All good things come to an end. So does the coverage of my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ).
The chapter “Customer Information Management” is the last one in the book and so we will close this reoccurring series with this one as well:
Information management has always been crucial to business strategy and learning to determine its value always underestimated.
One of these things constantly neglected is customer relationship management (CRM) and the information included therein.
The information has always been around and has been taken more of less seriously by the company owners even though it is very important to the success of a business.
This is immediate information and its value lies within the possibility of increasing sales simply by utilizing the information we hold about our customers.
The first and foremost important information are their contact details with which we can establish points of contact. These contact details would be – in order of costs involved in contacting – postal address, phone, and email.
Email, as pointed out above, will be the cheapest and thus most effective form of contact. Yet mailings are always a hard way to go because your customers have to opt-in or give their permission to be mailed.
The emails you send them should not consist of direct sales pitches, but rather of sales pitches hidden inside seemingly valuable information you give them for free.
You have to gain their trust on the signup page for the newsletter, and you have to explicitly point out that you will not spam, harass, or otherwise misuse their email address. Plus of course, you have to mention what differentiates YOUR newsletter from all the other ones, of which most are “evil”.
This will increase your chances that they will send this email they got from you to a friend who will then again sign up for your newsletter because it’s information their being fed with instead of sales pitches (of which they probably get hundreds a week).
Although I very well know the power of conventional mailings and phone acquisitions, I will not go into further detail because these topics are not really web related and go too far off topic.
Down the line, and if your business is ever up for sale in case of a merger or acquisition, the amount of information you hold about your customers and competitors will significantly improve the position you will be negotiating from.
The reason for this is that buyer of your company will be able to get business started immediately instead of having to search for new prospects, buy new leads lists, etc.
Another important thing to mention is that measures like these will significantly increase customer loyalty to your brand.
This will make sales way easier to begin with because if your sales staff can prepare themselves for a sales talk by reading the customer’s purchase history, maybe even preferences, chances of closing the sale will skyrocket simply because the customer has a better feeling.
The reason I asked the question when your customer’s daughter is turning 18 in the tag-line is because of an assignment I had a while back.
A car dealership for luxury automobiles wanted to increase sales.
It’s not like they were struggling but the CRM (customer relationship management system) they had in place was not really able to handle all the information they needed to increase sales.
Amongst others, I had them add fields to their customer database, which would capture the names and birthdays of their customer’s kids because of an experience I had while on the contract.
The daughter of a loyal customer came waltzing in one day as we were in a meeting. She was the typical spoiled brat yet her father was a wealthy personality, as most of their customers were.
As she started to look around the most prized models this dealership had to offer, it struck me…
“Since most of their customers were of that social class, and it is fairly easy to get your hands on the information of their kids names and birthdays during a sales talk, why not use this opportunity, save this information in the CRM and do a follow up with a presents basket and the offer for a free test drive around the time the kid turns 18 and get their drivers license?”
And this is only one of the things I worked out for them with the consequence that they not only drastically increased sales but also went way up in terms of customer satisfaction, which made them the number one dealership in that country.
So you see that the customer relationship management is a very important aspect of generating (e-) business and can be integrated into simple and easy to use web platforms.
Of course, everyone would be doing it if it were that simple. And like almost everywhere, we have a bottleneck. In this case we have the problem of convincing the sales staff to feed the CRM with the information you need to get this whole system off the ground because there is no immediate increase of profit for them.
I hope that you’ve not only learned a lot and gotten the chance to obtain a copy of my book but also had some fun reading through the lines I put together.
I don’t want to conclude this post without mentioning again that you please don’t hastily try to put together a web campaign by yourself. The reason is obvious as it is simple: there are professionals like myself you have a profound amount of knowledge about the topics we have touched in the last couple of weeks and who can help you to achieve leadership or polepositions on the web.
It would take years for someone to acquire this knowledge and a few more years to figure out which instruments work together how.
This brings be to the closing words for this post: if you intend to start an eBusiness campaign keep in mind that the instruments we have learned about are only successful if they are fitted together properly. No one instrument is going to significantly boost your business.
In that context – and if you haven’t done so – please buy my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) and read it closely to boost your business.
Lars
