities of each group. This stems from the notion that not all customers are the same, and they’re likely to churn of you fail to meet their needs individually. Specifically tailored success plans would be best suited to achieve this result.
Once you have defined expectations/ goals and segmented your customers, you can prioritize and address each one of them, moving ion from expectations to actual action.
Step 2: Go from expectations to action
Create processes to meet goals. Expectations are the goals you would be directing your customer success plan towards. While expectations are the “what,” you need to lay out the “how.” You must establish clear, attainable steps that you would be following towards meeting those goals. This entails figuring out what processes to put in place to ensure you meet and even exceed the customers’ expectations.
This step moves you from a theoretical framework to a practical application of your plan. No matter how exciting expectations are, they’d never materialize without an actionable step by step guide to achieving them.
Step 3: Measuring the deliverables (based on the goals)
While customer goals and expectations can vary, they would always reflect improving the business. You should also note that each expectation has a metric that can be measured and followed up to see whether it is being attained or not. This would help you monitor customer health and identify red flags that may need to be addressed.
It is also important to note that for every expectation of the customer, there should be a specific individual responsible for that expectation. For example, if your customer expects optimal value from your product, then you should have someone assigned who’d measure whether the customer is getting the best value from your product. Such measurements could take the form of quarterly business reviews.
Having measurable and actionable objectives is important. If you have a company objective to maximizes customer value intruder to achieve negative churn in the business, for example, then a measurable and actionable way to achieve this could be to ensure that averagely 50% of customers who renew their commitment to the company over six months have an agreed upon and well-discussed success plan!
Step 4: Strategy and tactics
Having set every groundwork down, it’s time to draw up the success plan so that you can start measuring and tracking success and results. And you dint need to be overly complicated with this; a simple spreadsheet can get the job done.
Having established the detailed plan, you must consider the following:
Define your timelines and stick to them
Make sure responsibilities are assigned to the relevant individuals
Be flexible enough, but always stick to the plan
Use metrics to measure the progress
To measure the progress of each point of the customer success plan, make use of measurable metrics. You should, therefore, have a predefined metric for each stage of the success plan to help you determine the efficacy of your processes.
Assign employees and schedules for each stage
To ensure the successful execution of the success plan, you should have a person responsible for execution at each stage of the success plan. They should ensure the goal of their respective stage is closely monitor and met satisfactorily. They should also measure the data for their respective stage and cross-reference with the predefined ideal metrics.
Schedules for stages of the success plan must also be followed to track the progress of tasks accurately. Any lag in executing a task on the success plan should be appropriately reported to the right quarters for corrective action to be taken.
Having established a great plan, it’s time to implement it! The implementation process can/ should involve:
Regular Business Reviews (quarterly or each semester)
Regular check-in meetings
Communication and feedback systems
You can also use customer success platforms and digital tools to keep you on track with your success plan.
A few mistakes to avoid when creating and implementing a success plan
It is entirely normal to ace challenges while executing a plan, which isn’t different from success plans. While you can’t always address all the challenges that come with developing an implementing a success plan, there are some key mistakes you can avoid to ensure your success plan follows a less hurdled development and implementation.
Not considering customer’s inputs into the success plan
No matter how thorough and fail-proof you think your success plan is, it would never really get the results you intend if you forgot or neglected the customers’ input into it. The first step to setting up a success plan is considering customer goals. You shouldn’t just assume their expectations. Consider customer reviews and expectations into your success plan if you intend it to succeed.
Don’t be too ambitious in your success plan
When creating a success plan, don’t over deliver. Ambitious goals may be hard to achieve and end up being a failure. Make sure your set goals are realistic and achievable. You should have achievable goals that aren’t so magnificent to set out lofty objectives you cannot attain.
Using vanity metrics to measure fruition of success plans
Measurement of the attainment of goals of your success plan is important. You must have metrics to measure your progress as you implement your customer success plan. But making use of vanity metrics to measure your efforts is just as bad as not measuring at all. Such metrics can be misguiding and can even give a false sense of achievement. So, be careful when picking out the metrics for measuring the achievement of the success plan.
