Many businesses are exploring methods to increase their profits, such as developing new products, outsourcing certain functions, or identifying cheaper raw material sources. All these efforts come with financial expenses and the intense use of time resources while results are not always guaranteed.
What if we told you there is a much better way of increasing profits by 25% to 95%?
Surprisingly, this life-changing tool is right within your reach, without requiring you to alter your business in a fundamental manner; the secret is to nurture your existing customers rather than investing to attract new ones.
Statistics show that it’s costing five times as much to attract new customers than to keep and cultivate existing ones. Loyal relationships keep costs to a minimum by their very nature as you need to invest less resources into persuading your prospects they need your products and/or services.
There are deliberate steps you can take to obtain cost savings through loyalty, such as offering incentives to sales staff that acquire customers who stick, focusing your customer acquisition campaigns on customers that ensure repeat business, creating annual reports for customers just like you would do with investors, and using dedicated software for managing your customer relationships.
The latest tactic for maintaining your loyal customers is what we will be talking about in this post. Our recommendation for CRM software is the Zoho CRM system, a platform we have been using in our company for many years and that we have been offering to our customers since 2018 as an Authorised Consulting Partner for Zoho. Here are the main reasons why Zoho CRM is an excellent choice for any business regardless of its industry and size, including yours:
Automating routine sales
Acquiring a new customer and making that first sale is exciting for any sales professional, but aside from praising your sales staff for attracting new customers, you should also provide them with the tools needed to make repeat sales in an easy manner.
Zoho automates sales processes and support functions that take up valuable work time (and don’t give your employees too much of an adrenaline rush either) so you reduce manual data entry, eliminate redundancies, and make the whole process smooth and fast for your loyal customers.
Effective contact management
You can’t have a close relationship with your customers if you don’t know who they are and you are not able to access related data with minimal effort. Ideally you should be able to foster strong customer relationship and eventually turn your customers into brand ambassadors. Fortunately you can achieve this with support from Zoho, which can make your work smarter by offering real-time notifications from customers, displaying a complete picture of customer conversations, supporting customer tickets and queries instantly, and communicating with customers across channels.
Monitor and reach your customers easily
CRM software, such as Zoho, makes it possible for you to follow your customers’ social media behaviour, which means you can see where you’re being talked about and participate in conversations, target customers who haven’t responded to emails and connect with them on platforms where they are active. You can identify and analyse your audience, their behavioural pattern and communication preferences, and reach these prospects where they spend most of their time.
What is amazing about Zoho is that you can contact your customers at the best times to get a hold of them due to Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant, which will make suggestions based on your previous interactions.
Predictive sales tools
A golden moment where you could have closed a deal with one of your customers could be lost because you had to look through your database to find a missing piece of information, and customers usually don’t wait until you’ve done your due diligence.
By using the Zoho CRM system, all your data, figures, and reports are available a text away or you can have a chat with Zia and make a request for contact or sales data. Moreover, when you are not sure about the customers you should focus on Zia can predict the win probability of every ongoing deal and assign a score showing how close they are to conversion. This way, you can stay focused on the right targets and nurture those leads that have potential. Zia can be for you that sales expert that always provides working tips and enables you to never slip out of deals.
Marketing automation
Before devising a strong sales strategy, your marketing should be shipshape as well, with help from Zoho CRM’s marketing automation tools. If you want to retain customers, you’ll need to create a unique approach when selling, and the Zoho CRM system assists you with segmenting customers based on their region, requirements, lead source, and even their level of responsiveness towards you.
Segmentation makes tailor-made campaigns possible and your brand will be able to communicate to each prospect or customer based on their interest in your products, awareness level, budget, and other criteria that can help you provide them with an excellent buying experience they will want to enjoy again and again.
Help pick the right influencers
CRM helps you understand your audience behaviours, and what causes that behaviour. By using social media data you can pick the right influencer for your brand. Having an influencer represent your brand can build trust with your target market.
One of the ways that Zoho CRM system can help you select influencers is finding sentiments in email with Zia – Zoho’s AI assistant can skim through your inbox to detect the sentiment behind each mail and tag them as positive, negative, or neutral. Correlate this with prospects that have a large number of followers among your target audience and you have found the people than can advocate for your brand and communicate your message more effectively.
Email marketing
EDM (or Email) marketing delivers some of the best returns on investment compared to other digital marketing techniques and is a must-have tool if you want to cultivate loyal customers. Email enables you to keep leads engaged from your first contact, but also to stay top-of-mind for your newly-acquired customers.
Zoho allows you to schedule reminder emails and offers analytics that measure email open rates, clicks, bounces, and other indicators that you can use to assess your email marketing success. Email is also used for sales to engage with your leads and customers, and writing effective emails is easy with the Zoho CRM system because the platform helps you create personalized content by combining emails with contextual CRM information and analytics.
CRM is a key competitive differentiating factor
CRM, especially Zoho CRM system, is crucial for gaining competitive advantage, as this type of software is no longer dedicated to elites, but it has evolved to suit even the smallest companies. Companies which have integrated CRM talk about how this move has allowed them to gain an overall view of their sales, increase performance, empowered sales staff so they managed to achieve their quotas, and improved customer retention. It all comes down to your ability to retain existing customers as this has a huge impact on your revenue, and there is no better tool to achieve this than modern CRM.
Looking for the simplest way to integrate Zoho CRM system into your company sales and marketing? VMA can help as we are a CRM Consulting company that has been using Zoho CRM for the best part of 8 years now. We certainly know it well and have watched it transform into one of the best CRM’s in the market today, voted #2 behind Salesforce but way more cost-effective.
We are a CRM consultant and Authorized Consulting Partner for Zoho Customer Relations Manager (CRM), one of only 20 in Australia and based on the Gold Coast and we are well-positioned to consult in Brisbane and all of Queensland and New South Wales if required. Contact us today and take the first step towards leveraging CRM to increase your company profits!
