If we look at recent statistics, it says that 46% marketers, who have a well-designed lead generation strategy, also have a sales team for following up for closure as well as retention.
Now, this means that both lead generation and customer retention is important. Let’s consider this scenario in detail:
- Your lead generation team keeps generating leads and bringing in new customers. But, if you don’t look after customer retention, then many customers will leave. This will go on and become a vicious cycle. Your sales will be stuck in a phase and your lead generation team will end up working extra hours.
- If you only focus on existing customers and forget about getting new ones, your revenue will be dependent on a fixed set of users. These users can leave and decrease your revenue. Additionally, with no new customers, your growth graph will be bad.
Both lead generation and customer retention go hand-in-hand. While your lead generation team brings in new customers, your sales team or account management team takes care of old as well as new users.
Here are some tips for lead generation and customer retention.
Tips for Lead Generation
1. Data-Driven Strategy
The more you know about your customers, the more personalized services you can offer. You can communicate in the right manner and provide the services at the right time. In short, you can ensure that you take care of your potential customers and reach out to them in the most perfect way. If you don’t know your potential audience and what these people want, directly offering products and services is a blind shot, which is likely to go wrong.
2. Right Tools for Tracking Leads
The lead generation process is made up of various tasks and to keep a tab on all these tasks, you need tools such as Google Analytics and CRM like Salesforce. For instance, Salesforce is a CRM software that will help you track your leads in each task. It will tell you the exact status of a lead at a current time. Google analytics, on the other hand, will tell you the pages that are attracting more traffic and from where. Using these, you can streamline your lead generation process.
3. Drop Quantity, Focus on Quality
One mistake that many businesses make is focusing solely on the quantity of leads. What they don’t realize is that this quantity may not be ideal customers and these users may only want some information. Focusing on quality leads will remove these issues. You will be able to provide personalized services to this small group and increase customer retention as well.
Here, many will think that the quantity will also lead to more number of customers.
While this may be true initially, if you do not streamline your lead generation, you’ll realize that this quantity is not here to stay. They will leave after the first offer or as soon as they have information.
4. Track Your Competitors
What your competitors are doing should totally interest you. Have they launched a new service in comparison to yours? Or are they up-stepping their product quality? You need to know everything to do better and attract more users. If the competitor launches something better than your services, you will lose leads as well as previous customers.
Tips for Customer Retention
1. Embrace Feedback
Get feedback from your new and old customers. This should not be a one-time process but a constant task. Call up, email, or message, and ask for feedback. Record user interviews to gain a clear insight into what is going wrong. Provide live chat support for immediate resolution of issues. Introduce the happiness score to see how happy your customers are. Lastly, ensure your customers that issues will be resolved at earliest if there are any.
2. Improve Based On Feedback
Once you have the collective data of feedback, analyze if you need to make changes in your product. For instance, if you offer Spa services and customers feel that the environment is dull, then you need to ensure a lively aura. This is called acting upon the feedback, and if you skip this step, there is no point in getting customer feedback.
Tip: You can also start a loyalty program to help your customers return. This may include some reward points on every purchase which can be redeemed after a certain limit.
3. Offer Special Deals
Every business has some customers who have been with the business from the starting. These customers are generally termed as VIP customers. Launch a deal for VIP users. Personally contact them, take feedback, and offer special deals. Help them come back to you with happy faces. The strategy will not only retain the VIP customers but also help you increase your credibility.
4. Personalized Follow-Up
Follow-up is a necessary step often skipped by the sales team. There should be regular follow-up sessions to ensure that your customers like your services and products. You can adjust your strategies and product delivery according to these follow-ups in future.
Use Continuity Programs
These programs include customer feedback surveys, email surveys, QR code scan that asks customer feedback, email marketing campaigns, and other ways of gaining user feedback. It helps in increasing customer retention ratio, acquiring honest feedback of the product and services, and providing enhanced services to customers. Nowadays, some physical stores take instant feedback while making payment. They ask the users about the purchase and the experience.
In the end, both lead generation and customer retention are about users. Hence, follow these tips for lead generation and customer retention to increase your list of happy users.