Guide to Growth Series: Ep 2. Customer Retention
Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing a series of blog posts exploring the different areas key to the growth of any organisation, as well as outlining why these areas are so important, and the solutions we can offer through Salesforce to help your business achieve scalable growth now and into the future.
Sustainable growth requires a deep understanding of your customers, personalised engagement throughout the customer journey, operational excellence, and the ability to react and change at pace to the world around-us and the ever-increasing demands of our customers.
Customer Retention.
After previously looking at how we can support increased customer acquisition, this week we’re focusing in on the ways we can use Salesforce to help you keep hold of your existing customers, and convert them to become repeat customers through the sale of new or upgraded products and services.
But why should customer retention be something you focus on when looking to grow your business?
For a start, on average, it costs six times more to acquire a new customer than to get further business from an existing customer. It isn’t sustainable to rely entirely on expensive marketing efforts to target and convert new prospects, you need to focus on creating a great offering for your customers and leveraging this to your advantage.
What’s more as you increase the rate at which you retain your customers, you’ll see corresponding financial growth – a 5% increase in customer retention can increase company revenue by 25-95%.
Focusing on customer retention doesn’t just provide financial support to your growing business – it can help provide an understanding of why certain customers are leaving, and what can be done to stop this happening.
Or it can ensure that you are building connections with your customers that result in longer term relationships, and creates enthusiastic promoters of your product and brand.
Key to this is a centralized Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform to hold customer data, an effective CRM strategy, and a company-wide focus on placing customers at the heart of your business.
How we can help.
Whether via implementation of tailored customer journeys; high levels of customer engagement; identification of retention opportunities; or an increased understanding of customer value, Salesforce has proven that their technology can increase customer retention by an average of 20%.
Below we outline just some of the Salesforce solutions (whether on Sales Cloud or Service Cloud) we can implement in these areas to help support the growth of your business through the application of effective customer retention strategy.
Tailored journeys:
Pardot or Marketing Cloud are marketing automation tools which provide you with the means to offer personalised and tailored communications to customers at all key touchpoints in their journey with you. Customer expectations are higher than ever, and the ability to deliver targeted and segmented communications to specific groups of customers is a crucial part of retention programmes.
Marketing automation tools mean you can present specific products and prices to customers to maximise revenue from loyal customers or provide discounts and special offers to help build longer term engagement. Provide a guided onboarding experience when customers first interact with you, so their first experience is a great one.
Customer engagement:
Ensure that customer feedback and data become actionable insight, understanding when and why customers may be leaving provides the information you need to lower your churn rate and turn pain points into business strengths. Quickly, efficiently, accurately analyse customer data and take advantage of the flexibility of the Salesforce platform to enact change.
Proper identification of customer preferences ensures you are communicating via preferred channels, building trust, and improving experience. Salesforce Social Accounts and Einstein Account Insights provide up to date view of your customers latest Twitter updates so you can always be on top of your customers most recent news and activity.
Identify opportunities:
Salesforce enables you to automate the creation of renewal, upsell or cross-sell opportunities, so you can be certain your sales team are proactively investigating potential sales to your existing customer base.
You can assign opportunities to specific users to ensure your most experienced sales reps are handling your most valuable opportunities, and you can automate communications so that there is a structured marketing campaign to support sales representative’s retention activities.
Understand value:
Analysis of customer data will help you understand which customer segments purchase most from you or purchase certain products most frequently. We can introduce Einstein Prediction Builder to your Salesforce Platform so that you can harness the power of AI to build up a picture of which customers are most likely to be at risk of leaving your business, based off historic trends, and most importantly ensure you engage with them early to retain their business.
We’ll help support the launch of any new products or services you may wish to sell by identifying users most likely to be potential opportunities, and enabling targeted communications and sales campaigns focussed on likely purchasers.
Get in touch.
Keeping hold of your customers is an essential, but complex, part of growing your business. Whatever your situation, we can deliver enhancement to your existing Salesforce platform (or implement a platform from scratch) to introduce effective solutions which will reduce customer churn, and increase customer loyalty.
Contact us today and we’ll arrange a discovery call to find out more about your business, your objectives, priorities and challenges, and to outline how we can help you start acquiring new customers to your business.
Or, if you’d like to receive the full Guide-to-Growth straight away, you can!
