Customer retention – it may not sound as exciting as winning new customers or closing news deals but can be just as important. Entrepreneurs know that effective marketing requires time and resources. It’s called a customer journey for a reason – convincing someone to part with their money to buy your product and service can be a long process. However, for most businesses, new customers only contribute a relatively small percentage of overall revenue. 

Zoho CRM equips your business with the tools to manage your sales and marketing process more effectively. But winning new customers cannot be your only priority. Existing customers are critical to maintaining and growing your revenue over time and to getting the best return on your investment to win them over in the first place. Luckily, Zoho also enables you to use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategies for customer retention management. Here are six ways that Zoho can help you to ensure that more of your hard-won customers stay with you and buy even more of your goods and services over time.

1. Measure your customer retention rate

A good CRM helps you to track and manage all your interactions with current and potential customers. Zoho equips you with the necessary tools to turn the data generated from these interactions into valuable insights about what is helping to keep your customers happy and what is not. One of the most revealing metrics that Zoho can help you to calculate with ease and accuracy is your customer retention rate.

Customer retention is a measure of an organisation’s ability to keep its customers over time. A higher retention rate means that more of your customers are loyal and sticking with you in the long run – the best outcome possible. The flip side of customer retention is customer churn. A business’s churn rate is the percentage of its customers that leave over a certain period. Churn rate and retention rate are inversely proportional to one another: If more customers are staying, it means fewer are leaving.

The ability to calculate these measures is the first step to understanding how many of your customers are staying and ultimately why they are choosing to do so. Zoho’s integrated CRM can help you to dig even deeper to understand which sales channels are yielding most of your loyal customers or what other factors happy and lucrative customers have in common.

2. Identify your high-value customers

It’s a well-known business adage that around 20% of your existing customers generate around 80% of your revenue. This means that satisfying and retaining existing customers is well worth your resources and can help to increase the return on your initial investment to win them over. But do you know who your high-value customers are? 

Zoho CRM can help you to identify your biggest and most important customers. Who are the biggest spenders at your business? Who spends regularly? Who has been with you the longest? Who is spending more over time – and who is spending less? These insights can help you to allocate resources to the customers that matter most by understanding who they are, what their needs are, and what would convince them to do even more business with you. It can also help you to develop more effective marketing strategies to target potential clients with similar needs and characteristics.

3. Personalise customer the experience and offers

Once you know who your high-value customers are, you can use the insights you have about their behaviour to personalise their experience and build an even stronger relationship with them. Nobody wants to feel like just another cog in the machine. Customers who feel as if you know them, and are sensitive to their wants and needs, will be more likely to support your brand.

Most businesses offer lucrative deals and discounts to attract new customers but fail to continuously present value-added offers to their existing customers.  Zoho CRM enables you to gather as much information as possible about your clients and to use this information to better segment them according to characteristics like their past purchase patterns, product preferences, location, or even how often they visit your website. This means you can personalise their experience through e-mails, promotions and discounts perfectly tailored to them. For example, Zoho can help identify which customers would be most interested in purchasing a new product and through its integrated workflow and sales management tools, you can ensure that your sales team offers it to them first.

4. Engage customers via email and newsletters

Emails give you the opportunity to build a good customer relationship before and after an initial purchase. Zoho makes it easy to segment your customer base and create customised, automatic emails to communicate with them according to their needs at different stages of the customer journey. You can easily manage and automate regular communication with existing customers such as extended offers, service expiry notifications, progress reports, and invoices. You can also use emailers to cement your relationship with first-time customers by sending them welcome emails or discount codes for follow-up purchases to help make sure they buy from you again. 

Zoho CRM integrates well with popular email marketing tools like Mailchimp and Zoho Campaigns to make email communication with clients easy to manage. With two-way synchronisation, all your contacts and campaign data now reside in a common area, accessible by both your sales and marketing teams. This allows you to cross-reference the deals created from each campaign and enable you to identify which campaigns worked best and how others can be improved.

5. Connect with customers on social media

Your customers are on social media, and they expect to interact with you there. You can make customers feel part of your brand by keeping them up to date on new developments such as new product lines, new partnerships, or exciting milestones for the company. Special offers and discounts are also a great way to reward repeat customers. Zoho Social, which forms part of the integrated Zoho CRM software package, makes this even easier to do. It allows you to create, publish, schedule, manage, and analyse content on well-known and popular social media platforms. With Zoho Social, you can manage all aspects of your social media planning and activities from one easy-to-use platform. 

However, customer retention is not just about making sure existing customers see your latest offers. Social media is more than a tool to disseminate information but offers the opportunity to engage directly with customers in a tw0-way conversation. This is where Zoho can be especially valuable. It offers social media integration with your CRM system to enable you to pass customer comments and queries on your social media pages directly to the workflows in your Zoho CRM. As a result, you can ensure timely follow-up by the relevant members of your team and make sure that your customers feel heard.

6. Improve customer support

A great customer experience is about far more than just the sales transaction with a customer. While not all customers will come back a second time, their longer-term interaction with your brand will shape how they see it and whether they are likely to recommend you to others. And nothing beats word-of-mouth when it comes to gaining clients and maintaining credibility.

To ensure a truly great customer experience, your efforts should continue past the point of purchase. You need to make the customer feel valued enough to come back for future purchases. This is where customer support comes in. Your support agents can best address the needs or complaints of customers if they have the necessary sales information and context. A CRM  like ZOHO that integrates with your help desk software can sync tickets with relevant sales data. It can also make existing customer data accessible to customer-facing teams, helping them provide a consistent customer experience.

Social media integration also means that Zoho can help you monitor and respond to customer complaints on social media – be it through posts or direct messages. With Zoho, you turn social media into a powerful customer service tool by responding to incoming messages in real-time and creating tickets to action customer support from social media updates.

Zoho and Outsourced CFO - Your partners in Customer Retention

Customers are the heart of any business, so satisfying them should be a top priority for every business owner. Zoho CRM is the ultimate solution that will help you in your mission of customer retention by providing you with enough tools to make customer interactions a breeze. 

The invaluable insights that Zoho Customization presents will assist you in targeting particular customers  and allow you to create personalised offers, and ultimately build a stronger relationship with them. At Outsourced CFO we believe in making things easier for our business partners. We recommend ZOHO CRM for keeping your customers engaged and loyal.

Get in touch with Outsourced CFO at www.ocfo.com