The Importance of Customer Retention Strategies in CRM

Saphyte Team

5 min read

Updated: September 15th, 2020

Longevity is every business’s end goal. However, with the ever-increasing competition of the global market, the idea of longevity is a long way street. With that, acquiring customers alone can get quite expensive in the long run.

That is why if you want your business to survive in this cut-throat business environment, you need to understand the emphasis of keeping your current customers. In the modern-day competitive landscape, your existing customers are your greatest assets.

Why is customer retention important?

Your customer retention rate is a benchmark to your success. The more loyal customers you have, the larger value it brings to your business and your brand. With that, you should start incorporating customer retention strategies in your business and sales process.

Customer retention is the capacity a company has to keep their customers engage with their products and services. Retaining customers is also a form of business strategy that seeks to increase your value as a business and eventually acquire new customers without spending too much.

Customer retention is important because it provides important insights into your performance as a business. And just like any other part of your business, customer retention is rooted in real-time data.

Data is everybody’s favorite ally nowadays. Data is the building block of a solid strategy and can provide your business an overview into what’s working for you and what’s not. That is why it is important to have the right recipe to help you drive more customer loyalty.

To further support your loyalty programs and customer retention plans for your business, you need a reliable tool – like a CRM.

Customer relationship management (CRM) tools go way beyond contact management and securing contact information. The tool can also help you manage customer acquisition, customer interaction, marketing automation, and other sales and marketing activities for your business. Furthermore, CRM helps you increase customer loyalty and mitigate customer loss.

What is the importance of customer retention strategies in CRM?

A CRM is a helpful tool to make your customer retention plans work. However, you also need to put into account that CRMs are machines and machines need to be fed with instruction in order to help you work. 

That is why, on top of investing in a CRM platform, you also need to incorporate some important customer retention strategies. Don’t just randomly put things together like it’s a salad and then hope for the best. You might want to get started with these effective customer retention strategies for your business.

Build a Strong Customer Journey

Each of your customers are on a journey to reach a certain goal. And they can’t reach to their journey alone, they need all the help they can get. This where your company comes into the picture.

In order to effectively guide your customers through their purchasing journey, your need map out your customer journey first. By doing so, you can determine the factors why your customers are coming to you in the first place, and how you can uniquely position yourself to help them reach their end goal.

Remember, the customer journey comprises various potential touch points your customers can have with your company. It starts when they first interact with you – like phone calls, emails, seeing an ad, etc. – and then proceeds through the process of nurturing your customers down the funnel and into the most anticipated post-purchase phase.

At first glance, it might not make sense how this process can contribute to customer retention. But you can think of it this way: Mapping your customer journey allows you to gain imperative visual understanding of how your potential and existing customers interact with your business’s products or services.

You can use this information to improve each touchpoint, eventually enhancing the overall customer experience and gradually building up your brand.

A CRM like Saphyte can help you build a strong customer journey through its Client Management module and visual sales pipeline tools. You can store important customer information before making the first touch point, nurture your leads, organize the whole customer journey with the use of a visual pipeline, and maintain your customer relationship with email marketing tools.

Let Data Do the work

The only certain thing in this world is uncertainty. Everything changes from time to time. So, doing guesswork and impulsive decisions can lead to your business’s downfall. Never rely on guesswork, always trust data.

However, when you have a CRM you won’t have to worry about the doing guesswork for your business. CRM allows your business to become grounded with hard data. Which in turn drives intelligent and data-driven decisions.

With the ability to have access to a massive amount of customer information at your fingertips, you can be able to build solid data. In return, you can take advantage of the data stored into the system rather than letting the data become stationary. Use the insights generated by the system in order to build a solid foundation for your strategy.

You won’t have to worry about manually calculating everything too. With Saphyte’s Sales Intelligence and Sales Forecasting features, you can start ditching the idea of manually calculating and processing for you.

The Sales Forecasting feature of Saphyte allows you to have access to estimates on future sales to avoid business pitfalls. The system itself can provide you with accurate and realistic forecasting that can help you make intelligent business decisions.

The Sales Intelligence feature intelligently collates all information related to a client. With this vital information, you can come up with your next best action to improve your sales. Or adjust some of your loyalty programs, should they need adjusting.

Implement targeted marketing

The better you know your customers, the more you can personalize your marketing strategies to their needs and wants. To achieve this, you need to implement a targeted marketing approach.

Targeted marketing is a strategy that breaks down a large market into reduced segments to focus on a certain group of customers within that audience. The moment you’re done with your segments, you can now focus your marketing efforts within that audience.

This might seem hard on hindsight, but you can manage effectively when you have a CRM software to help you. A CRM software like Saphyte allows you to organize and segment your contacts into groups to make your targeted marketing campaigns easier, streamlined, and effective. 

Offer incentives to your most profitable clients

You can your customer database stored into the system to identify which of your customers so far has made the most purchases from your business or how long they’ve been subscribing to your products or services. In return, you can use this information to offer incentives or perks to your most loyal customers.

In order to communicate to your customer about the perks they’re able to receive, you can use a CRM to send out emails by integrating your email accounts (Gmail, Outlook, etc) to the system.  With Saphyte, you can do this seamlessly and effectively.

Saphyte is built with integration options that allows you to integrate your email addresses into the system. That way, your team members won’t have to switch from one software to another. Thus, saving them more time to do important matters such as sustaining your current customers.

Set Expectations and Deliver more than what is expected

The lack of communication between you and your customer may lead to a lot of problems. In order to avoid confusing or frustrating your customers, you have to clearly lay out the framework of your relation with your customer.

So, you have to set your expectations with your customers. Be transparent of what you have to offer and how they may benefit from your business. After setting expectations, if your customers are still interested, deliver more than what is expected.

Customers love it when businesses deliver what they promised. This means, you have to go above and beyond what you can offer to your customers. By doing so, you’re encouraging and building a solid and loyal relationship with your customers.

Actively Listen to Your Customers

Active listening starts with asking the right and empathetic questions. You can use surveys, polls and other feedback strategies to have an idea on how your customers feel about their relationship with your company.

Back to letting data do the work for you. Again, it’s risky business to base solely on assumption and guesswork. When you only knew your customer’s pain point the moment she first bought your product or service is dangerous. Because everything changes as the days progress, and your customer’s challenges are not the same as the first time they’ve made a purchase with you.

You could “trust your gut”, but you’ll likely end up going the wrong direction eventually. By doing so, you’re burning through precious time and resources. The best way to minimize this situation from happening is to let your customers’ feedback guide you.

Also, by actively listening and taking note of your customer’s feedback, you’re building trust. And customers love to transact with businesses when they feel prioritized and heard.

Conclusive Thoughts

CRM plays a vital role in retaining customers. That is why it is essential to have a CRM solution provider that adapts to you and your business. With that, you might want to look at Saphyte.

Saphyte is a CRM platform that helps you streamline all of your business activities and integrate them into one powerful platform. The platform is built to help small business owners or medium enterprises reach their maximum customer retention potential by offering modules for client management, sales marketing, and other administrative tasks.

Saphyte has a remarkable pay-as-you-go subscription plan, no set-up fees, no extra or hidden charges, inclusive of a free demo and product training, and a stellar 24/7 customer service availability.

Contact us now for a free demo. Or perhaps you can start your trial period starting today for free.