Increasing customer loyalty is a major concern for any business, but it’s especially important to B2B businesses that rely on long-term customer relationships to thrive. In their efforts to encourage customer retention, some organizations forget that loyalty is a two-way street.
How do you express to your customers that you remain committed to being there for them, giving them consistently excellent service, and keeping them in the loop on your latest product lines? Marketing automation is one way to put customers first while allocating routine tasks to the software. Here’s how automation helps you become a more loyal provider.
Getting to Know Your Customers
If you were to go into your CRM, would you be able to pull up complete records of any account from the earliest point of contact to today, or are those early steps of the customer journey invisible to you? Does your prospecting database intersect with your CRM, or are they siloed systems?
When you’re loyal to your customers, you get to know them throughout the entire buying cycle. You link their early interest to their eventual buying decisions and keep accurate records so you’re able to anticipate what they might need next. Great customer knowledge is about more than the demographic facts and figures you have at your disposal; it’s also about knowing customers’ preferences, behaviors, and the context in which they use your products and services.
Marketing automation provides a complete view of accounts from first contact to most recent sale, including behavioral and contextual data along with demographic and firmographic details.
Aligning with Your Customers’ Expectations
In a digitally accessible global marketplace, your customers have more choices than ever. Someone may be able to offer a lower price or a larger selection, but your competitors can’t provide the personalized service a loyal company can. Automation’s role in enhancing your customer service lies in its ability to reveal aspects of your audience that they won’t tell you outright.
Through analytics, you’re able to see trends competitors miss and read the signs your leads give you about where their priorities lie. You might find, for instance, that your customers value follow-up, giving you a chance to demonstrate your customer service and continuing care. Or maybe your customers are a tech-savvy audience that responds best to innovative digital marketing, leading you toward responsive, mobile-first design in your email marketing.
Making It Easier to Be a Customer
If great products alone were the key to success, we’d all use the same phones, drive the same cars, and drink the same colas. Clearly, there’s something more to winning market share and ensuring customer loyalty. Your customers also need to find it easy to choose and use your products and services. What are you doing now to make your leads’ and customers’ lives easier?
Automation makes marketing and selling as close to a frictionless experience as possible for leads, not just for marketers. With nurture programs, content arrives to answer questions just when leads need it. Complete customer care records ensure that any CS call provides complete answers without the need for customers to repeat themselves again and again to be heard. Offers are relevant and targeted, not dumped on leads in a heap. Creating a holistic customer experience means your buyers find it effortless to buy from you again.
Aiming High
You are competing against more than your industry rivals. Customers are now measuring you against the best in the world – the international brands that have redefined service such as Amazon. Customer experiences with these brands and others like them are consistently excellent, and that has raised the bar for every business. What’s more, they do it repeatedly; users overwhelmingly return to these companies when they make their next buying decision.
In the B2B sector, it’s even more critical to earn repeat business, yet service is still measured by what the best deliver in B2C. Here’s where automation shines by giving businesses of any size the power of the biggest companies to solve their customers’ problems quickly and effectively.
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