Optimizing your customer contact through marketing: how do you do it?
Customer contact and communicating with your customers is essential to improve customer satisfaction and build trust. It’s an important process for the success of any business during which customers can ask questions, get information about products or services and look for solutions for their problems.
So optimizing customer contact is crucial for any organization. But how do you do it? In this blog, we’ll explain how to get your business communications on point.
The Customer User Journey
Before we get into how marketing can help optimize customer contact, it’s vital to understand what the customer user journey entails. This is the route a customer takes before, during, and after they buy a product or service.
It includes all the interactions a customer has with a company, right down to any follow-up service.
During each of these five stages, customer contact is important:
- Awareness: the customer becomes aware of the existence of the product or service.
- Consideration: the customer considers the purchase of the product or service and compares it with other options.
- Decision: the customer buys the product or service.
- Delivery: the customer uses the product and sometimes seeks guidance.
- Loyalty: the customer receives necessary support after the purchase and can develop loyalty to the brand.
First, you should understand where your client is on their journey in order to understand their needs. This allows you to anticipate certain questions or difficulties and have the correct information and responses at hand.
Customer contact across various channels
Once you have a strategic overview of what your customers are looking for at which stage and touchpoint, you can define your tactical approach per channel. The competition is fierce, and customers expect fast and clear communication on the channel of their choice. Whether it be emails, your website, or socials… You better stay on top of your game! These are just a few of the many channels you can use to keep in touch with your audience.
Social Media
Let’s talk about social media presence. By creating accounts on the most common socials, you make yourself available to be contacted even faster. Some of the most commonly used social media are Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Besides fast interaction, socials offer numerous advantages: you can showcase your products or services on them and through likes and shares you can expand your customer base.
You can also opt for paid advertising on social media. Make sure to regularly check the comments on your organic posts and ads: you don’t want to be paying to push content with negative reactions! Mitigate risky situations by responding in an understanding way and showing that there is a person behind the account that is willing to help them solve their problems.
Website
Another important pillar is to build your online presence. You must be easily findable online for your customers. Start by registering your company with Google, if you haven’t already done so. Research shows that the vast majority of customers first google a company to get in touch with it. Building a strong SEO strategy will help you become top-of-page more often in Google and other search engine results when potential customers are looking online.
Having a well-structured website that’s easy to navigate for your customers will only benefit you. This also means that you need to make information accessible to your audience. What questions will they have when they are in the decision phase and ordering something? It’s important to anticipate this and to create pages on your website that can help them.
Creating help centres will enable you to get in touch quickly and improve the customer experience. Whether you want to work with a call centre or maybe a chatbot: your customers will appreciate quick, clear, and personal communication!
Take a look at the customized help centre from be•at here below, developed by Premium Plus. Branded pages like these with the right app integrations can improve the all-around customer experience significantly!
Email Marketing
Email Automation
When you start building a customer base, it’s just a small step to implementing email marketing. Building automated email marketing flows can save you time and improve your customer satisfaction. It’s a way to keep in touch and to build trust. However, these automation flows can be used for a variety of goals! You can set up your own triggers, such as a customer putting a product in a cart and leaving it there for one hour, not being active on an application for a certain amount of time, opening one of your previous email campaigns… This way, you can build solid moments of contact that can engage your customers again and keep your brand top-of-mind.
Newsletters
You can also collect email addresses or let customers sign up for your newsletter via your website or when they create an account. When they opt in for marketing emails, this allows you to regularly send them personalized mailings with fun campaigns, promotions, new launches, and tips. A marketing trick often used is to offer a ‘new customer discount’ as an incentive to subscribe to your newsletter. Win-win for both, and an excellent way to build your contact base!
A weekly newsletter can be a great way to stay top-of-mind with your customers and to increase the retention rate.
This example of what an email format can possibly look like shows the structure and necessary elements of an email template. It’s a best practice that we use at STRAREX and also implemented in many campaigns.
Email marketing tools like Mailchimp and Hubspot make it possible to send out automated emails, schedule campaigns at a certain time and to divide your customers into segments. You can even set up A/B split tests to see which emails perform best! Keep track of your results and learn from your own best practices.
Conclusion
In conclusion, communication and marketing go hand in hand. Optimizing your customer contact can be done on multiple channels with a strategic approach. However, the right know-how is required to implement the tactical parts for the best results. At STRAREX, we can optimize all these processes for you, in order to achieve your goals.