In our inbound marketing series, I've explained how creating great content can have a positive impact on your lead acquisition process. The next step in your marketing strategy is to strengthen your retention process and make your customers happy.
You've turned your opportunities into customers and provided the product or service they were looking for, but the job isn't over yet. By reviewing your data (from your CRM, website analytics and customer preferences), you'll be able to go further - efficiently allocating your resources and encouraging your customers to continue their journey with your brand.
That's why you should do all you can to build a long term relationship between your brand and your customers. These three marketing tactics will help you to:
delight your customers with smart content
engage with your customers
turn your customers into brand ambassadors
Provide the perfect experience
Part of a customer-centric strategy is considering people as unique and aiming to delight them. By giving them the best possible experience across all channels, you'll increase your chance to influence in their purchase decision journey.
Why is this important?
On the one hand, you increase the value and relevancy of your brand when you deliver the right message. On the other hand, you show your customers that you care about them.
One of the numerous ways to do this is by providing them additional products or services such as free gifts or even smart content.
As a software company, we at Odoo know how difficult it can be for customers to take a step into an environment they're unfamiliar with. That's why we've introduced onboarding in our CRM software, so users can quickly and easily understand all the essential bits, including the functions and how to organize their sales team. We provide them with comprehensive tools so they can set their goals, KPIs, organize their sales flow and much more.
This is an example of how to delight your customers with smart content, which is not just commercial content, but value added content your brand can provide to solve customers' main pain points.
To create this kind of tool we had to know our customers. In addition to data collected using our analytics, we also interviewed some customers to better understand their needs.
Meet, talk and engage with your audience
"Let us always meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the beginning of love" - Mother Teresa
It may be unusual to quote a saint when talking about marketing, but she's right! We increased brand loyalty by creating regular events to engage with our audience.
Why is this important?
You give your company a human face and this allows your customer to connect more easily with your brand.
For a fun and convenient event, why not try hosting a business breakfast where people can learn while having a chat around a buffet. Here you combine an appealing factor (food, networking) and a nurturing element (insightful conference) around your brand. This kind of action helps you to gain more authority when delivering the insightful message. In other words, you have successfully built on your company's expertise and gained trust as an influencer and a key source of information.
Another example is the event we organize every year for our community - the Odoo Experience. During three days of conferences, special events and workshops our customers, partners and anyone interested in Odoo all come together and have the opportunity to meet with us and each other. People come from all over the world to be a part of the event. We successfully bring together 2,000 professionnals and spread the word about Odoo with:
30k+ online viewers on Youtube
16k+ social engagements
Let the world know how happy your customers are
You first grabbed their attention when you attracted these strangers, then you have gained their trust when you successfully sold them the product or service they were looking for. Now, these happy customers will be more eager to be loyal to your brand and share their happiness, becoming the best brand ambassadors ever.
Why is this important?
Social validation is an important asset to trigger sales. Potential customers trust their relatives and, among other factors, Google uses social metrics to rank your website on SERPs.
You can help your customer spread the word about your brand by offering, for instance, free credits. Odoo has created a Google AdWords optimization tool called AdSpike. To reward existing users and increase the customer base, we offer to each user $25 in credits for every referred person. The user only has to share their performance report with pre-defined content.
As you can see, these examples are a perfect mix of digital incentives and real life actions. It's always important to keep maintaining interaction with your user base or you risk losing it.
These examples come from my own experience at Odoo of delighting customers in their purchase decision journey. If you use the same tactics to delight your customers, feel free to share this post. Or if you have any other suggestions, just tweet me.
Scaling your business with inbound marketing (4/4)