The world as we know is changing and people are getting more and more plugged in. We know you tried to be at where your clients live and function, but it doesn’t always work out as you thought. As a smart business owner, what are some ways you could do to build a better interactive relationship with your customers? How can you turn one-off purchases into long-lasting engagement?
All type of CRMs
Regardless of what platform you engage your customers, you still have to convert them into paying or returning clients. A good practice is to use a CRM. You don’t have to run a salesforce to track all your customer’s information. There are many types of CRMs which traditional businesses use to remember their customer’s names and details, for example, Starbucks has their famous reward system to drive customers back.
For each shop, regardless if it’s a physical business or e-commerce; it can have various types of mailing lists and VIP programs. Among those, CRM is the most cost-efficient way for a business to interact with clients, keep them updated on new possibilities, and always give them a reason to want to know what you are up to. Once they are interested in you, they will patronize you. Even better, you start to build loyalty and followership with them.
Capture the unknown
Once you have your customer base, the next step is to really make sure they are your customers. Your website should do more than just tell your store’s story, it should be the central point in which you interact with your customers before, during and after-sales. It should also capture more information about your customers.
There is a concept of digital twins, where we are able to build a digital twin by using the information we can capture about that person in specific scenarios. Many big tech companies are building technologies to achieve this goal. When you build your website, seek a platform that could offer you tools to understand how your clients interact with it, such as:
- What are the most visited pages
- Where your customers originated from
- Which type of promotions get the most attention on the site (both in terms of placement and content)
Bring them together
So we start off with a strong social presence, be it Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter or others; then add a functional and constantly updated website plus a good CRM system that captures your customers’ behavioral data. This is how Wali grew its customer numbers from 0 to over 200,000.
To understand all this in a more practical approach, let’s walk down what a typical business would do for promotions and see how we would do things differently.
Usually, a company would push a new product or a promo via social media, storefront banners, and promo codes on their site.
But there are simple and practical ways that can be maximized and enhanced to produce better results.
- Social Media posts: We broadcast on multiple social media channels but at the same time, we place different measure links in each. Why: So we can measure the different types of customer interaction from multiple channels. We also combine this with our CRM, so that we convert the customers from other channels to our customer base. The data can also allow us to have a better understanding of which channels bring in more sales and which require more focus or attention.
- Storefront Banners: We add a few CRM elements here: We let customers sign up for the mailing list or VIP programs, and learn about how to redeem the promotion. So we know how a customer makes purchase decisions based on the promotions they received.
- Site Promo Code: We perform non-intrusive data capture. We also add tracking to see where the customer clicked when they are on our website. We also test different types of up sell methods, so we know how to sell online better to our customers. We also build our CRM into our website, so we aren’t only knowing their offline engagement behavior, we also know how our customer behaves online.
The strategy we share here is not magic. Each step will work with different elements in our process. It’s the perfect balance between the use of the various types of tools at our disposal and well thought out strategies. When merged seamlessly together we get the best results. This not only allows us to gain our customers uncaptured data both online and offline, but also gives us a more complete image of our customers compared to others.
Take a look at what Wali has to offer