In an increasingly competitive market, successful brands understand the importance of marketing automation for growing revenue and generating a steady stream of leads. But once a lead converts, many brands fail to adjust their marketing automation efforts to build engagement with customers. A mistake that corporations make is by spending more effort on client acquisition and retention becoming just an afterthought.
According to a study by Martech, just a 5% increase in customer retention can shoot profits up by 25 – 125%. Once a company has won over a customer, the next, and a crucial step is to turn them into a lifelong brand ambassador. With just some effort, brands can turn paying customers into loyal ones. Apart from lowering churn rates, keeping customers happy is important to cross-sell and upsell.
Once a company has invested in a marketing automation platform, the next step is to automate engagement for the entire customer lifecycle. Here are five tips for making marketing automation work for the customer lifecycle.
Keep a score:
Apart from generating leads, marketing automation tools like Salesforce Pardot help keep track of customers and how they engage with a brand. By leveraging automation and converting a satisfied customer into a loyal customer by deciding when to step in and offer the right service. But that’s not it. Lead scoring is a brilliant strategy that adds or deducts points for each lead based on their engagement with the company. Companies can track those with the highest scores i.e. customers who regularly interact with the brand, share content, etc. They can also create behaviour-scoring models to ascertain how happy existing customers are. With Salesforce CRM, they can identify those with a low score and target such customers with marketing campaigns and outreach efforts. The idea is to handle unhappy customers, keep the happy ones happy, and sell more to them.
Create nurture programs:
Brands can use the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to create nurture programs that deepen a customer’s understanding of the product. Brands can offer new user programs to educate clients on connecting with customer support or other team members. Other post-sales nurture programs could include guided self-implementation, primers on advanced functionalities, and customer stories with use cases. Brands can also create programs to cross-sell and upsell to existing customers. They can offer information and incentives to increase purchases. The key to building a loyal customer base is by offering customers a reason to be excited about their relationship with you.
Send emails using triggers:
Event triggered emails are a popular tool for converting leads, but they can also be used for customer retention. Got a new customer on board? Set up an automatic email after a week and see how they’re doing. If a customer has been recently inactive, set up a re-engagement email to identify how you can help. In fact, brands can use Salesforce Pardot to identify engagement opportunities very early in the customer lifecycle. This is helpful for preventing disengagement by helping customers understand the full range of services available to them. Creating emails on a marketing automation platform like Salesforce to directly address pain points is also a fantastic way to deal with unhappy customers. It makes sure that a personal connection is created between the two parties, increasing customer satisfaction in the long run.
Have access to the right data for triggers:
Having access to the right data is important to target customers with the right message. Brands should seek data like how interested a customer is in their products, how happy they are with the products they own, how often they use it, etc. Some of this data will be available in a corporation’s Salesforce CRM, but some information might not be getting recorded or it may be stored in data silos. Gathering and integrating this information will helps brands build a comprehensive customer journey easier.
Connect with existing clients:
The focus for a corporation should always remains the same- to build seamless conversation and a loyal customer base. Often, users of a product do not have a good idea of how well they can use a product. In such cases, nurture programs help deepen their knowledge. Another great idea is to have successful, happy customers interact with other customers or even leads. This not only encourages clients who are doing well but inspires other users. A webinar or a workshop can do a great deal in passing on trust from one generation of customers to another.
Establishing a completely automated customer lifecycle engagement program demands a lot of investment, but is rewarding in reduced churn rates and increased revenue. Salesforce Pardot’s marketing automation solution drives customer loyalty and profitability.
