Want to Increase Customer Retention? 4 tips CRM can help you with
Do you know that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%? In fact, attracting new customers will cost your company 6-7 times more than keeping an existing customer! So how do you increase customer retention? The secret lies in one word: relationship, with the help of a powerful CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.
CRM provides you with lots of valuable data to help you measure and analyze your customers’ behavior, thus, making better business decisions and selling what is suitable at the right moment. Below are 4 tips on how to increase customer retention using your CRM system:
VIPs are no doubt your most important customers, so how can you prevent them from walking out of the door?
Let’s say you want to know how many of your VIP customers have not purchased anything in the past 6 months, which might be a sign of them considering your competitors. You can first create a list of all of your VIPs, and then create a list of all sales made within the last six months using your CRM. By combining and comparing both lists, you will have a list of VIP customers who haven’t purchased from you in more than half a year.
You can now ask your CS representatives to call these VIPs and find out why they were not purchasing.
Personalized selling is becoming the major trend nowadays. The more you know about your customers, the more you can tailor your approach to each client. CRM allows you view a customer’s buying history so that you can determine what kind of offer will be most appealing to each individual.
Let’s say you want to follow-up on a customer who showed interest but haven’t bought anything from you. You can use your CRM to create list of all open sales activities and compare that with a list of all contacts that are subscribed to your newsletter (i.e. Displayed interests but haven’t bought anything). You can consider offering a special discount urging them to close the deal.
CRM can give you a whole picture on which of your accounts can generate the most revenue so that you can allocate resources accordingly.
Let’s say you would like to reward your most profitable customers to further increase their loyalty. Identifying these accounts can also help you develop strategies for cross-selling. It’s very easy – just create a list of your most profitable customers and export this list from your CRM. Now, you can start to follow up and let them know about the rewards/incentives to make them feel special so they continue to stay as your most profitable customers.
As mentioned above, personalization is a major factor in differentiating between good customer service and great customer service. What CRM can do is to help make it easier for you see your customer as a person and not just a bunch of numbers. You can use personal notes and other bits of information that allow you to personalize your outreach.
For example, you have recently hosted a seminar but not everyone showed up. How can you create a personalized follow-up? First, create a list of all of the contacts you have registered in the CRM software. Next, create a list of all customers who have attended your seminars during the last twelve months. By combining those two lists, you are left with a set of contacts who have not attended your seminars, which you can use to follow up on.