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Tag: Customer Leads

  • Why & When Customer Lifecycle Automation is Critical in Your Business | Entrepreneur

    Why & When Customer Lifecycle Automation is Critical in Your Business | Entrepreneur

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    Your business needs more customers, but you’ve encountered a roadblock. You can’t spend more money on advertising unless you get more customers, but getting more customers requires more marketing dollars — and the cycle continues. This is where lifecycle automation can help.

    First, let’s get some clarity on what this means. While automation is using technology to perform tasks or processes without human intervention, lifecycle automation refers to automating and optimizing customer interactions at every stage of their journey throughout an entire product or service’s lifecycle (e.g., from acquisition and onboarding to engagement and retention). Lifecycle automation encompasses a broader range of activities and stages compared to general automation and is designed to enrich the customer experience and maximize business outcomes.

    Sounds pretty powerful, right? It is — and yet it’s also one of the tools most consistently underused by small businesses. Here’s why it’s important and when you can get the most from it.

    Related: How to Navigate to the Next Phase of Your Business — 3 Tips as You Scale

    Why does customer lifecycle automation matter?

    If you’re not yet convinced that customer experience has a clear business impact, maybe this will do the trick. Research has found that companies that invest in improving their customer experience have seen, on average, a 42% improvement in customer retention, a 33% improvement in customer satisfaction and a 32% increase in cross-selling and up-selling.

    Those are some compelling statistics, giving you all the reasons you need to prioritize customer experience. Lifecycle automation fits into this by ensuring every customer gets a personalized, excellent customer experience in a predictable, trackable way.

    For example, your team won’t forget to follow up if you automate sending notes reminding prospects to schedule an appointment. Or, after a purchase, you can automate sending an invoice to your customer and set up automatic reminders to pay it. After you’ve delivered a project or service, you can also automate review requests or recommendations for another purchase.

    When applied well, lifecycle automation can increase sales without increasing advertising costs and free your team to focus on more important tasks.

    Lifecycle automation has three phases: Collect Leads, Convert Clients and Create Fans.

    Related: 6 Ways to Exceed Your Customer’s Expectations Just With Good Manners

    1. Collecting leads

    In the collect leads phase, you’ll aim to get the attention of your ideal audience and capture their contact information so you have permission to follow up with them. This includes targeting people (by criteria like interests, behaviors, demographics or location), attracting them with great content (e.g., videos, ebooks, infographics or blog posts) and capturing their information (through a web form, often in exchange for a free consultation or premium content).

    For example, one independent pharmacy we have worked with grew revenue by 20%, despite facing big competitors, by engaging patients through automation. Their Collect Leads stage strategy involved setting up an iPad in the lobby to gather walk-in information, which was delivered to their CRM via a landing page with a form. This made it possible to follow up with people who didn’t become customers immediately.

    Related: 5 Ways Businesses Can Get Traffic and Generate Leads

    2. Converting clients

    In the convert clients phase, you’ll make your product or service the obvious choice when the leads you’ve attracted are ready to buy. You can start by engaging them through an automated campaign, offering an irresistible deal, closing the sale and using automation to communicate next steps.

    The pharmacy mentioned above succeeded in this phase by implementing an automated welcome campaign. They also segmented their list to nurture relationships through emails personalized to customers’ medical conditions, such as diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular issues.

    Related: 6-Step Plan to Convert Leads Into Sales

    3. Creating fans

    Finally, there’s the create fans phase, often overlooked by small businesses. You can turn this phase into a goldmine by delivering on your customer commitments, providing additional value that delights customers and encouraging referrals by creating incentives for customers and partners.

    Before implementing lifecycle automation, the independent pharmacy referenced above had around 15 to 20 Google reviews. Now, they have close to 500 reviews due to consistent follow-up, and the highly personalized service automation allows them to deliver to their community.

    When you set up lifecycle automation, you’ll never lose a lead, and each customer will get the right messaging to move forward in their customer journey no matter what stage they’re in.

    When you need lifecycle automation most

    It’s never too early to set up lifecycle automation, but it works best when you’re starting to see revenue growth in your business. You’ll see the most impact if you already have a sizable contact list and a reliable way to ensure it keeps growing (e.g., a solid lead generation strategy).

    As you can imagine, lifecycle automation becomes crucial when you have more customers than you feel you can serve and respond to individually. When your business starts losing potential customers because you’re not getting back to them fast enough or creating an accidental bottleneck that’s holding your team back from moving sales forward, lifecycle automation is a must, not a maybe.

    Lifecycle automation allows you to invest time that would be spent on one-off communications to customers in things you most enjoy doing — serving customers, developing new services, or spending time with friends and family. For entrepreneurs who want to grow their businesses while also making the most of their time, customer lifecycle automation is the way.