Lack of improvisation
A plan exists as a set of guidelines to execute when all things are in order and place. But sometimes, when surprises occur, you need to improvise and re-prioritize your actions to get quick solutions to these impromptu situations. A plan is a guide, but there should always be room for improvement and quick improvisations.
To wrap things up
Success plans are important for the progress of the business, as it gives a picture of what success is, with a practical step-wise approach to achieving such success. These plans synthesize the expectations of the customers and executives of the business into an actionable and achievable set of actions towards business success. By steadily following up on your success plan, you can better identify how and when to engage with customers, mitigate chances of churn, and actively (and proactively) work towards achieving the goals and objectives of the business. This keeps your eyes on the prize at all times and sets you on the path to business success. Check out this article about becoming a successful business owner.
There are some important reasons to get online reviews for your business. In our tech-driven world, it’s no surprise we turn to the internet for just about everything. Not only do we make countless purchases online, but we also research those purchases well before we take the plunge.
In many cases, that involves scouring the web for customer reviews. These online reviews are seen as trustworthy commentary. In fact, many people trust online reviews from complete strangers just as much as personal recommendations from someone they know! And if your business has very few or only negative reviews, you’re going to have a hard time competing. Let’s discuss why you should make online review generation a priority and how to get more customers to share their feedback on a public forum.
Without any reviews for your business, customers will have a hard time trusting you. It’s rare that someone will be willing to take a chance on a brand that doesn’t have much in the way of proven customer interaction. Your website might look great and your products or services might be top-notch. But scams are simply too prevalent in the digital age; customers want to avoid getting ripped off or having a poor customer experience. As a result, they’ll be inclined to seek out alternatives that have received some sort of online endorsement from real-life customers.
The occasional negative review may not matter too much, especially if you respond in a way that customers will like. But if you have too many of these reviews, it’ll make it much harder to build customer trust and manage your reputation online. When a business has less than three stars on a popular forum, they may struggle to compete.
Keep in mind that online reviews matter in more ways than one. They can help or hinder your online reputation, but they can also drive traffic to your website and serve as a lead generation tool. Because they’re often permanent, online reviews can help you get more out of your marketing budget (especially when compared to something like a paid ad). There are also a number of platforms you can utilize for online review generation, which makes it possible to spread the word about your business and make it more likely for your brand to show up in Google search results.
With all that in mind, it’s clear that online reviews play a critical role in the marketing and promotion of your business. So how can you generate online reviews? Check out the tips below.
How Can I Get More Online Reviews For My Business?
Just Ask!
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Because most people won’t go out of their way to write a review unless they’ve had a negative experience, you may need to gently remind customers to share their thoughts. Whether it’s in person, in an email blast, or in a social media post, it doesn’t hurt to simply ask (though you should be careful not to bombard them with requests).
Establish Different Platforms.
As stated above, there are several different review sites and platforms that make it easy for customers to leave feedback. Yelp, Google My Business, Facebook, BBB, and other platforms can help you spread the word and encourage customers to support your business in a few words. Diversifying where you direct customers can heighten your profile and help you appear more prominently in SERPs.
Keep It Simple.
No one wants to jump through a bunch of hoops just to leave a review for your business, even if they love supporting you. For best results, aim to eliminate complications and frustrations. Include links in your emails and on your website, keep the feedback process short and sweet, and don’t make them guess where to go or what to say. Simplicity is key; if it takes only 30 seconds to a minute to share their thoughts, they’ll realize how easy it is to show their love for your business.
Summary
Clearly, online reviews hold a lot of power — so you need to devote some effort to review generation. While there’s no guarantee that customers will leave a review (and you need to be careful about incentivizing positive reviews), these tips will make it more likely that they’ll take the time to share their thoughts.
