How to TARGET your Ideal Customers for Retention and Repeat Sales

Marketing? Check. Conversion? Check. Sales? Check.

At this point in the game – when a customer commits and purchases a product or service – many organisations pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

 

But the truth is that the buyer journey isn’t over yet. Far from it.

To really get the most value from your efforts, and from your customers, you need to consider aftersales care as a part of the funnel.

You need to create an effective sales handoff template.

This should target high-value customers to drive success, maintain relationships, retain loyalty, and perhaps most importantly, generate repeat business. 

 

 

What is the sales handoff?

 

In digital marketing, the term ‘handoff’ is often used to refer to the handoff of a prospect from the marketing team to the sales team.

But there’s another type of handoff that’s equally important, yet often overlooked: the handoff from the sales team to the customer success team.

Your customer success team takes responsibility for nurturing the customer after they’ve made a purchase, helping to draw that customer back into the funnel when they’re ready.

So which customers should you target?

 

 

Can you measure the lifetime value of your customers?

 

Very few – if any – businesses will have the time and resources needed to fully support and nurture aftersales relationships with each and every customer.

So it’s important to know where to place your focus; who to prioritise and target.

Ultimately, you need to be asking yourself which customers are most likely to keep bringing you value. And you can figure this out with the CLV model. 

The CLV – or customer lifetime value – model is essentially a scoring system.

It ranks customers by the predicted value they’ll bring to a business over the course of their ‘lifetime’; the time they’re involved with the organisation.

‘Value’, of course, is subjective.

Perhaps you consider value to be how much a customer spends per transaction, how often they visit your website, how many times they share your content on social media, or something else.

Once you know what value means to you, you can assign CLV scores to your customers and easily see which segments are worth targeting after a sale.

 

Why is targeting so important?

 

Let’s say you’ve been driving your hard work and efforts into positioning your brand as a solution to your customers’ problems, reaching out to potential leads, designing attractive offers, monetising your activities, and optimising your campaigns.

You’ll already know just how much goes into acquiring new customers.

When you’ve made a sale, you have a customer that’s already demonstrated that they’re willing to go through the buyer journey with you.

They’ve already demonstrated that they’re interested in what you’re offering, and they’ve shown that they’re capable of both converting and committing. 

What you have is a ready-made potential customer who doesn’t need to be nurtured once again through the awareness or consideration stages. They come in right at the bottom of the funnel. 

Unfortunately, even though you may have driven a lot of resources into building strong relationships with customers prior to closing a deal, strong pre-sales relationships don’t always translate to strong post-sales relationships.

You need to actively nurture the customer through this stage of the journey to reduce the aftersales churn rate, and turn a one-time customer into a lifelong fan of your brand.

 

 

3 ways to turn customers into fans

 

Although there are many different ways that you can choose to nurture the aftersales customer relationship, there are three highly effective areas that customer success teams should focus on:

 

1. Aftercare services

 

Do you offer aftercare services for the customers who buy from you?

A buyer is unlikely to become a repeat customer if they don’t feel comfortable or confident using the product or service they’ve purchased.

There must be some form of aftercare service that enables them to find the information they need, build their confidence, and eradicate this barrier to success.

Some businesses like to create online knowledge bases, or publish guides that enable and empower the customer to ‘self-serve’.

 

2. Customer exclusives

 

What’s to stop a customer from switching to a competitor in the future?

This is something that appears challenging to avoid, but it can be very simple.

You need to give customers a reason to stick around; a reason why they don’t want to spend their time transitioning through someone else’s sales funnel.

The easiest way to do this is to make exclusive offers.

Do you have products or services dedicated to existing customers, like add-ons or premium features? If not, then this is something that’s worth considering.

 

3. Communication

 

The final way to turn customers into fans? Just good old-fashioned communication.

Do you keep in touch regularly with your existing customers after they buy from you? If not, why not?

Communication keeps your business in the mind of the customer.

It also demonstrates a dedication to helping them in the future, and to ensuring they’re getting the most value from the product or service they purchased.

Email marketing plays a huge role here, and can help you maintain a connection even outside the sales window.

 

At My Cloud Media we celebrate our 10 year anniversary this year.

In my time running the business I have delivered 100's of digital projects for clients large and small. Here are my key observations focusing on our newly developed PROMOTE formula: Position - Reach - Offer - Monetise - Optimise - Target - Engage.

 

1. Successful businesses know how to POSITION their products and services to solve their customer's problems.

2. Building familiarity with the right potential customers takes time, however, you can use a few key tried and tested digital strategies to REACH your audience in quick and measurable ways.

3. A good lead generation and growth marketing strategy must always include an unbeatable OFFER; a proposition that’s going to connect with casual visitors, and really make them want to stick around.

4. By taking the best approaches to boost your conversion rate, you’ll be able to MONETISE your lead generation and digital marketing efforts.

5. You need to OPTIMISE your website and social media output to ensure you’re creating content that your buyer wants.

6. Great businesses TARGET their customers for retention and repeat sales.

7. Successful businesses encourage their audience to continue to ENGAGE with their brand by giving you reviews and referrals.

 

If you would like to explore these principles in more detail, I have created a free scorecard for you to benchmark your performance and identify clear areas to help you grow your business.

 

Take our free test to understand how your well your business targets customers to drive lead generation and sales growth for your products and services.