5 Steps to Building a World-Class CRM Customer Retention Strategy

Read time: 5 mins

A good CRM is one of the most important parts of any sales and marketing strategy. It’s central to organising customers and leads and generating new business. With so much riding on it, you need to make sure you’re using it strategically to build and maintain strong, long-lasting customer relationships?

CRMs are great for:

• Personalised communication: CRM systems enable personalised email marketing, alongside SMS and social media interactions.
• Tracking interactions: CRMs track all interactions with customers and Identify key touchpoints in the customer journey and implement personalised interactions at each stage to enhance the customer experience.
• Automated Workflows: They can automate certain customer interaction workflows, such as sending a birthday discount or a follow-up email after a purchase.

While a CRM system is a powerful tool for managing customer relationships and can significantly enhance personalised customer interactions, executing a comprehensive strategy often involves integrating other technology. 

Where you might need additional tools:

• Advanced marketing automation: While CRMs can handle basic automation, specialised marketing automation platforms offer more advanced features like complex multi-step campaigns, dynamic content, and detailed behavioural triggers.
• Website personalization: To personalise website experiences based on CRM data, you may need a website personalization tool that can dynamically alter web content for different visitor segments.
• Going beyond purchasing data: beyond interactions based on sales, CRMs are limited in what they can tell you about your customers. If you want to understand the motivations behind buying decisions, look to advocacy software to give a fuller picture of your customer base and point to where the real, untapped value lies. 
• Social media integration: While CRMs can track social media interactions to some extent, a dedicated social media management tool provides deeper insights and more control over engagements.
• Customer feedback and surveys: To gather and analyse customer feedback efficiently, integrating a dedicated tool for surveys and feedback management can provide more functionalities than a standard CRM might offer.

So while CRMs are a cornerstone of any marketing strategy, you’ll need other tools to get you all the way there. That means your CRM needs to have fantastic integration capabilities so data flows freely between systems, allowing you to build and execute a unified and efficient strategy.

Here’s our 5 steps to developing a CRM strategy integrates with your wider marketing efforts and builds customer retention:

1. Personalised customer interactions

As CRMs are the central hub for interactions with your customers, they contain a wealth of data. You can use this data to understand individual customer preferences, purchase history, and interactions, building personalised  communications strategy tailored to unique customer needs.

The large amount of data they contain makes them the ideal starting point for creating customer segments. You can group customers based on purchase history, behaviour, demographics, etc., allowing you to develop targeted messaging that resonates with each customer segment. 

They’re also a great first port of call for mapping customer journeys. From pre-purchase actions like opening an email or clicking on ads, to selecting or paying for a product, right through to post-purchase activity like order confirmations and follow-up emails, CRMs track and organise all of these interactions. It allows you to identify key moments in the customer journey and create personalised messaging at each of these moments. 

2. Improved customer service

Customer service teams can also make great use of the information CRMs contain, accessing histories and preferences and offering more informed support.

Integrate your CRM with channels like email, phone, chat, and social media to offer consistent omnichannel support. You can also use your CRM to collect feedback and identify common issues and opportunities for improvement that keep your customers satisfied.

3. Proactively engage with customers

Use CRM data to identify signals of customer satisfaction or distress so you can reach out before issues escalate.  Integrating your CRM with other platforms, like Mention Me’s Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform, gives you access to advocacy signals that go beyond purchasing decisions, like if customers are referring friends, sharing on social media, and actively promoting your brand. 

Gathering feedback is another great way to reach out to customers proactively.. This not only provides valuable insights for the brand but also makes customers feel valued and heard. 

Many brands gather Net Promoter Scores, but if you really want to understand customer sentiment, you need to know why they’re giving you positive or negative scores. Mention Me’s Sentiment Analysis capability gathers NPS data and key customer insights in one easy to read dashboard, allowing you to understand what’s driving customer sentiment and allowing you to take action to boost it.

4. Use customer advocacy insights to drive your segmentation strategy

While traditional segmentation focuses on demographics, purchase history, and direct interactions, incorporating customer advocacy insights can significantly enhance your segmentation strategy. Advocacy insights delve into the emotional and psychological drivers of customer behaviour, offering a more nuanced understanding of your customer base. It allows you to:

• Identify advocates: Integrate with advocacy software to identify customers who are not just satisfied but are enthusiastic about your brand. These advocates engage more with your brand, providing valuable feedback, referring new customers, and participating in community discussions. 

• Go beyond purchase data: Incorporate metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), referral rates, and social media engagement into your segmentation strategy. Creating segments that take advocacy data into account helps you more accurately identify and target your brands’ biggest fans. 

• Create more relevant messaging: Tailor your communication and marketing strategies for your advocate segments. Using Extended Customer Revenue data — that shows you the total value of your customer’s purchasing and referral activity — in your segmentation strategy means you can create bespoke campaigns and offers for customers who deliver the most overall revenue.

5. Predictive Analysis

Analyse advocacy data to predict which customers might become brand advocates. By understanding the pathways to advocacy, you can nurture potential advocates through targeted engagements and personalised experiences.

Integrating advocacy software with your CRM also lets you understand in greater detail which of your customers are in danger of churning. Analyse patterns in customer behaviour and use these insights to take preemptive action.

Activate customer advocacy insights to truly boost customer retention

Building a successful CRM strategy involves not only personalised communication, tracking interactions, and automated workflows, but also going beyond what the CRM system can offer. By integrating advanced advocacy software with your CRM, you can break boundaries and discover untapped value in your customer base.. 

For more compelling insights on leveraging customer advocacy and to understand how our Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform can help transform your CRM strategy, taking your customer retention game to the next level: Request a Demo.