In this blog post, we’re going to look at strategies you can aim for when growing your company: customer acquisition or customer retention. Gaining new customers (aka stepping out) or doing continued business with existing clients…digging in. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. Newer businesses focus on gaining customers, but all businesses should ensure they keep their customers happy. Having a CRM system at the heart of your business provides the tools to manage both of these goals. In this blog post, we will dig a little deeper into the wealth of features available to help you with this.
Stepping Out – your Customer Acquisition Plans
When developing your strategies, it is crucial to remember that effective customer acquisition is key to a sustainable business model. Implementing various customer acquisition tactics can greatly enhance your growth potential.
In the context of a successful business, customer acquisition strategies must be tailored to not only attract new customers but also to reinforce existing relationships. Focusing on customer acquisition is essential for long-term success.
To state the obvious, when you start a business from scratch, you are unlikely to have many/any customers. Therefore, you need to get working on your customer acquisition strategy! Assuming you have done some market research, you can start to customise your CRM to capture information specific to you. Fine-tuning lists such as Industry sector, job title, or location means you will be capturing data that is relevant and actionable. If you want to carry out some targeted marketing to a particular sector, that audience is easily identified.
Your sales pipeline should reflect your customer acquisition goals. Each stage should be designed with the customer acquisition process in mind, ensuring you effectively capture and convert leads.
Furthermore, understanding your target audience will help you refine your customer acquisition efforts, making them more efficient and impactful.
Revenue forecasting is also integral to your customer acquisition strategy; it allows you to predict the financial outcomes of your efforts and adjust as necessary.
Encouraging referrals can be a direct path to enhance your customer acquisition efforts. Happy clients often lead to new customers.
Sales Pipeline
Implementing effective lead scoring can significantly improve your customer acquisition strategy, enabling you to prioritise leads that are most likely to convert.
Once you have identified potential customers, you need a foolproof way to assess whether you are a good match for each other. That is where your sales pipeline comes in. Having a good pipeline tool gives you so much information at a glance. When an Opportunity was opened, and when you expect it to close, are good starting points. Obviously, the value is paramount, as is the sales stage. You need to see which deals you might want to focus on if you’re nearing the end of the month and your target is looking some way off! From a managerial perspective, having an overview of your sales team’s workload is important. All these factors mean your sales pipeline is up to date and should prevent those good deals from falling between the cracks. With the pipeline in place, your customer acquisition strategy is off to a good start.
Ensuring your contact methods are streamlined is vital for your customer acquisition, as it facilitates easier communication with potential customers.
Utilising tools that enhance data capture can significantly support your customer acquisition efforts, allowing for a more personalised approach.
Data analytics is crucial for optimising your customer acquisition strategies. It provides insights that can lead to informed decision-making.
As you implement various customer acquisition strategies, remember to evaluate their effectiveness regularly to ensure continual improvement.
Revenue Forecasting
A logical step from working your pipeline is to determine when you will likely see that revenue come in. Maybe you work on long-term projects that require a deposit followed by phased payments. Or you may run a subscription service where revenue will come in at regular intervals. Your financial planning will be greatly enhanced by knowing when your business is likely to receive income. As you would expect, CRM systems such as OpenCRM allow you to track and report on those projected figures.
Moreover, integrating customer feedback into your customer acquisition plans can lead to more tailored offerings that resonate with your audience.
Referrals
When it comes to buying, customers are more empowered than ever before. Instead of relying on your word that your product is the best there is, they can find a wealth of information about you online. Reviews and social media comments are a couple of good examples. One way you can tap into this is by encouraging referrals. This entails identifying people in your business contacts who are likely to help. The comments from those contacts about your products or services will be highly valuable. In addition to making direct referrals, you can encourage your clients to leave reviews on sites such as Capterra. Peer-based customer acquisition is a great way of helping business growth.
Your customer retention efforts should also align with your customer acquisition strategies, creating a seamless customer journey.
By investing in customer relationships post-acquisition, you can further enhance your customer acquisition efforts through loyalty and positive referrals.
Account management plays a vital role in both customer retention and customer acquisition, creating a cohesive strategy for growth.
Lead Scoring
The two ways in which data can be updated in your CRM system are either manual or automatic. So many interactions need that human touch, but you can also do some clever things with automation. One great function permits you to automatically aggregate scores against a Lead record. That score can depend on certain criteria being met. For example, if someone is a decision-maker for a company in a sector very interesting to you, that gives them an initial score, and they become a priority in your customer acquisition strategy. That can be aggregated with each subsequent interaction.
Make Yourself Available
Recognising the importance of customer success is essential to your customer acquisition strategy, as satisfied customers are more likely to refer new clients.
You undoubtedly have a website, social media accounts, a phone number and an email. The key is ensuring you have the tools to record a person’s details when they contact you. Here are some tips that might help you with that data capture. A really simple option is to put a Contact Us form on your website.
Jotform is a great form-building tool and the integration with OpenCRM means it couldn’t be easier to get that data into your CRM system. Once the info is there, you could use some automation to send some targeted emails. There are many options to help you make the most of this data. A second option involves some email integration. As well as copying your in and outbound emails into your CRM, did you know your system can also be configured to automatically create new Contact records that are sent to specific email addresses?
Handling customer queries efficiently can also enhance your customer acquisition efforts by fostering trust and reliability.
Identifying and learning from lost customers can provide invaluable insights into how to improve your customer acquisition strategies.
Hopefully, these options give you some food for thought. Essentially, you need to offer whichever your client’s preferred method of contact is.
