You’ve gotten the sale or a new client onboard! Cue celebrations, wine, champagne, pick your poison.
But wait, your work is not done yet. You’ve got the customer, but how do you keep them? Marketing can support your customer success team in ensuring your customer is delighted and stays on with you after the sale. How your company handles customer experience can make or break brand loyalty and whether they stay with you after their purchase.
Focusing on customer retention makes business sense. It can cost up to five times more to attract new customers than retain an existing one. At the same time, 44% of companies focus more on customer acquisition than customer retention.
How then, do you retain your customers? And how do you delight your customers through your marketing efforts? Here’s some areas you can enhance the customer experience with inbound marketing here.
#1: Post Customer Purchase Support
Think about how your customer is feeling after they purchase a service or product from you.
They’ll either be in a good mood and willing to purchase more, more on which we will capitalize on in the next point. But there will be customers that will be happy, yet slightly uncertain, especially when your product is complex to use.
They might ask “okay, so what’s the next step from here”. This is where you can create content to guide them along the way and support your customer success team.
Create content to create value and reassure the customer that they made a right decision by going ahead with your service or product.
For instance, you could enroll your customers in a post-customer purchase email workflow where you can explain common issues they might face using your product and how to solve them. Or you can provide the best practices to use your product or service either on its own, or with other complementary services in a linked blog post or email.
#2: Drive Customer Engagement
After a purchase, customers experience ‘post-purchase euphoria’ and are more receptive to buy more. Post-purchase emails report double the engagement rate as regular emails
Should you cross-sell or upsell existing customers so soon after they’ve made their purchase? It’s a delicate balance. If you don’t attempt to upsell, you may be missing countless opportunities. However, if you upsell too fast, you may come off as a hard-sell.
For the unwilling-to-purchase group, encourage micro-conversions. Ask them to follow you on your social channels or communicate more frequently to keep them engaged and ready to buy on the next round.
For the willing-to-purchase group, encourage further purchase without being too pushy by including a ‘you may also like’ recommendation box in your post-purchase emails or an exclusive and ‘only available now’ to incorporate the scarcity principle in your customer engagement strategy.
#3: Delight Your Customers
Content generated by satisfied customers can be powerful marketing tools. They’re good for SEO, provide additional social proof and feedback on your product. You can incentivize them to leave a customer review or ask for feedback on their experience with your product thus far.
If you do well here, customers can become passionate evangelists of your brand and they become a source of referrals, testimonials and engaged customers for your brand.
With your evangelists, use smart content (dynamic and personalised website content, forms or call-to-actions) to personalise your site’s content for this customer group.
While a marketer’s goal is all about generating sales-qualified leads and improving brand awareness amongst your target audience, don’t forget that the buyer’s journey doesn’t end there. Marketing can also play a key role in delighting customers and ensure these customers generate business for you.
After all, happy customers that feel taken care of will refer countless more to you. Doesn’t that sound like music to your ears?
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