Email and analytics are cornerstones of marketing, but, as is often the case with strategies considered “obsolete,” laypeople tend to overlook the strength of email marketing. As one of the first significant marketing trends in the digital age, email marketing gave rise to just about every other form of campaigning before the social media takeover.
Today, the numbers for email marketing continue to validate its value as a marketing method that can reach countless qualified leads.
293.6 billion emails are received every day, with 52% of responders saying that email is their primary communication method.
Most professionals (86%) will give communications priority to email, and analytics show that the average open rate for emails was 22.5%, with a click-through rate of 3.43%.
89% of marketers prefer this method of lead generation, and 47% of marketers find that this method is the most effective means of marketing to potential and existing customers.
Email marketing is so potent that it can deliver up to 4,200% ROI. It’s also 40% superior when it comes to bringing in conversions.
And most of all, customers are more loyal through email newsletters, with 37% of respondents saying that it’s effective in building brand loyalty, retention, and purchase influences.
How to Boost Email Conversion Rate Using Predictive Analytics
There are numerous ways to get utility out of email, and analytics data is one of them. From getting an IP lookup through email to gathering your audience’s demographics—there’s a lot to be gleaned from information in your email campaign.
But why is it crucial to be able to gather data from your campaign? It’s not just about analytics: it’s about getting the factors and data for predictive analytics. This makes all the difference when trying to determine interest in products and services. This includes the potential direction of your marketing campaign in its entirety.
Understanding the Power of Predictive Analytics
Marketers know that if they need customer data, they can get that information from the email. And analytics uses that data to create models for customer personas, see buying trends, and discover interests. This is referred to as predictive marketing, a more efficient way of selling to customers and improving conversions. Predictive analytics does all of this and more, utilizing the power of machine learning to make computations beyond human capability.
By strict definition, predictive analytics is the use of statistical algorithms on user data. With machine learning technology, the algorithms can predict future outcomes based on existing historical data. AI and machine learning can show marketers what trends are forthcoming and what customers are likely to be purchasing next. Essentially, it’s user information from email and analytics for predictive marketing but performed on an exponential scale.
The use of AI and machine learning for analytics has steadily been on the rise, but in recent times, more so in marketing. This is because marketers have a lot easier access to customer data in large quantities. Furthermore, what was once inaccessible technology is now more widely available in the form of automation tools. Algorithms have also become far more sophisticated. And finally, cloud computing has made it so that even marketers can access the greater computing power needed to make predictive analytics work.
Currently, there are five major predictive analytics applications used for marketing purposes:
Predictive Modeling for Customer Behavior
This one goes beyond just email and analytics. Predictive modeling is used by large “shopping mall” type of companies such as Amazon and eBay. Often, it’s a way to create predictive models about their customers and determine which customers are more likely to purchase specific items. This can even predict the likelihood that they’ll make a particular purchase.
Qualifying and Prioritizing Leads
Analytics can also enable marketers to “filter out” leads who are most likely to be interested and make a purchase (and therefore improve conversion). Through predictive scoring, identification models, and automated segmentation, marketers can prioritize the most qualified leads. They can approach them, for example, with a personalized email, and analytics proves that these leads will be the most responsive.
Introducing Products and Services
One of the great things about predictive analytics is that it can help companies reduce production costs and determine what customers are looking for. This allows companies to figure out which products and services to introduce to the market. It reduces the risk of losses, wasted resources and improves production chain management.
Timely Content
It’s not just products and services that become timely; the customers’ needs can be addressed at the right time. Customers gravitate towards a positive user experience, such as being alerted through email of a new product that they need. And analytics show that customers are more likely to make a purchase when alerted about it through personalized communication like this.
Successful Marketing Strategies
Through the use of predictive analytics, marketers gain valuable insight that helps them plan their upcoming strategies. Analytics use internal structured data, social media data, and behavior scoring in customer data. All these data are used to figure out if a marketing campaign would be successful in one platform or another or if it’s suitable to a specific demographic of the target audience (such as the predictive models mentioned previously).
