One of the goals often cited for implementing CRM is an improvement in customer loyalty. That sounds like a logical objective, and knowing more about your customers and the history of your interactions with them certainly helps you understand how to keep them coming back.
Still, there’s a long way from the starting point to the ending point in the life cycle of a loyal customer, and there are a lot of pitfalls. In short, a lot of efforts that cite customer loyalty as a goal never result in actions that ever impact the customer—they end up as internal activities that collect data, collate and analyze it, and then result in no actionable insights—or worse, insights upon which no action is taken.
This activity may result in improvements to processes, but if your goal was customer loyalty, those internal improvements are not enough.
Map the Road to Loyalty
I’ve never been a big fan of flow charts, but I think that if your objective is long-term loyalty, it’s probably a good idea to chart the things you do to foster loyalty and to try to anticipate the factors you don’t control that can impact loyalty from the customer’s side.
In other words, try to draw a line that follows the path from customer acquisition to customer loyalty (or a failure to establish loyalty). If you do that, you’ll probably discover that there are lots of paths on your flow chart that come to dead ends—or at least head in unpredictable directions.
For instance, marketing automation is an obvious help in acquisition and drip marketing, but are you using the technology to continue to communicate with existing customers? Loyalty is not developed through monetary transactions; it’s developed through the ongoing experience with the company.
Email is good not only to continue marketing efforts with the goal of upselling customers, but also to suggest ways to better use the products and services they may have already purchased. Adding value outside of an obvious sales effort is a great way to demonstrate your commitment to the customer and thus foster loyalty.
How do you know which customers to reach out to in this way, or what content you should provide them? Use your CRM and marketing data to find out.
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