Tag: Customers

Recapture Inactive Customers

Posted on | by Emi Lesser | Leave a Comment on Recapture Inactive Customers

Image: Reengaging Customers

A lot of focus in business goes to capturing new customers, but what about previous customers who you already know like your product. It’s common for companies to abandon previous customers when they stop buying or responding. But according to invesp it costs five times as much to attract a new customer, then to keep an existing one.

Recapturing inactive customers isn’t as hard as it would seem. Especially since your chances of selling to previous customers is much higher than capturing new ones.

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With recapturing being cheaper and having a higher success rate, it’s a no brainer that you should be targeting this market. Below you’ll learn some tips and tricks on how you can recapture your inactive customers.

Email Retargeting

What is it? A high-return marketing channel that tailors marketing messages to people who have either shown interest or previously purchased something from you online. Browser cookies keep track of individual visitor’s activity on your site, working to retarget those customers.

After finding and installing the best retargeting software, you’ll upload your inactive users into their own email list to start a campaign just for them. The program will then place ads across the webpages and/or social media sites your inactive customers visit.

You will also want to send emails tailored to inactive customer’s specific needs. Split these customers into categories based on similarities and retarget each group in ways specific to them. Abandoned carts and searches, products viewed, and ones they spent the longest looking at, are a great way to narrow down an email. These methods are more likely to capture the inactive customer’s attention.

As always, take time to go over the data and figure out what emails are getting inactive customer’s attention. Adjust your campaign and always continue to improve it.

Get Personal

Follow-ups are important in keeping your customers active and reenacting inactive customers. After customers make a purchase, follow up with personalized messages that reflect their desires and adds value to their experience. Send a thank you message, highlight uses for the product, suggest items that would go well with the product, etc. to add value while you try to plant yourself in their life.

Use the data you already have on your inactive customers to send them targeted messages. Remind customers of why they chose to buy or visit your site in the first place. Send them suggestions of the products they could repurchase or try for the first time with a discounted offer.

Using geo-targeting you can send specific messages to inactive customers when they are in a specific city, close to the store, on a certain IP address or device ID, through GPS signals, geo-fencing, and more. This strategy will help you deliver the right message at the right time. The location data also helps to define the who and what of your audience. This proves to be effective when targeting consumers who have purchased in the past.

Use customer’s names when sending them messages. The more personalized the message, the higher chances of a customer, past or present, opening and clicking through.

Deep-Linking

You always want to make sure you make it as easy as possible for a customer to take a desired action, especially when wanting a customer to reengage. Deep links are used to send users straight to specific in-app locations. This strategy saves users time and energy from locating a particular page themselves – significantly improving user experience.

Deep links provide a seamless user journey and increase the likelihood of an install and purchase. Creating campaigns using deep linking provides a better user experience, moving them onto your purchasing page in a single click. It drives inactive customers right where you want them to be.

With unresponsive customers, it’s even more important to remove all the obstacles and lead them directly to completing a purchase.

Direct Mail

As digital marketing seems to be the future, direct mail is still here to stay. Direct mail response rates outperform digital channels by a long shot, achieving a 4.7% response rate as compared to a 0.62% response rate for all digital channels combined.

Using targeting and segmentation send unresponsive customers something different. Receiving a gift in the mail is sure to spark inactive customer’s attention. This leads to not only gaining your past customers back but also building up better brand loyalty.

B2B Strategy – Holiday Style

Posted on | by Emi Lesser | Leave a Comment on B2B Strategy – Holiday Style

Graphic: b2b holiday season

Here comes the Santa Clause of your business sector with goodies for your prospects, customers and business associates. While reaching out to your business prospects during this holiday season, there is more than just sending a Merry Christmas card. In fact, this holiday season, your team should utilize a B2B marketing campaign which cuts across multiple channels.

Rejuvenate Social Media

The canvas of social media platforms is flooded this holiday season but there is always a way to be innovative. Bring out all the raving reviews and video testimonials from your customers and business associates and share them proudly. Over the past year, whatever you have accumulated, splurge on your social media pages of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others. Remember that B2B marketing strategies have faired well with prospects trusting recommendations from peers and other businesses.

Tradition Wins

During the holiday, there is always an underlying current of traditions; your team must play along. In your holiday marketing strategy, make sure to have a theme associated with your business sector and stress the application of traditional values in the festive environment. In all your physical and virtual decorations, engagements and reach-outs, local, geographical and social traditions help reach out to fellow businesses.

Reinvent Traditional Ways

In addition to reaching out through the internet, traditional methods are essential in a B2B marketing strategy as well. Your team needs to have a list of business prospects and current contact persons ready and should reach out in a traditional way such as, calling, visiting (although harder in our current times), or even just sending a postcard. Remember, a miss can cost you money in the coming year through unhappy clients who feel as though you don’t value them.

