4 Ways to Improve Customer Retention Rates Using Salesforce

Have you heard about the 80-20 rule that is considered a golden rule for running a profitable business? According to this rule, 20 percent of your existing customers tend to bring 80 percent of your business as long as they derive complete satisfaction out of the products and services offered by you. While you might have spent a lot of time and effort in generating leads and finally converting them into paying customers, all your efforts can go down the drain if your competitors swipe them away right under your nose. To ensure long-term growth, it becomes imperative for you to lay equal focus on customer retention along with acquisition.

As per statistics shared by HBR - an increase in customer retention rates by five percent can increase profits by around 25 to 95 percent.

This is where the need for a robust Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) like Salesforce arises. Over the years, Salesforce has emerged as a significant tool that has been leveraged by businesses to provide superior value to every customer. Offering a large number of rich features and functionalities along with ample scope for scaling, this amazing CRM system has become an industry favorite for hundreds of companies across the globe.

Let's take a quick look at the multiple ways in which Salesforce could be leveraged for boosting customer retention:

Collating Your Customer Data in One Place: One of the most compelling ways of turning your relationship with a customer into a meaningful one is by resolving their problems in a timely manner. While this task might appear to be simple at the onset, it's indeed a tedious one. As different teams (Sales, marketing, etc.) within an organization use various tools and applications for gathering data, business or data siloes start aggregating leading to decreased efficiency. By integrating all the systems and data centrally using a Salesforce integration tool, a complete and single view of every customer can be achieved. This will not just keep you and your customers on the same page but will also result in improved customer retention rates.

Personalizing Customer Data: A great way of retaining your existing customers is to make them feel special and valued. This can be achieved by personalizing communication with them. Since each and every activity of your customers are kept in records, communicating with them at a personal level becomes easier. You can leverage the Salesforces' Pardot Dynamic content tool to customize the content of emails, forms, landing pages, etc. to provide them with a great experience.

Track Customer Interaction: If your customer hasn't kept in touch for quite some time (say 6 months), it's quite possible that you lose that customer forever. Rather than investing your sales and marketing dollars in acquiring new customers, it is in your interest to woo inactive customers. By searching and sorting date fields present in the Salesforce CRM, you can track customer interaction in real-time. The data gathered from these interactions can be used to draw insights regarding customer behavior and preferences. This will help the marketing teams to take necessary action to entice them back.

Re-connect with Inactive Customers: According to a research report shared by MailChimp, inactive subscribers are more likely to make a follow-up purchase than non-subscribers. So it would be a mistake if you don't pursue them. Salesforce could be leveraged to track the frequency at which a customer seeks follow-up. Apart from this, the powerful CRM system could be leveraged to track every touchpoint and generate a follow-up report that displays a list of customers that wish to be followed-up.

To Wrap-up:

Given the cost and effort involved in acquiring new customers, businesses cannot afford to solely rely on customer acquisition strategies for increasing revenue or ensuring long-term success. When paired with customer retention strategies, businesses can achieve sustainable growth. However, to personalize customer experiences, understand and add value to their needs, businesses need access to real-time customer data from multiple sources. Salesforce has emerged as a real business solution for companies struggling to tackle the issue of retaining their existing customers by providing them with centralized access to data. In other words, businesses can now look forward to a solution that will remove the roadblocks to their customer retention journey.