There’s a reason that predictive analytics has recently gained steam among marketers: it lets them create more personalized and relevant campaigns and messages for their target audience. It gives them access to information that allows them to reach an even more comprehensive range of demographics. It produces better business decisions and metrics. And most of all, it ensures a better overall customer experience that leads to brand retention and customer loyalty.
And when you combine the power of email and analytics, things only get even better.
Give Your Email Campaigns a Big Boost Through Predictive Analytics
Email isn’t just a tool that marketers can use to gather data that powers predictive analytics. It’s also an instrument to put what predictive analytics has learned into action. Email is 40% more effective when it comes to getting new customers—that’s more than Facebook and Twitter combined. And when used with knowledge gleaned from predictive analytics, marketers can create better, more distinctly personalized, targeted campaigns to make emails even more effective.
Determine your potential customers’ purchase intent.
A great thing about analytics is that it uses AI and machine learning to determine how a customer will make a specific purchase. For example, predictive analytics can identify that one particular customer group is likely to be interested in a new product. Then, marketers can disburse a targeted campaign about that product through email. And analytics will show if these customers will make the purchase and convert with just a gentle nudge.
Narrow down a user’s preferred category.
Another use for predictive analytics is to study your customers’ purchase history. The algorithms take this information into account and look for purchasing trends and habits that indicate if they have a preferred category to shop in.
This sort of analysis is helpful for eCommerce sites that want to send tailored campaigns to their users. A specific user might often shop in the sports department and has a high purchase rate from the category—this opens the opportunity to send an email about a discount or free shipping for items in that section.
Upselling and cross-selling to customers.
For upselling and cross-selling purposes, email and analytics are a godsend. Using the analytics, marketers can now use email to cross-sell to them by recommending certain items that the AI suggests they are most likely to purchase.
For example, a customer makes a swimwear purchase on the website. The analytics may provide insight that they are likely to go on a trip and require other swimming items such as a snorkel, beach shoes, or goggles. It keeps marketers one step ahead of the apparent trends and actively anticipates customers’ needs.
Offering personalized content to users.
Customizing email and analytics aren’t just for selling to customers: it’s also great for improving their experience on your website. This is a method that sites like Netflix and Spotify use to cater to their customers’ interests. Based on what analytics have determined as their interests, a user might see different content on the site than others. Analytics can help you make sure that when your customers come to your website, they see content that they are interested in. It keeps them on the site longer and improves their user experience.
Build customer retention and keep them active.
Using email and analytics for customer retention involves tracking customer behavior as they interact with your website. Predictive analytics tell you how a customer thinks as they browse through the website. And you can use this knowledge for retention by sending an email to remind them if they’ve left anything in their cart. It also keeps them active by making them frequent buyers; if analytics say they have made a specific amount of purchases, you could send a marketing email to them that lets them know they get a loyalty reward such as a promo code.
Create follow-up emails.
To expand on the previous point: email and analytics go hand-in-hand when adapting to customers’ shifting moods. By collecting customer data on their past purchases, site movement, and interests, machine learning can also determine if they are losing interest or are likely to make a comeback with the right incentive.
The correct follow-up email urging them, for example, to check out through a discount can help you close the sale and improve conversion. Furthermore, custom emails with more items that might interest them, as shown by the analysis, may make them want to add more things to the cart, thus increasing sales.
Prompt them to re-engage through something new.
Another effective tactic in email and analytics is to bring back leads that may have been “lost.” If the data shows that the customer has lost interest or hasn’t made a purchase in a long time, predictive analytics can figure out what could bring them back.
Looking into previous browsing and purchase history, the team can introduce a product or a service that will appeal to their interest. It may solve the problem that the other items were not able to address. Not only will this allow you to manage the customer’s needs better, but it also anticipates them and reminds customers that you have something to offer for them. It makes them re-engage and renews their interest.