Personalize Your Approach

There is nothing better than developing personal relations over the festive season. Including business prospects while cementing the already made bonds with customers and business associates. It is a proven fact that there develops an emotional and familiar undercurrent of recognition which subconsciously affects your business deals and business relations.

Dive Into Communities

This festive season your team should break the barriers and share on all relevant platforms. Check out all virtual world sites where you can tap into a wide audience of relevant prospects. With your high values content and a commanding leadership tone, your experts can attract all the prospects who frequent such B2B information hubs, which serve their industry and provide solutions to their problem.

Wishes With Gifts

Your Festive Wishes, when sugarcoated with an offer or two will hit the mark. Your team can churn out different goodies you have been offering over the year and repackage them. Offer them as this limited time offer. Anything like an e-book, an expert advise time slot, a free sample or just an upgrade – all work wonders – depending on your business sector. If your business sector is facing a particular crisis or a hiccup, and you have a product or solution to offer, a very limited time offer of it can do wonders to spread the word.

Activate CRM & Funnel

With a year behind you, the time is right to top the funnel and activate a CRM tool (provided free with an Infofree.com subscription). The CRM will definitely play a major role as you move forward and utilize optimized details from your curated prospect lists. Need more prospects to get your CRM and sales funnel started? Check out FreeSalesLeads (free to use) or Salesflower.com (cheap monthly subscription), where business databases have 95% accuracy.

From Foes to Friends

Overall, just relax and take everything in a holiday spirit. If there was any misunderstanding with any customer this is the time of the year to rebuild a stronger relationship. During this festive season, all is forgotten and forgiven, so take advantage and mend any broken bridges.

Spark Your Audience Engagement

Posted on | by Emi Lesser | Leave a Comment on Spark Your Audience Engagement
Audience Engagement

All top companies have extensive customer engagement, and most notably, it’s largely customer-driven. Every company strives to have audience engagement. It helps build relationships, community, and loyalty, encourages conversation and participation, and makes your brand stand out among others.

Companies need a long-term engagement strategy as it is vital to their growth. Better customer experience means customers will not only choose your brand over any other they are also willing to pay more for your product or service. The better the experience the more loyal a customer will become and the more engaged they’ll get.

Humanize your brand

As a company you want to be able to play to people’s needs and be someone customers can relate to. Popular consumer brands such as Wendy’s and Under Armor have it easier while brands like banks and B2B companies have to try even harder. Utilizing people within your company that are passionate about your brand, you can work to create a humanized brand. Create content that is relatable, things consumers would interact with, and make your brand stand out as something they want to be a part of.

Consistent communication

Your engaged customers want to hear from you. They want to know they can count on you to inform them of updates to your product/service and company, especially in these unusual times. In gaining audience engagement, you also want them to count on you for supplying them with information within your industry. In gaining engagement, you must be consistent in your newsletters, social media posts, emails, and any other form of communication you use.

Get to know your community

The more you know the easier it is to interact with your audience. Do your research as to why your audience is drawn towards you. Take time to get to know them so you can engage accordingly. Know their interests, wants, needs, and lifestyles. Knowing your audience drives you in the right direction, making sure you don’t strike out when trying to engage. Asking for feedback will also help you get to know your community and gives you ideas of what your audience thinks currently and what they want to see in the future. Most customers are very willing to give their opinions and thus become engaged with your product and brand. You’ll also see engagement levels rise once you start implementing their ideas.

Surprise personalized outreach

Digital marketing allows companies to take personalized engagement even further. The most effective content strategy is to offer something that they wouldn’t expect. Real-time personalized deals are a sure way to get customers to engage with your brand. Making your deals relevant to customers right when they need it makes them feel as though the advertisements were made for them. Be sure to create marketing and advertising campaigns based on location, social platform, and specific products to boost your consumer engagement strategy. However, personalization should be about making the user feel welcomed and known without feeling like you’re digging into their personal data.

Schedule weekly activities

It can be effective to post activities or ask questions the same day each week on social media – promoting things like Sales Tip Tuesdays or Motivational Mondays. After posting your content, ask your followers to join in, sharing their tips and advice, or posting a photo of what motivated them. This encourages followers to not only engage with your post but others in the community as well. Being the source of community engagement ups your brand and encourages users to return to your page to interact each week, growing your engagement.

Understanding What Customers Want

Posted on | by Emi Lesser | Leave a Comment on Understanding What Customers Want

Three Tips to Understand Your Customers

If we could understand what every customer is thinking, we’d be selling left and right. Of course, it’s very rare that a customer tells us how they’re feeling. With the constant bombardment of advertising and everyone wanting them to buy, customers are a lot less trusting and require more time and effort to convince to buy.

customer service image

Understanding what drives an individual to want to buy is a key factor in selling today. If you don’t get lucky with that customer who willingly tells you their wants, needs, and concerns for your product/service, it means you must figure it out on your own. Knowing how to figure out a client’s wants, needs, and concerns and use it to your advantage is something every good salesperson understands how to do.

