We’ve all heard the statistics about how keeping a repeat customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one. And while you can call out “come back again!” as a customer leaves your store, there are more effective (and simpler) means to getting customers to come back again and again.
Marketing automation is perfect for grabbing onto your customers and turning them into loyal repeat buyers. Here are five strategies guaranteed to bring business back, again and again.
#1. Customize Emails Based on Behaviors
Welcome to the next era of email marketing. You can now target your customer list based on past purchases, activity on your website, and other key metrics that tell you a lot about a given customer’s interest.
Let’s say you have a customer who recently bought a woman’s raincoat from your online store. You know the customer is interested in women’s apparel, and has at least some need for outerwear. Armed with this information, you can put her in a list of automated emails with specials on rain boots, umbrellas, and jackets. She’s more likely to buy one of these products than your general customer list would be, at least based on her history with your brand.
#2. Monitor Social Media Mentions
If you’ve connected with your customers’ social profiles in your customer relationship management, monitoring what they’re doing there can help you sell to them. This works better if you just have a handful of customers, like B2B, so you can spend time scrolling through your customers’ feeds.
Let’s say you sell office supplies, and you have a particular customer who you’ve serviced for the past several years. You see on Twitter that he announced a second location for his business opening soon. This is a great opportunity to congratulate him and offer him a discount on additional office supply services.
You can automate this process by setting up a stream for all your customers’ social profiles in a social media dashboard like HootSuite. All the updates will be in one easy place for you to scan once a day.
#3. Create an Engaging Offer on Your Site/Email
You can continue to drive value to existing customers (as well as attract new ones) by creating an appealing offer that they can opt into from your website. Let’s keep using that office supply example. You write a whitepaper called “101 Ways to Greenify Your Office” and make it available for download on your site (requiring in exchange, an email address). You also send an email with the same download option to existing customers.
When they download the ebook, they’re automatically added to your Eco Friendly mailing list, and receive your 14 Days of Green Tips email series. In each, you promote a specific product appealing to this segment. You’ve successfully used content marketing to identify customers interested in a particular type of product, then hit them with repeat offers to buy them.
#4. Set Up an Automated Sales Process
If you’re manually dealing with leads now, you’ll appreciate the time savings (not to mention close rate success) of automating that process. You’ll have to set up what that looks like for your company, but it might be similar to this:
- Step 1: lead signs up for emails on our site
- Step 2: lead gets targeted emails for a week
- Step 3: sales associate sends personalized email
- Step 4: sales associate follows up with a call
Not every part of this has to be done manually, but those steps that do require more hands-on will be that much more successful, thanks to those carefully crafted emails.
#5. Leverage Your Analytics
You’ve got access to a plethora of analytics, including who’s visiting your website, how many followers you have on social media, and how many people are clicking the links in your emails. Don’t let this data wither on the vine! Instead, pay attention to what it tells you. It might indicate that you need to keep pumping a particular product that’s getting a lot of attention online. Or that existing customers respond best to discount offers on Facebook. Go where the data leads you.
There are so many ways to keep customers coming back, and some take surprisingly little energy to see great success.
Images: ”business, technology, internet and networking concept – businessman pressing automation button on virtual screens/ Shutterstock.com“
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