Final words
Predictive analytics, inherently, is not a new concept. In terms of marketing, people have been trying to use customer information to open up new opportunities since commerce began. Understanding and anticipating those needs gives a company the edge.
Therefore, by using the power of email in compelling users, coupled with the strength of data backed by predictive analytics, businesses can make more intelligent and better decisions. Customers get more of what they want when they want it and when they need it most. Timing is everything, and email and analytics keep you one step ahead of the competition every time.
Has your company been using predictive analytics for marketing campaigns? What have you learned about your customers? Let us know in the comments below.
The reason business owners and salespeople exist is to solve problems for their customers. The better you are at understanding and articulating the needs of your prospect and crafting a solution to meet prospect’s needs, the more effective you will be at winning clients.
Focus on Your Prospect’s Needs First
Before you start “spouting off” your vast array of business features and services, you must deeply understand your prospect’s needs. Think of how foolish a doctor would be to prescribe a medication to a patient before making an examination. Serve your prospect like a doctor serves a patient: ask good questions, diagnose the condition and only then prescribe the best remedies to treat the business “illness.”
People hangout together at a coffee shop
Ask Good Questions.
In the same way that a doctor makes a thorough examination prior to writing a prescription, you must take your prospect deep into his “pain points” or business problems. Ideally, you want to identify and quantify three to five pain points to help you demonstrate your value in solving a prospect’s needs.
Set Your Client at Ease
Remember, the reason your prospect is meeting with you is that he has a need. However, like a patient who is asked to disrobe, your prospect may be uncomfortable or embarrassed to talk about his business condition. It is your job to set your client at ease. Be quick to admit a fault or mistake you have made recently or in the past; that will help your client to realize that you are human just like them.
Pay Sincere Compliments
It is also helpful to first find things to praise about your client’s business: the size of the business, the length of time in business, their facility, their employees, etc. Congratulating them for their successes makes it easier for them to discuss their problems later. Ask them what they like most about their business, why they started their business, what advice would they give to a new business owner. These are “feel-good questions” that will help set them at ease knowing that you see their value.
We find that many business owners have problems with cash flow, working too many hours and not spending enough time with family or friends. Do you?
Do you find it hard to find good employees? customers?
We had a client who was stung by a large bad debt. Has that happened to you?
Move Into Specific Pain Questions
Once you have developed your list of three to five pain points, get a deeper understanding of the issues. Do not gloss over these! These are important to help the prospect to understand the issues and how much the problems are costing them. Ask the following questions about each pain point:
Tell me more about______________________.
How long have you been experiencing this problem?
What attempts have you made to solve the problem?
Have you given up?
How much would you ballpark this problem is costing you per year?
Repeat back or rephrase the answers to your questions to demonstrate that you understand and empathize with your prospect. If you sense that your prospect becomes a bit emotional during this exercise, you have done a good job of helping them grasp the reality of their problems that you will solve.
Recap Your Prospect’s Pain Points
Recap each problem and the estimated costs for each problem. Add the costs up to determine the total costs that your coaching solutions could save.
*As a possible interim step, you can ask about the prospect’s budget for your services or product. However, many small business owners do not have budgets. As long as you can demonstrate that your remedy is going to save them a lot more than the cost of your service/product, you can win their business.
Prescribe the Remedy
Now you should be ready to craft your proposal to the prospect’s needs. A few more questions will help you to focus on your prospect’s needs and refine your proposal:
What are the top three things you want out of a service provider?
What would you want to change?
Are you working toward a deadline?
On a scale of 1-10, how important is solving these problems to you?
How often would you like to see me or talk on the phone each month?
Simply list each pain point in your proposal with the coaching solution for each one and the dollar savings goal for each point. If you have done a good job with this, the cost for your service/product will be insignificant to the benefits you will bring your client.
Conclusion
When you focus on your prospect’s needs, they will understand that you care about them. Doing the above will take some practice, but once you are proficient at this, you will win many customers!
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