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    Clate Mask

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  • Why Spending the Most Really Does Win the Most Customers | Entrepreneur

    Why Spending the Most Really Does Win the Most Customers | Entrepreneur

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    “Whoever can spend the most, wins.” This is an adage in marketing that happens to be 100% true. If your business is prepared to meet the ever-increasing customer acquisition cost in today’s hyper-competitive digital and traditional media landscape, you are well on your way to dominating the market.

    However, this does not mean that you can simply throw money around willy-nilly and hope to get the results you want. Being willing to spend big to win big is great, but it’s only half of the battle. You also need to be strategic about how you spend your money to win over the competition.

    Related: Why the Best Days of Digital Media Are Ahead of Us — and Other Trends for 2023

    Companies with deep pockets that can spend more to acquire a customer will get more customers. If this sounds like you, keep reading to learn the most effective ways to put “whoever can spend the most, wins” into practice.

    1. Invest in the right digital media channels

    Spending on digital advertising is expected to exceed $600 billion in 2023. Your business needs to be heavily invested in this space if you want to maximize your market share.

    Of course, where you spend your advertising budget is an important consideration. Google Ads provides multiple robust pay-per-click campaign options (e.g., text and display ads). With Google Local Services Ads, businesses in select industries can dominate local search results for professional services. You will likely need to invest in social media ads on one or more platforms, too.

    All of these channels are highly competitive and, therefore, expensive. However, once you determine how customers find your business (i.e., via organic and paid search, social, etc.), you can start spending on digital ads that will maximize your visibility and drive customers to you over the competition.

    2. Don’t ignore traditional media

    Investing in traditional advertising (such as television, billboards, etc.) is still well worth your time and money if it means reaching your target customers on a massive scale. Mass media is a tried-and-true strategy for bombarding the market with your message. Not everyone will convert, but spending the money to make your name inescapable will drive far more customers than a limited investment in traditional channels.

    We see this with legal advertising. The law firms you see all the time on TV, on bus benches, on billboards, etc., are counting on the millions of dollars they spend to drive multi-million-dollar cases.

    It might seem strange to invest in traditional media when digital has taken over the space previously occupied by television and other strategies. However, considering that you are likely thinking of a local law firm’s slogan or phone number, there is no disputing the effectiveness of a major investment in TV and other traditional advertising venues.

    3. Invest in your employees

    Relationships are a cornerstone of marketing. While much of the discussion centers on engaging customers digitally, you should never underestimate the importance of hiring customer-facing employees, training them to be the “face” of your business, and empowering them to bring you new customers.

    Related: 4 Ways to Provide Excellent Customer Service

    This goes beyond fully staffing your office to handle phone calls and emails. Depending on your industry, it might mean hosting community events, wining and dining business prospects, and more.

    Customers are the lifeblood of your business. You don’t want to cheap out when it comes to hiring customer success managers, event planners, and other employees who can take your business to the next level.

    4. Define your brand

    Inconsistency is one of the greatest dangers when making a massive investment in marketing. Although you can distribute your message across seemingly endless advertising channels, your return on investment (not to mention your market dominance) will suffer if the message is unfocused and inconsistent.

    Before making a big splash and getting more customers than your competitors, you need to nail down your brand identity and key messaging. The brands people love have a clear identity and a consistent message. They also know their customers and tailor their marketing and advertising to maximize sales.

    You don’t have to be a multinational corporation to dominate your market. However, you have to understand your unique offering and consistently communicate to customers why they should buy from you over anyone else.

    Related: Define Your Brand Identity in 3 Steps

    5. Follow the money

    As the saying goes, “Fortune favors the bold.” The businesses with the money and the mindset to shoot for the moon and take the biggest piece of the pie are the ones that typically find the greatest success.

    However, your dollars must be tempered with sense. You must carefully identify your target audience by age, demographic, income, buying habits and other key characteristics. In addition, you need to understand what your competitors offer and how you can stand out. Finally, you must drill down on the geographic area you want to target.

    Related: 5 Ways Small Business Owners Can Embrace Rapid Digital Change to Get Closer to Their Customers

    With all these components in place, you can develop an intelligent strategy for maximizing the business you gain from a substantial marketing and advertising spend. Both digital platforms and third-party vendors should provide detailed reporting on how your money is being spent, the results of each campaign, and your return on investment.

    You won’t achieve dramatic growth if you are overly concerned about being cost-effective. However, a strategic approach that relies on data and tracking only ensures that you spend money wisely. This reduces the customer acquisition cost and results in higher profits.

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    Sean Allen

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