The Best Practices for Maintaining Customer Relationships

The Best Practices for Maintaining Customer Relationships

It takes time, effort and consistent follow-up to turn a prospect into a new customer. Once you gain new customers, you need to make the effort to maintain those relationships. So, before we dive into the best practices to do just that, consider this: acquiring new customers can be 6 to 7 times more expensive than retaining current customers. Your current customers are your most profitable ones, so don’t lose them! Now, read on for some best practices to maintain those current customer relationships!

1. Have Consistent Communication

After you cultivate a prospect into a customer, make sure to communicate in various ways with him or her. Consistent communication will ensure your business is always familiar to them. Here are some ways you should consider communicating with your customers if you aren’t already doing so:

Start a Newsletter

A monthly newsletter that can be emailed to your current customers allows you to highlight recent news, upcoming promotions and more! To make these newsletters attractive, add color and images. You can even have a section that highlights a customer of the month. Add a few fun facts about the customer of the month and a quote that states why they love your product or service. This reinforces your brand and drives a positive mindset about your business to other customers.

Start an Email List

An exclusive email list that provides offers and promotions along with blog posts with free advice surrounding your product, service and industry can go a long way. Premade email templates can help make this process easier. You can even have the emails scheduled to send whenever you want.

Use Social Media

Always encourage new and existing customers to follow your social media pages. Promotions and giveaways for shares, likes and tags engage your current customers while simultaneously promoting your business to potential new customers. Social media is free advertising you can take advantage of and broadcast to the millions of global users. Be consistent with the frequency of your posts and imagine the new customers you can acquire.

Reward Your Profitable Customers

Everyone has those elite customers who drive lots of profit for your business. For example, let’s say that you’re an insurance agent and you have a highly profitable customer who has bundled home, life, boat and auto insurance with you. You should randomly offer them a free giveaway for being such a loyal customer! Not only will this make their day, but it will also likely get them to mention your business in conversation to friends and coworkers. They’ll talk about how your business made it possible to attend the big game or have a new gadget for their home. This word-of-mouth marketing can then lead to new customers in the future!

2. Have Superb Customer Service  

In today’s world, nearly everyone offers customer service for their business, but that doesn’t always mean its good. Did you know that the majority of customers won’t forgive a business for bad customer experience? This means that your business needs get it right with the customer every time. Make sure you have resources and tools in place in the event a customer needs to contact you.

For example, have an available online help desk with articles and videos about using your product and service. This can significantly aid customers by solving their questions and reducing the number of calls your customer service team receives. Also, be sure that you have a fully-staffed and properly trained customer service team in place to handle the volume of customer requests your business receives. You wouldn’t want to lose customers due to requests not being met in a timely manner; the cost is too high.

3. Use Sales Technologies That Work for You

In order to track and manage all your prospect and customer relationships, you’ll want to have a place where all that information can be easily accessed and securely stored. Sales software can provide you real-time intelligence so you know who your customers are, where they came from and where they belong in your software. Many sales software and CRM are out of date and complicated to use. However, the right one can make a world of difference.

For example, sales software like Blitz can help you quickly determine your cross-sell candidates so you can drive even more business from your current customers. Or, if you need to target all customers, use the software to automatically send your weekly email. The truth is that sales software can simplify many of the best practices for maintaining customer relationships and save you time.

What are you waiting for? Its time to take these best practices and incorporate them into your business. We’re here to help you too! Click here schedule a free demo of Blitz and see how you can begin to include some of the advice above into your business today!