List Building
With the growth of social media, as well as mobile devices, email list building is easier than ever. There are many ways to build an email list. The tried and tested methods are content marketing, off-line events, and your website. Creating high quality content marketing publications that include opt-in/opt-out options is a must. The emails derived from this setting are also of high quality since the signees want to stay engaged with the offerings/brand. Another way to get signees is through off-line events. At such events you can have a booth at which you provide people with the option to sign up for upcoming promotions/newsletters etc in your Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM).
Lastly, have a sign up option through your website. When potential customers visit your website, having email signup options and/or offerings is an effective way to build email list. One further option to explore is list purchasing from vendors. This can be expensive, so this would be more of an investment. It can be a tedious process, but it can be well worth it if the focus of the list is targeted correctly.
Lead Nurturing
Keeping constant contact, through content marketing/newsletters and/or offerings, with the individuals in the email list will enable them to become educated about your products, build trust and eventually turn them into customers. In addition, customers are informed and the connection to the customers with regards to brand awareness is kept alive. Common lead nurturing strategies are the 3-2-1 drip program, stage-specific drip, event-specific drip and straight drip. How effective is lead nurturing? A study by Annuitas revealed that 47% of larger purchases are made by nurtured leads, relative to non-nurtured leads. This is where having automated marketing software comes in very handy.
RELATED: What is Lead Nurturing?
Sales Automation
Involving a sales team and a sales process makes converting these nurtured leads easy, especially when you have an effective CRM system.
According to the Forrester research, of marketers with lead management processes, 46% of them employ a sales team that follow up on 75% of marketing leads.
A sales team does so much more than that too. They’ll be able to build a relationship with the customers throughout the buying lifecycle and be able to gain their trust. That will lead to referrals. The sales team can also make great use out of that sales CRM software by being able to view all the contact history with each individual customer to see their likes, spending habits, complaints, etc. It makes a world of a difference when the sales representative can make a call to a customer and have the information of exactly what the customer has and if it’s satisfying their needs.
Customer Retention
A key component of customer retention is the post-sale follow up. An CRM will help you in customer retention by keeping track of their orders, the challenges they had (if any), and their level of satisfaction with your services and products. With a CRM, all the notes relative to the customer are integrated for easy access by the “key” team in one “room”, and makes the follow up process fully informed and effective. Remember, a happy customer is easy to retain. Just keep them engaged well past the sale closure stage with continued engagement.
