How to Reconvert an Existing Customer

If you’re involved in setting your business marketing budget, you know that acquiring customers is expensive. It’s so expensive that it has been dubbed a ‘startup killer’.

While our techniques are constantly evolving and improving, the investment can be considerable.

Triggering repeat purchases is a great way to lift ROI, and it’s the reason why businesses spend so much on nurturing relationships. The potential gains from repeat custom are worth the investment, particularly in the B2B market where decision-makers may take many months to choose a supplier.

Measuring client loyalty

First of all, you need to figure out the lifetime value of your client. There are three KPIs to look at when assessing customer loyalty:

1.   The number of times they have placed an order

2.   The frequency of their order

3.   The value of the relationship, overall

Businesses prefer to strike up long-term relationships with suppliers, so we often find that B2B relationships are highly engaged. But if their purchase value is low, there may be additional opportunities to upsell and increase your margin with that client. Whether you approach them directly with a proposal, or improve your website to make your services clearer, there are many things you can do to drive extra income.

If a decision-maker returns to place a second order, but then drops off your radar, there could be an opportunity to bring that customer back into the fold by improving the value of the product or service.

And if the decision-maker is purchasing occasionally, but infrequently, you could perhaps tweak your offering to increase that frequency over time. For example, many businesses now work to a subscription payment model that encourages lock-in over the longer term.

Knowing your client

In the world of retail, companies set up loyalty cards and reward repeat purchases with incentives. In business, this kind of scheme is less common. However, there are cases where loyalty programmes can work in a B2B market. If the business is owner-operated, the owner is likely to be more sensitive to loyalty offerings, and a long-term relationship with a small business can become more lucrative as that business grows.

It’s important to know what you want to achieve, whether it’s B2B referrals, additional business, or a longer tie-in for the customer. Even if you don’t make more money from a loyalty programme, you can learn more about the customer and figure out why other customers may or may not be buying from you.

This might result in new website landing pages, new content marketing strategies, different payment options or an increased product range.

Of course, if you run a micro business, you might already have a good idea of who your best customers are – and what they spend. If that’s the case, simply pick up the phone and ask them if there’s anything else you can do to assist them.

Using your assets effectively

Across the board, having the right data about your clients is imperative when it comes to effective loyalty programs, and B2B markets are no different in that respect. Designing the right solution means thinking like a decision-maker, and using data to understand what makes them tick.

Maintaining data quality is an important part of the process, and you’ll need to allocate a certain amount of your budget to marketing and developing your brand. But as you get better at nurturing your existing clients, you should find that marketing becomes more effective, and results in more rapid growth for the business while leveraging the assets you already have.

How a CRM Could Boost Customer Loyalty

In an ever more connected world, customers have come to expect better service. The better your service is, the more likely they are to stick with you – and that goes for B2B and B2C.

The more loyal customers you have, the more repeat purchases you will get, and the better ROI you’ll receive on your marketing and advertising campaigns.

So how do you achieve high levels of your loyalty, and keep hold of your clients long-term? Your CRM is key to success, because it supports your team in delivering personal service.

Supporting the customer journey

Every customer that buys from you has made a considered choice. They may have entered your sales funnel while researching your offering, then been converted by your sales team. They may have found a product in a store, researched online and chosen a different shop to make the purchase. It’s a complex journey, and one that marketers are continually trying to track.

After conversion, those valuable customer details are stored in your CRM, but that’s not the end of the story. The CRM gives you the opportunity to continue to store data about the customer as the relationship progresses. In highly competitive markets, this could be the key to unlocking their custom over a much longer period of time.

It’s important that your CRM supports your customer services team, as well as the people manning the phones in technical support. By bringing together information about the customer, their demographics, and their previous contact with the company, you can streamline the support experience and offer better services in a shorter timeframe.

Is your data supporting your goals?

Your CRM holds a wealth of actionable data that reveals how and why your customers make their purchases. By drawing on that data, you can inform future marketing campaigns, as well as targeting segments of your database with timely offers that they can’t refuse.

Using the data you already have in your CRM, you can profile customers according to the products and services they’ve already bought from you. This improves relationships by making marketing messages more relevant, ensuring your budget is directed at the customers most likely to spend. You can also split customers by age, location, or the number of times they’ve reached out for support.

The one caveat is this: you must make sure your CRM data quality is managed. Make sure you invest in keeping your data clean, and free of duplicates and errors, and able to generate accurate reports. Data decays quickly in a CRM, and within a year, 22.5% of your records could contain an error. A proactive attitude to data quality will help you to make the most of your CRM over the years.

Getting to know your customers

From the data in your CRM, you can derive valuable information about the way your customers spend and interact with your business. Not only does this drive repeat purchases, but loyal customers will also refer new business, increasing your ROI with zero effort or marketing spend.

If you aren’t using a CRM to build a picture of your customers, you could be wasting money and duplicating effort every time you run a new campaign. Talk to use today about affordable CRM solutions that will pave the way to increased loyalty and engagement.