Communication is at the heart of everything we do, and running a business is no exception. How you communicate with your customers is vitally important to retain them. When it comes to customer communication the old saying ‘it’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it’ is more important than ever, and can be the difference between securing that sale that you have been chasing, or losing it.
You may have never felt the need to give too much consideration to your communication, but to make your business as successful as it can be, reviewing how you communicate with your customers is not only a good idea but a profitable one too.
The Customer Journey
If you are wondering about how you should even get started with examining your communication with customers so that you can improve it, the customer journey is a useful place to start.
So, what is a customer journey? Your customer journey is the full customer experience that clients receive when interacting with your product or service. Charting your customer journey enables you to analyze every stage of the customer’s experience with your company.
For example, the customer journey starts from the time they first heard about your business i.e., the minute they browse your website for information about your product or reviews, the customer journey then continues through to when they visit your showroom/office for more information about the product, through to the aftercare that they receive, and so on. The reason that mapping a customer journey is so useful is that rather than looking at just parts of your customer’s experience with your brand, you can examine it as a whole instead.
By examining each stage of the customer journey, you can identify the areas that your business does well and improvements that could be made. This reveals the point at which you may be missing out on converting sales and enables you to resolve this. You may discover that you need to speed up the rate at which your team respond to customer queries online, or improve how they speak to customers face to face. Examining the stages of the customer journey could reveal training issues, or identify weaknesses in your processes that could be streamlined.
Relationship Management
As the customer journey demonstrates, the communication that customers receive at every stage of their experience with your company is essential. With the customer journey in mind, it is a good idea to review ways in which you can improve the whole process of customer communications. To address the full customer journey, many businesses are adopting customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to manage better the way their business interacts with customers.
There are many different varieties of CRM software out there, offering a range of features. The huge benefit that CRM software offers businesses is the ability to manage the whole process of interacting with customers. The CRM dashboard can be updated with every single time the customer has been in contact with your company.
This enables sleeker client interactions, removing the need for the customer to explain previous conversations that they have had with your staff. Sales teams, in particular, benefit from CRM, as this prevents different members of the team repeatedly contacting the same prospect.
Using CRM software can streamline all of your client interactions, providing them with more cohesive communications, and delivering excellent customer service. In short, customer relationship management does precisely as its name implies by managing the relationship between your business and your customers, leading to increased customer satisfaction, improved customer retention, and ultimately growth in sales.
Another useful CRM feature is 24/7 customer support. These pop-up boxes appear on your website, providing the opportunity for your customers to contact your business anytime, anywhere. This enhances customer communication further still, demonstrates that you value communication from your customers, and also makes your brand more accessible to clients.
The Importance Of Content
In the process of marketing your business, it is likely that you contact customers directly. Pitching the message just right is vital for marketing communications to be successful. As mentioned at the beginning, ‘it’s not what you say, but the way that you say it’ that counts here. You may want to let all your customers know about your fantastic new product, but if you pitch the message wrong, you are unlikely to get the results that you crave.
As every business owner knows, your marketing efforts need to be justified by a good return on investment (ROI). Therefore, maximizing your communications so that they achieve the best outcomes is essential. You may be overflowing with excitement about your new product, but if the way you communicate that to customers doesn’t engage them and entice to find out more, then your marketing efforts are entirely wasted, and your communications won’t help increase your bottom line.
A prime example which demonstrates the importance of content is email marketing. Successful email marketing is entirely dependent on your customers or potential customers, opening the email in the first place. If no one opens your emails to read them, then a lot of wasted effort has gone into putting them together, all for no return. Unlike other forms of marketing, contacting customers by email cannot rely so much on an all-singing, all-dancing piece of methods, such as video. Instead, email marketing relies on its content; to encourage customers to open the email and click through to find out more the content needs to be pretty engaging.
Getting your email communications right begins with ensuring that you are targeting the right audience.
Once this has been done, it’s time to focus on those all-important best subject lines for sales success. Taking your time to think about which subject lines you should use to hook your customer into finding out more is vitally important. After all, it is on the strength of your subject line that they will click through, read the rest of your email, and ultimately lead to a sale.