While increasing market share and attracting new customers is always a key focus for businesses, retaining your existing customers is equally as important. Not only do loyal customers often offer the most value to your business, as they’re more likely to recommend you to friends and family, but they’re also more cost-effective to attract.
However, converting a one-off purchase into a loyal, repeat customer is a core challenge for a lot of businesses. Over recent years, we’ve seen big brands like Co-Op, Café Nero and Amazon Prime successfully bring in membership and loyalty programmes in an attempt to build community and incentivise repeat purchases. What sets them apart from the businesses that haven’t been so lucky in their membership launch? The detail of data that sits within their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
By leveraging the data that sits within your CRM, you’ll unlock insights to create personalised experiences that will retain customers, increase their lifetime value and drive sustainable growth.
Keep reading as we explore different ways marketing and sales teams can leverage their CRM system to boost customer retention and offer actionable strategies to build a loyal customer base.
The importance of customer retention
Did you know that increasing customer retention rates by 5% can at least increase profits by 25%? And since customers that are invested in your brand are more likely to be interested in a wider range of your products and spread the word about your brand, businesses that prioritise retention and loyalty are more likely to succeed in the long-term.
How you can use your CRM system to boost customer retention
A businesses CRM system often holds a lot of valuable, untapped customer data that marketing teams should be using to inform their retention strategy. From customer behaviours and preferences to key interactions, the system holds all the answers to help you create personalised experiences that will draw them back in. Check out the number of ways, you can be using your CRM system to increase customer retention.
Personalise customer experiences
Across all marketing channels, the key to consistent customer engagement is personalising your approach. One of the biggest reasons that past customers will have disengaged is because they don’t feel like they connect or relate to your brand. By using a high-quality CRM system, teams can dive into the detail of purchase history, past customer service engagements and track customer preferences to tailor their marketing and sales outreach.
For example, by identifying a certain brand or product that your customer buys, you can send personalised recommendations, or generate personalised promotions (similar to Tesco Clubcard) to increase the chances of a sale.
Set up follow-up automations
The post-purchase period is a pivotal time to keep customers returning to the website. With this in mind, you should set up a series of automated follow-up emails that will entice the customer to interact with your brand.
They don’t necessarily need to make another purchase at that moment, they could go to a guide or blog that’s related to their recent purchase. However, that click will create an experience with your brand and feed new insight back to your database.
You can also set up milestone automated communications around birthdays and anniversaries, which create a positive and personal experience for the customer.
The ability to plan ahead with automation makes it so much easier to make sure you are interacting with each of your customers, ensuring you have ongoing engagement that will foster strong relationships and loyalty.
Set up key notifications
Having automated internal notifications in place is a key way to stay ahead of key milestones. Is the renewal of a contract coming up? By setting that reminder internally, you can give yourself time to plan personalised communications that are more likely to lead to a happy, retained account.
Create targeted, segmented campaigns
A one size fits all approach won’t be effective when it comes to customer retention. With the ability to segment your customers based on key demographics, purchase history and behaviour, you can create tailored marketing campaigns that are more likely to convert.
For example, you could use your CRM to identify customers that have stopped engaging with your brand over the last six months and create a re-engagement or incentive campaign to welcome them back into the fold.
Measure and manage customer satisfaction
Managing customer satisfaction is the best way to identify why your customers do and don’t return to your business, helping you identify what aspects of your brand you need to shout about, and where you need to prioritise improvements. A decent CRM will integrate with customer feedback tools, helping you address any issues early.
Best practice for using CRM to increase customer retention
While a CRM has amazing capabilities, it’s the quality of your data and how your team leverage CRM insights that will determine retention success. For this reason, it’s crucial that you regularly audit CRM data to ensure it’s accurate and up-to-date, and that your team are trained to use each of the CRM’s capabilities.
Our final tip would be to share your insights beyond those who use it. Wider marketing, sales, user experience and brand teams will find great value in the data you uncover, which can be used to create consistent communications across the marketing funnel.
Do you need to update your CRM system?
Everything we’ve ran through in this blog is possible with a modern, high-quality CRM system. Platforms like Microsoft Dynamics 365 go one step further and use AI to automate workflows, identify key trends and suggest next steps to continually improve your performance. If you’re still using the same traditional CRM that you’ve been using for years, you might be surprised at how much easier you can make your working day with a modern system.
