When a small business focuses on customer relationship marketing themselves, it can be a bit overwhelming. How can you effectively convince your [potential] customers to use your business instead of your competitors? This requires some sound customer loyalty strategies. Personalizing your marketing goes a long way to customers when they’re making a decision. Shifting your marketing means making the necessary changes to ensure that your customers’ expectations are being met. In today’s world, customers expect a lot from businesses they work with, starting with:

Quick Responses
Personalized Interactions
Positive Experiences
Quality Work
Open Communication

What do you need to focus on in order to change your customer marketing strategy and cater it to your customers’ needs?

Utilize Technology

Utilizing technology means knowing all of your customer data and using it to your benefit. Data-driven engagements and targeted marketing ads are the key to successfully reaching the right customers and increasing revenue. Your business should have a customer data platform where you can store the information you need to keep your business at the top of your industry’s game which will fuel your customer loyalty strategies.

Business owners need a powerful solution on their side that will meet their needs. They need a catered CRM, created specifically for small and local business, and that’s where FreshLimecomes in.

Be the Salesperson

It’s tricky for many business owners to take on the role of a salesperson, but it needs to be done in order to succeed. Most likely you don’t have a large sales team to take over the process of selling to potential customers. Instead, you’ll be taking on this role of CEO, sales and marketing, trying to get customers to buy your products directly through the power of your marketing campaigns. You do the nurturing of potential customers and leads, you are the one who does the following up to see why they haven’t responded, you determine how to effectively interact with customers at any given point in the process, and you close the sale, all through marketing methods you’ve designed.

This is a big task, but a CRM and marketing plan makes the whole process a much easier affair. The need for retaining customer and transactional data is strong when it comes to making sales and bringing new customers in, as well as bringing old customers back. Being the salesperson isn’t an added burden when you have automated, targeted engagements being sent to your customers through a customer data platform.

Loyalty is Everything

Loyal customers are much more valuable to businesses than new customers are. Loyal customers have a 70% conversion rate, so building up a loyal customer base is necessary for business growth. Repeat customers spend up to three times as much as one-time customers. It also costs businesses up to five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to drive a repeat purchase. What kind of strategies can businesses use incentivize customers to keep coming back through their door?

Create a Loyalty Program
Offer Discounts
Send Targeted Engagements Regularly
Provide Data-Based Product Recommendations
Follow-Up after Each Transaction

Shifting your customer relationship marketing to meet customer expectations means to implement a marketing plan that will make your customers want to choose your business over your competitors. This process is made much easier when the right technology is put in place to increase your success, such as a customer data platform.

For more insights on marketing strategy that actually works for small business, connect with Jay Bean, Founder of FreshLimeand Small Business Marketing Expert on LinkedIn and Twitter. If any of these tips have helped you or if you have anything to add, please comment below. We’d love to hear from you!