Here are three ways to understand what potential customers are thinking.

Be the guinea pig

Go through the customer experience process. Follow the paths they would take on the route to buying from you. Act as though this is your first time coming across the product and note what value you receive. What key information do you take in, is there something not mentioned that you can note in your sales pitch or a key factor you can build off of? It’s important to understand the process and information the customer is taking in before they reach you. This way more value is being added to your product instead of just highlighting what the customer already knows. The more value you can add, the more likely a customer is to buy.

Learn as much as you can about your client’s job and life

It’s important to focus specifically on those who will be using your product/service. Learning about your customer’s job or life often helps bring to light key factors your customer wouldn’t think of if asked what they wanted from the product. The more you know about a customer, the better you can pick out key things the customer would enjoy. This tactic takes more time and empathy from the salesperson, but the more personal you can get, the more likely a customer is to buy from you specifically.

Understand what customers want

Personalized service, consistent answers, and optimized user experience.

Personalized service. Customers don’t want to be treated like a case number. As you want to learn as much as you can about your client, you also want to create an experience that’s personalized to them. Work with the client to figure out the best package for them, making sure to pay attention to their needs and wants. Giving them an experience different than the usual sales pitch will get them much closer to buying.

Consistent Answers. Seventy-six percent of customers receive conflicting answers from different support agents when asking the same questions. Make sure your sales team is on the same page. Consistent answers throughout the buying process will increase the likelihood of completing a purchase more so than receiving different answers to the same question. It shows you have your stuff together and that a customer can rely on each representative to give a good deal.

Optimized user experience. User experience is a huge factor in choosing to buy. Non-responsive and hard-to-use websites turn people away. Make sure your website is user-friendly through the navigation, homepage, and cart checkout. You want to make it a fun, easy experience. Aside from online experience, you also want to make sure customer support services are optimized. Using quality sales skills, salespeople can make for a troublesome user experience, one that will keep customers coming back.

Find Your Target Market

Posted on | by Emi Lesser | 1 Comment on Find Your Target Market
Graphic target market profile

We have seen it numerous times, businesses not realizing they are missing a huge opportunity because they are either targeting the wrong market entirely or so focused on one target market they don’t notice the large chunk of people coming from another.

It’s crucial that businesses find their prefect target market. Before diving in you must first understand that a target market does not encompass your entire selling market. A target market is those who really want or need your offering, the people most excited about your product, and most likely to buy over others. These are the people you want to direct your marketing campaign towards.

Here are some tips for finding your perfect target market:

  1. 1. Gather information about your company

    Figure out what problems your product/service solves. Be as specific as possible as this will help you narrow your audience down. Once you know the problem you’re solving, find the characteristics of those that have the problem.

    Next, identify what features and benefits your product/service offers. Features are something your product has or is, while benefits are the outcomes or results that users will (hopefully) experience by using your product or service.

    The overall question here is, what will the customer get out of using your specific product or service?

  2. 2. Analyze your current customers

    The best way to find your target market is by learning who is already buying your product/service. Learn their demographics, interests, behaviors, what benefits they get out of the product/service. You want to know how they think and act.

    Once you have a general idea of your current customer base, you’ll want to highlight the similarities between them to come up with your top customers.

    Website and social media analytics are great resources to gather this information. Analytic tools help to see who is visiting, buying, and exploring your website or social media. It also shows how long they spend exploring your website, where they’re located, what industry they work in, their interests, and more. Do not be afraid to also reach out to your existing customers to survey them too.

  3. 3. Analyze your competitors’ customers

    You can find out a lot about your potential customers by researching your competitors. This research will show if competitors have been successful at attracting specific types of customers and whether or not you should be trying to attract those customers too.

    You can learn basic information about your competitor’s customers by looking at their social media accounts and searching through their followers and likes on their posts. If your competitor has a physical store you can also check out who is shopping there.

  4. 4. Conduct market research

    Conduct secondary and primary research to gain more insight. Secondary research is any outside research done about your company or industry. Gather information from other resources that will help find your target market. Primary research is research done by you. Create a survey to gather information on your current customers and everyday people. Ask about their demographics, interests, perceptions of your product and your competition, what services or products they would like to see, etc. Ask any questions that would prove helpful in finding your key market.

  5. 5. Complete your customer profile

    Once you’ve gathered all the information you can, compile a complete profile of your perfect customer. If you offer more than one product or service, you might have multiple target markets. Your profile should include both demographic and psychographic information. From here, you can work on how best to market and advertise to your target market.

The most important and toughest thing to avoid in finding your target market is making assumptions. Let the information you gather tell you who your best and most popular customers are, do not draw your own conclusions.

You must also note that your target market is flexible and always evolving. Knowing who you are targeting and continually refining it will ensure you’re on the right track.