What are the best ways to keep existing customers happy? Our guide outlines strategies to ensure your existing clients stay loyal to your brand.
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Existing customers are more important than new customers! In this article, you will learn what consequences can occur if you do not “look after” your customers and what opportunities you should use to keep existing customers happy.
Existing customer vs. New customer
“Why wander far away when the good is so close.”
This old wisdom could also have been devised for existing customer management. Many companies focus only on the constant acquisition of new prospects, so that they often forget or neglect their existing customers. They offer rewards, discounts and special bundles when new customers decide to buy or sign up. And what happens to the existing customers? You feel fooled, neglected and ignored.
“What the heck, we already have them. They don’t run away from us that fast. “
It may be that customers do not change providers so quickly just because they feel neglected. Often, however, there is a bad feeling that the attitude towards the company has a negative impact and, for example, ensures that the next new customer campaign of your competition will make the customer weak and you will lose them. But even if you keep the customer on paper, it influences their repurchase rate and their recommendation behavior.
Definition: existing customer
An existing customer is a customer who has already bought or booked from you. So you’ve already managed to convince this customer of your company and your offer. If this customer has a new need, you basically have a good chance of getting back on track. The last purchase / order / booking is no guarantee that the customer will buy from you again.
What are the possible consequences if you don’t keep existing customers happy?
Consequences that can occur if you do not “look after” your customers:
- The customer becomes approachable for the competition and possibly attentive to his offer.
- The customer no longer buys from the original provider.
- The customer talks badly about his original provider.
And aren’t those even the worst consequences for the provider? Granted, these episodes are bad. But they are only the ultimate consequence of a “falling apart”. It is the “active consequences” of the unhappy customer relationship. But there are also “passive consequences”, namely that which does not happen. In this customer relationship, the provider misses:
- After sales, up- and cross-selling sales
- New customer relationships and sales through active recommendations from the customer
- Findings from communication and customer behavior
So it is definitely worthwhile not to lose focus on existing customers. The only question is: how do you do it? And what are the challenges in managing existing customers?
Challenges to focusing on existing customers
Often customers do not even know what else you are offering and do not ask about them. Another challenge is the changed buying process. Customers are becoming more and more “unfaithful” and they search, decide and buy differently than before. And who should look after the existing customers? This is usually not a problem for A customers, but who takes care of B and C customers? Calling these customers once a year, sending a company brochure and / or sending a promotional gift for Christmas is not sufficient or effective. Companies need to know their existing customers and their “business”, provide them with relevant information and actively support them until their next purchase.
Opportunities to to keep existing customers happy
If you know your existing customers, their business environment and especially their pain points and challenges really well (desired customer profiling / buyer persona profile), you can set up processes for automated but individual communication and offer content (content marketing) that is relevant to your desired customers , helpful or entertaining. With these customer development processes (nurturing processes) you not only stay in contact with your existing customers, but also learn more about the interests and behavior of your customers (progressive profiling).
Depending on which goal you want to achieve, you can set up appropriate nurturing processes:
- Wake Up Nurture: reactivation of customers
- After sales: sales of training, maintenance and consumables
- Repurchase: Further sales of products / services that have already been purchased
- Up-Selling: Selling higher quality products / services
- Cross-Selling: Selling additional suitable offers
- Trade fair follow-up
- Recommendation and / or reference
Privacy
In order to access the information you offer, your customer must give you permission to send him information (opt-in). Especially after the changes to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on May 25, 2018, this is an important aspect of your customer communication. Because with every customer who accepts your content offer, you increase the pool of customers whom you can address regularly with relevant information, and this is an important way to keep existing customers happy.
Another advantage is that your customers practically qualify themselves in these processes. With the appropriate qualification models (lead scoring), you measure the “sales maturity” of your customers for repurchase and control the transfer (lead routing) from marketing (marketing automation platform) back to your sales department (CRM system).
Questionnaire: Before building your strategy
Before you start building your existing customer management strategy, you should ask yourself a few questions:
- Do you even have enough existing customers?
- How many existing customers can you theoretically reach?
- In what “technical condition” are these addresses?
- Address structure
- Address quality
- What is the legal situation of your data like? Do you have a valid optin?
- What is the value of an existing customer to you? Worthwhile customer experience?
- How big is your up- and cross-selling potential?
- Which of your existing customers would you like to reach? Desired existing customers?
- Who do you want to sell what?
- Do you only sell to one contact person or one position in a customer company?
- How many contacts are you interested in with your existing customers? If z. For example, if the production manager in the customer company is your customer, could other contacts (heads of technology, operations, development, quality management, etc.) also become customers?
Recommendations for action
Here you will find a recommendation for the development of an existing customer management strategy:
- Start with a plan and strategy! – Sales and marketing (possibly also service and product management) should sit at the table.
- Define who you want to reach. The classic definition of the target group alone is not enough! Define your desired customers with the buyer persona concept.
- Create relevant and attractive content for your desired customers – guidelines, checklists, white papers, eBooks, etc.
- Use your website, your company blog and the touchpoints that are relevant for your desired customers to build reach and distribute your content.
- Make sure that you convert anonymous website visitors to “known” prospects. Exchange your content for the data (name, email) and the opt-in of the interested party.
- Think about how you can develop your customers with relevant content through the sales funnel. To do this, set up the corresponding nurturing campaigns.
- Define in your SLAs (Service Level Agreements) who, what, when and how has to contribute to mutual success in your existing customer process.
- Develop your scoring model and define how you evaluate existing customers and their activities and when the customer will be returned from marketing to sales.
- Establish efficient routing in order to prepare your sales staff as best as possible for existing customers and to optimally support potential customers.
- Measure which activities produce which results and optimize the activities accordingly.
