4 Simple Ways to Nurture Your Customer Relationships
If you are worried that you are not looking after your customers enough, you feel you could be doing more to drive positive sentiment towards your brand, then please read on ...
Here are some simple ways to develop your relationship with your customers:
Use analytics to develop the perfect personas
The more you know about your potential customers, the more successful you will be developing meaningful relationships with them, i.e. build a detailed profile of your customer's needs, preferences and key characteristics. This is sometimes referred to as customer persona.
Customers are more inclined to turn to search engines and social media to carry out their product research than to hard sells. As more businesses begin to acknowledge this, they have thought more about analytics that can inform a more effect approach. Customer analytics will provide you with a better understanding of your existing and potential customers' buying and living lifestyles. This will allow you to predict their future buying, streamline your targeting, and deliver marketing messages to customers most likely to respond. Because you will be delivering the right message to the right customers at the right time - you'll be maximizing customer loyalty and positive sentiment. So Customer Analytics are an essential first step to securing a relationships.
Send personalised, relevant emails
Step two. Email is the single most powerful channel you can use to communicate with and engage customers. If a customer has agreed to giving you their email address, they are at this stage aware of your brand and willing to receive correspondence from you.
If you send your customers personalised emails, you have the opportunity to show your brand's investment in their unique needs and interests. If they have been spending time on a product page, you can follow up with more information on that product. Keep in contact with them! Tailor your emails, use your personalised marketing emails to provide valuable, informative and authentic content. Show you care - then you will reap the benefits.
Repeat customers spend, on average, 67% more than new customers
Be social
We are all aware at this stage that Social media is increasingly, the preferred way for communicating and connecting. Some businesses though make the mistake of thinking that they can use it solely for building brand visibility and extending their audience. This however is not the case, the moment you establish an online presence with your customer, it is up to you then to look after your customer!
How do you do this? By responding to queries as soon as possible and sending a "human touch" along with your communications. No one wants to wait an age for a response or even worse for no response whatsoever, especially if it is a dissatisfied customer! Implement a system that will allow you to prioritise your customers communications, the more you can do to promote a positive social customer experience, the more likely it is that your customer will recommend your business to others - step three!
Aim to retain - final step
Regardless of what type of business you are in / audience you a targeting, content marketing is a top performing retention tool and at the same time strengthens your customer relationships due to its personalised nature. Once again you can use analytics to send emails to customers tailored to their individual personas based on their preferences and their previous buying behaviour. If your customer hasn't opened your emails in a while or be it purchased anything for sometime, you can use incentives such as a special offer, a competition, etc to entice them. (Remember to state this in your subject line!).
And finally, the best way to develop positive customer relationships and loyalty, it to reward your customer. You can do this by sending them a gift or including them in exclusive deals, points towards a purchase, etc. Small but thoughtful gestures will keep your customers coming back for more.
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