Engaging customers in the development of new products can serve as a powerful tool for your customer acquisition efforts, ensuring offerings meet their needs.
Ultimately, a well-rounded approach to both customer acquisition and retention will yield the best results for your business.
The integration of customer acquisition and retention strategies is crucial for building a sustainable business model that thrives on repeat customers.
GDPR: your data, your rules
We’ve always put data protection at the heart of OpenCRM. So with the introduction of GDPR, we’ve added new tools and features so you have the control you need to implement your policies and achieve compliance. Find out more
Strategy for Customer Retention
Parallel to establishing a customer base, you need to work on customer retention. In fact, many businesses can only survive by making repeat business. Just think of those subscriptions that are incredibly cheap initially before switching to a regular monthly tariff. They would be hard-pressed to survive on just that initial amount. In this section, we are going to look at ways in which your CRM can help you take those seeds you have sown to make them truly blossom.
This really is the key. With the initial sale, you have done a lot of hard work “getting to know the customer”. You’ve already gone through the hoops to ensure you and the client are right for one another. Once you have established that mutual benefit, you can see how both parties can benefit from the relationship. The close of that first piece of business is actually just the start of the journey…
Account Management
One thing that can be quite tricky to manage is the issue of how often you should get in touch with your clients. If you message them too frequently, you risk irritating them, perhaps inviting them to unsubscribe from your communications. But a hands-off approach can also be dangerous. Let’s face it: we are online longer than we care to admit. Therefore, there is every chance that offers from your competitors are surfacing here and there. In your absence, those names might sound appealing and you are at risk of failing on your customer retention plans.
Within your CRM you have plenty of date and time stamps that tell you when you last spoke with a client. System fields such as Last Email or Last Call give you an easy audit trail with that information. Furthermore, fields such as Preferred Contact Method tell you where your clients are at their most receptive. All these details give you the tools to carry out your account management as efficiently as possible.
Customer Success
One relatively new role within an organisation is that of a Customer Success Manager. This job sits somewhere between various stools. This is not the same as support – their role isn’t to put out fires. Nor is it a sales role – the purpose is not to get people to sign on the dotted line. But it is somewhere in between, with the focus being on keeping customers satisfied. In fact, customer success could be considered so important that it is hard to imagine how you manage without it! In an ideal situation, it helps you position yourself as a partner rather than a supplier, thereby changing the traditional dynamic of a customer-to-service-provider relationship. Make those points of engagement meaningful rather than just for the sake of it. Customer retention is key to ensuring those regular revenue streams don’t dry up and customer success is at the forefront.
Turn a Frown Upside-Down
When your clients have a problem, they will likely contact your frontline support team. Sometimes it’s just a simple enquiry, or an issue of user error. At other times it can be more serious and needs investigating right away. To help you manage this, you can configure Service Level Agreement (SLA) times based on ticket severity, to ensure that urgent issues are given the relevant priority. Subsequently, you can review and report on questions logged. These offer a chance to correct a wrong and improve your client standing. It shows that you listen to and aim to address their pain points.
When Good Things Come to an End
Sadly, business relationships come to an end all the time. It could be down to any number of factors. A company might cease to trade, or get bought out by someone else. They may restructure, and realise they no longer need your services. But it could also be that a competitor has launched an amazing new product, or that something went wrong along the way. Broadly, these can be split into reasons you can manage and those outside of your control. There are a number of things you can learn from this.
Firstly, if a client has left on amicable grounds, you may still retain them to help with endorsements or referrals. If the parting was something you could have prevented, then you have the knowledge required to improve your service. Ignore this at your peril! Perhaps it’s not too late, and you can still retain the client by making some adjustments. You might identify trends where there is a lull in the relationship, and so you can proactively manage this danger area.
Get the Customer Involved
If you are logging your customer transactions through your CRM, if is fairly easy to identify their areas of interest. One great way of helping both yourself and your customer is when it comes to new product development. Once you have spotted your target audience, you can invite clients to trial beta versions of new features. This involves your customers in helping determine the trajectory of your product. Doing this means that you are providing actual solutions for customer problems, rather than what you think might be an issue. Here at OpenCRM we have successfully involved clients in projects such as the integration with Zapier when this was at the trial stage.
Customer Acquisition and Customer Retention: A Common Focus
Whilst most of the points outlined above relate to either customer acquisition or customer retention strategies, many other aspects are relevant to both scenarios.
Keep up your Audit Trail
Given how often I say this one, I think I must sound like a stuck record, but log your interactions! Use the Activities function to record all your meetings, calls and tasks related to your work. It all adds to the bigger picture so your business can best serve your customers. Use email integration to capture all your relevant emails into your CRM. These factors offer transparency within your business, so anyone dealing with that client has access to their full history. It puts you in a great place when it comes to looking after that customer.
Prevent Sales Prevention
I’m sure you’ve all been in a situation where you have abandoned an online shopping cart. Maybe the process was too complicated, or you weren’t fully sure it was working. The last thing you want to do is prevent your customers from giving you money! This applies to both customer acquisition and customer retention scenarios. One feature you might want to investigate is giving your clients the ability to digitally sign a Quote or Sales Order. This can be done any time, day or night, and will automatically update the related order in your system to show that the customer has signed it, enabling you to proceed with the next steps.
In Summary
Wherever you are with your business, you will always want to keep planting new seeds (customer acquisition) as well as nurturing those blossoming flowers (customer retention). Make sure your new and repeat business revenue streams are ticking over to support your customer acquisition efforts.
