Companies investing in customer relationships are realizing substantial returns. Customer-centric businesses are topping the charts when it comes to customer loyalty, employee turnover rates, and overall profitability. So with this growing emphasis on the customer experience, how can marketers look beyond email campaigns to reach customers on a personal level? One solution is to evaluate marketing automation vendors that can help bridge the gap between a business’s contacts and their content. A well-rounded marketing strategy includes a lot of moving parts, such as email campaigns, blogging, and social interactions. Automation tools will help all these parts run as a well-oiled machine, saving you time and money and letting you focus on your customers.
Drip marketing (scheduled communication via email or social media), is more productive when used with a marketing automation system. Extending your reach from existing customers to potential users, automated drip marketing allows you get to know your contacts by tracking their activity. Agile CRM, for example, is a marketing automation app that offers businesses the ability to integrate their drip campaigns with the rest of their marketing efforts, making it easier to evaluate the big picture.
Tracking specific behaviors also lets you explore potential relationships without dropping the ball. Customizing drip campaigns so that they are accurately targeted can be as specific as sending deals only to people who have only visited certain pages on your site, or creating different campaigns for those who haven’t visited your site at all. Focusing precisely on the individual customer, agile automation tools like Hubspot can keep the discussion going on social media channels. When you can appeal to each individual’s needs and interests, you’ll increase customer retention and new user conversions.
Customers notice when a brand is customer-centric because they deliver a different kind of (read: better) experience. This non-price differentiation is an essential factor in a successful marketing strategy, but in order to be successful it has to start with the customer. When brands focus on customers instead of products, they create a positive relationship that exists even beyond the point of sale. Teaching customers how to use your product and how to get the most out of it is a service they will remember. The key is to be able to reach your users precisely when they need help.
Automation tools make it easier to anticipate customers’ needs and offer them timely solutions. Marketing automation programs help businesses understand their customers by gathering information, then analyzing that data to optimize interactions. Dashboards can be used to organize correspondence and follow-ups, and email app integrations can provide information about prospects (such as their recent social activity), which will help you maintain a customer-centric focus.
A brand’s image is important because it affects the end user regardless of the situation. Technology brands in particular exhibit a positive correlation between brand-building efforts and profitability. But all purchasing decisions, no matter how utilitarian the product, have an emotional factor that causes the customer to form an opinion of the brand. Knowing your customers is the first step in marketing to them successfully. Marketing automation tools just take some of the guesswork (and the headaches) out of those first steps so you can focus more on delivering a consistently great product or service.
Photo courtesy: Kyle Turco/TechnologyAdvice
