July is a Slow Month? It’s time to re-think the stages of the customer life cycle!
It’s a slow July ? It’s to refresh your CRM and choose a simple CRM to build your customer life cycle. The three stages of the customer life cycle are :
1. Customer acquisition stage
The beginning of the life cycle; a customer enters into contact with a business for the first time. A sale is not necessary for this phase, but new customers can be acquired through advertising or word-of-mouth. It is also known as “Top of the funnel”.
When a customer makes contact, the acquisition stage of buying should look very different from when they call. You must then offer the best products or services to satisfy the needs of the customer. There is also an important way to offer information to the customer’s needs.
2. Sales Conversion Stage
During this period, prospects are converted into clients or customers through traditional sales tactics such as cold calling or trade shows and conferences. This stage includes lead generation. It is also known as ‘Middle of the funnel’.
This is your chance to reach the customer while they’re deliberating. social media marketing, SEO, and other inbound and outbound methods should place your brand on the customer’s radar. This stage is successful when the customer reaches out for more information, looking to either educate themselves further or get a definitive price. A customer is comparing products across competing brands (including yours), carrying out research, and reading customer reviews, to be successful in this stage of ‘reaching’ It’s also a chance to contact the customer via social media or search engine marketing, such as search engine optimization, to get to this stage.
3. Post-sales conversion
In this stage, existing customers are retained via retention strategies that strengthen brand loyalty and generate repeat purchases thus preventing defection to competitors’ products/service
Customer retention starts by asking how your product or service feels. Customers share their feedback about what you’ve done with them. 24/7 customer support, discounts, and referral bonuses can help your customer reach out and get back on the line. You must also make the best use of customer feedback to build a “Voice of the Customer” program for the first time and improve the quality of your services and customer service experience for the second time. This program record customer feel to make sure that customer relationships are effective.
How do you start your lead nurturing and sales funnel?
Lead nurturing is made through an automated work of lead nurturing. It generally involves segmenting the leads based on their stage. Leads are nurtured accordingly for each stage of the customer lifecycle.For example, if you have a product/service, you know your potential customers will be little more than novices. So going by experience,you will do something to educate them about your product/service and thus that is called lead nurturing or Lead Education.To contact with customers in this particular phase is known there should not be any middle man involved such as call center personnel which will help build trust automatically between the company and their potential clients or customers. Remember that the customer must feel like they are having a personal touch.
What is the customer life cycle in InvestGlass CRM or customer relationship management?
InvestGlass CRM are core to a successful customer life cycle as they are all about consistent marketing and relationship management. InvestGlass CRM is your sales rep best friend.
This important process will take your business to the next level as it’s designed to make things easier for you in terms of growing customer base, gaining customers loyalty and building strong relationships.
InvestGlass CRM helps you manage every phase of the Customer Life Cycle from acquisition, retention to loyalty through a variety of ways such as an effective InvestGlass CRM strategy, loyalty programs,marketing automation etc.
There are various phases of customer life cycle in any kind of business or organization such that there cannot be a single definition for all industries but a set of definitions may differ based on industry requirements.
In the banking industry, the challenge will be different if you’re building a new bank or if you’re a traditional bank. Customers’ journey on a new bank will be made through an application usually download it from the App Store. While for private banking it would be mostly word of mouth or business relations.
In the retail banking or retail insurance segments, potential clients are used to looking for product reviews. Customer lifecycle management is, therefore, more aggressive. Your financial or insurance products will have to pitch by your sales managers and your sales rep with more aggressivity. We are not talking of “valuable customers” anymore and here it’s the KPI – key performance indicator world. Sales reps will have to use exclusive offers arguments.
What are the phases of customer sales cycle?
Customer retention is a widely used method of making customers feel that they are indispensable to your business or brand. There are several strategies for customer retention. A good customer retention strategy would be a combination of offers and incentives,cross-selling products as well as introducing additional services to the original purchase. loyalty given by the customer shall make them beneficial for both parties in terms of reducing costs, improved relationship spreading awareness about your company, you may know more about it here.
Looking at the phases through which most customers move before buying you can create an effective marketing plan according to these phases.
The acquisition is about targeting potential customers with your marketing message by using different techniques, such as advertising media like print ads, radio, TV commercials etc.
But first, you will have to consider the ideal customer or buyer personas. Your prospective customer should look similar to your repeat business client. If you have an idea over this stage, you can move to the next one.
The next step is conversion. You should attract or convert your prospective customer by giving them the right marketing message for your product or service so that they will ask themselves ‘why not buy from me?. If you are able to make them think like that and then push them towards buying something from you, you are on a successful path.
This has been shown effective in many businesses through internet marketing . Once they think why not I try it! It’s my choice whether I want it or not and if they decide for buying, that’s also a big benefit of targeting the right audience and convey TRUST..
Why email marketing is important for the retention stage?
Email marketing is a common way to exchange information with your prospects and clients. Email marketing will help you advertise your products and services. It’s a quick and effective way for building your brand name as well as credibility. Email marketing can help you build trust among your customers. When they receive anything from your side, whether it is a promotional offer or product update, they will surely trust you more if you do it via email than any other platform like social media or a general blog post. Each email should present new ideas, it should state exactly what customers should do, and show one purchase or one click-to-action link.
Decision maker might not have time to read your email so make sure you have a PDF or video communication to show how much value offers your product or service. Decision maker might participate later in sales cycle stages. Your sales team should be ready to start again the sales cycle with them.
While developing the email marketing campaign,you should make sure that what step of the customer lifecycle is being targeted at this stage? This is a very important part to be considered while developing an email marketing strategy within the context of InvestGlass CRM.
For each customer lifecycle model, you have series of emails. Sales pitch is calibrated based on typical stages success and you should handle objections with those emails. The biggest challenge is to feel natural while using templates to handle common objections.
Make digital marketing ‘always on’ coordinated
Customers are still in a relationship when they make their first contact with them. Companies need to build relationships through a planned always-on marketing approach. Customer lifecycle marketing focuses on prospects and customers’ path-to-purchase. This has been dubbed ‘lifecycle marketing’ on the rise of customer engagement, conversion and retention by marketers. Here we give you the best tools and share a customer journey map. Use the tool to help you review the gap between prospectus activities you could be working on and current ones you are currently working on. Find out more about customer engagement and the best practices for best practices via our toolkit. Learn how the analysis can be applied to…
Sales process automation in 2021
With this never-ending Covid situation, customer lifecycle analyzes have been very difficult. No one is to blame but you have to keep your sales reps smiling. Look for brand advocates. Some communication channel might be crowded with stupid messages but you have to resume your communication with relevant content. The customer journey can be shorter and lifecycle stages reduced to less stages as before because customers are eager to consume quickly.
Your sales pitch should be transparent and your sales staff very empathic particularly for B2B qualified leads. The future customer will be digital-friendly so it’s your chance to use digital onboarding and automate customers’ journey. Automation can help you increase sales with fewer resources. You don’t have to spend money on useless marketing campaigns with low ROI. Automation does not mean a lesser quality customer experience. Loyal customers will appreciate that answers are delivered quickly. Nevertheless, always get an escape if sales team automation is clueless.
Think about and test the freemium model? Start your sales process as soon as possible and involve potential customers in it if you can just give away a product or service for free with a clear action from their side to convert. It’s your way how you grow future customers base and generate repeat purchases even before they become registered users. Keep them satisfied after they make the first purchase and provide some great user experience at each stage of the lifecycle. They will return back to you when they need more, but don’t spam them with products or services they do not need! Add automated emails like triggered welcome, follow-up reminders, in case something went wrong!