| some customer retention ideas |  LEAD MANAGEMENT IS ESSENTIAL | So, you’ve generated your sales leads, qualified them, nurtured them, managed them, and turned them into customers. Don’t stop now! The good news is that the lead nurturing programme you’ve developed can be used for customer retention.
Just change the copy to make it suitable for your customers!
The even better news is that it’s very simple; the costs are minimal and you won’t need extra budget resources!
Retaining customers long-term is most cost-effectively handled by a continuing nurturing programme, similar in many ways to the lead nurturing programme. | | | USING ePARTNER | These are some of our ideas on using ePartner (our eMail marketing system) to nurture, with customer retention in mind:
|  Drip campaigns - drip campaigns are composed of a series of marketing activities that happen in a set sequence and a specified timeframe.
By using ePartner to manage your drip campaigns, you can increase brand awareness through repetition and increase your campaign response rates. | Win/loss surveys – win/loss surveys provide valuable information on what you’re doing right, and more importantly, what you’re doing wrong in your quest to acquire new customers.
By using ePartner to execute win loss surveys, you can capture and analyse feedback that ultimately results in increased ‘close’ rates. | | Welcome campaigns – welcome campaigns can be used to thank customers, deliver training tools, request warranty registration, provide re-order instructions, or even provide ‘cross-sell/up-sell’ information. ePartner offers a comprehensive toolset to develop campaigns that result in a positive impression. | Up-sell, cross-sell - it costs more to acquire a new customer than to sell to an existing customer, but many marketers forget to include up-sell/cross-sell promotions in their marketing plan.
With ePartner, you can execute highly targeted and personalised campaigns - maximising the return on your marketing investments. | Up-sell, cross-sell - it costs more to acquire a new customer than to sell to an existing customer, but many marketers forget to include up-sell/cross-sell promotions in their marketing plan.
With ePartner, you can execute highly targeted and personalised campaigns - maximising the return on your marketing investments. | | Customer satisfaction surveys – customer satisfaction surveys provide a litmus test for organisations to determine if they are on the right track. They can also be used to drive business improvements for long-term success. With ePartner, building, executing and analysing surveys is easy. | | Inactive customer surveys – identify at-risk customers and take steps to re-engage them before they are lost, by executing inactive customer surveys with ePartner. With powerful survey and graphical, real-time reporting capabilities, ePartner helped you gain the one-to-one customer insight needed to retain customers longer. | | Win-back campaigns – you are much more likely to get a sale from a lost or inactive customer than from a prospect. Even with excellent retention strategies in place, you will likely lose customers for reasons outside your control. With ePartner, you can develop personalised win-back campaigns to retain customers longer. | | | A CONTINUOUS PROCESS | Mid- to long-term nurturing should become a continuous, ongoing process applied to every customer, lost order and re-classified lead.
| | | some conclusions on customer retention | | A REMINDER OF THE DEMAND GENERATION PROCESS using the well-known customer adoption life cycle diagram | Lead generation > Lead qualification > Lead nurturing > Lead management > Customer retention
To summarise, lead generation is just that – simply supplying the sales force with a batch of unqualified leads, of which only 20% will turn into orders within six months. Most companies stop there, thinking the job is done.
Demand generation first of all puts those leads through a qualification process, classifying them as ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, or ‘D’ leads. Only the ‘A’ leads are passed onto the sales force.
The ‘B’, ‘C’, and ‘D’ leads are put through a lead nurturing process until they (almost!) inevitably become ‘A’ leads over a period of time.
These new ‘A’ leads are passed on to the sales force, and both the sales force and the prospects are ‘tracked’ - this is ‘lead management’.
If an ‘A’ lead takes longer than expected to close, it’s re-qualified and put back into the lead nurturing system until it eventually re-surfaces as an ‘A’ lead.
The final part of Demand Generation is Customer Retention – the customer is put back into the ongoing nurturing programme.
Demand Generation is a cyclical process, taking leads through the customer ‘life cycle’:
From ’leads,’ to ‘suspects’, to ‘prospects, to ‘customers’, and finally to ‘advocates’.
Remember – the statistics show that your competitors have not latched onto this new strategy yet! | | | | | "it’s very simple; the costs are minimal and you won’t need extra budget resources! " |  | |
| | | "retaining customers long-term is most cost-effectively handled by a continuing nurturing programme, similar in many ways to the lead nurturing programme" | | |
| | | "…A continuous, ongoing process applied to every customer, lost order and re-classified lead…" | | |
| | | "…Remember – the statistics show that your competitors have not latched onto this new strategy yet!…" | | | |
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