Customer relationship management.
Introduction:
Customer relationship management consists of collecting, processing, and analyzing customer information and establishing personalized communication with them to retain them and generate more sales.
- Support– Empathy is the ability to relate to and understand another person’s problem. It’s also the basis of a strong relationship with a customer. By tapping into a customer’s history and data, you can communicate more effectively or offer promotions that fit their situation.
Knowing your customers and establishing a personalized relationship with each of them is essential to better meet their expectations and thus increase their lifespan, their purchases, and their satisfaction. In short, the customer relationship is an art.
There are four essential principles for establishing a good customer relationship:
1–Personalise the exchanges:
Go from mass communication to individualized and calibrated communication for each client.
Try to personalize communication with each customer by taking advantage of the personal information you have about them as well as the tracking of their actions. For example, adding the first name of your customers in your emails will allow you to increase your conversion rates. But more importantly, an email sent at the right time and responding to a specific customer action will be much more effective than a mass email campaign. To better adapt your communications with your customers, the best solution is to set up marketing automation scenarios. Marketing automation consists of automating communications according to predefined conditions that take into account the behavior of the recipient. For example, a customer who has just registered on your site will receive advice on how to complete their profile and a presentation of the various services offered a customer whose birthday it is would receive a special promotion, etc. Your messages are thus more timely because they are targeted for each user according to their progress in the customer journey.
2 – Know your customers :
Collect the right information and track the right indicators to adapt your communications to the journey of each customer. Your customers are all different. They differ in their consumption patterns, in the way they behave on your site, in the way their attention is engaged – in addition to differing as humans! Analyzing the data you have on your customers allows you to be more effective in your marketing.
3 – Ensure brand consistency
Reassure your customers by adopting a consistent message and graphic identity on different communication channels. In order not to lose the customer relationship, it is important to work on the identity of your company: it must be immediately recognizable in your communications, whatever the channel used. Let's take an example: you sell handmade jewelry with semi-precious stones, which have influences from Brittany. The words “artisanal”, “semi-precious stone” and “Brittany” must always come up in your speeches – website, business card, social networks, newsletter… By deciding on wording for your company, you communicate its identity simply and remain consistent. Your customers will remember these keywords when thinking about your brand. But the consistency of the customer relationship across the different channels must not be limited solely to your brand message: it is the entire experience that must be homogenized. For example, it is important that your newsletter has the same graphic identity as your site, or even that it includes navigation to its different categories. To do this, you can create email templates in your brand colors to gain consistency and save time!
4 – Offer value:
Your customers are bombarded with hundreds of low-value-added information every day. If you want your customer’s messages to not be perceived as parasites, you have to stand out with content that is useful for them! Any relationship has an interest for both parties involved. Providing interesting content to your audience will help keep them interested. Blog articles, white papers, newsletters – but also webinars, Instagram stories, and Facebook Lives are all media that will allow you to provide your customers with the information they are looking for or to entertain them with original content. The mediums used depend on your products, your customers, and what you prefer to use. Either way: Communicating on topics around your business will demonstrate not only that you know what you're talking about – but also that you sincerely want to help your audience. Let's take an example: you sell made-to-measure skirts online. Offering your customers a guide that helps them take their measurements at home will help them with their orders and also in their future lives. You can also create content around fashion – designer interviews, articles on upcoming trends, photos of a full outfit – that will engage and educate them. This is called a content strategy, or inbound marketing. Your customer then comes back to you for the value you share with them, not because you bullied them with aggressive campaigns.