Customer success is a methodology that entails predicting customers' problems and questions that might occur and providing solutions to them. This approach aims to lead consumers toward the success and achievement of their end goals. It helps companies drive customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. In this article, we'll get to know why customer success is important, how it works, and how to build a customer success program. We'll also review customer success roles and responsibilities, compare customer success and customer service, and explore the key metrics. Why is customer success important? Today, the majority of successful brands pay great attention to customer success. They strive to understand their customers' needs and desires and anticipate future problems and questions. Companies help consumers attain their goals, resulting in a positive reputation, customer loyalty, high customer retention, and profitability. Statisticssay that72% of companies report customer successto be one of theirmajorpriorities and keys to progress,which is why they focus on its improvement. Assisting clients and taking part in their success means a lot to your customers. As a result, you'll drive customer happiness and satisfaction and reduce churn. If people are satisfied with your company, they will sincerely recommend it to other people.Superb experience and achieving customer goals are excellent reasons to recommenda company and refer friends. Remember,buyers can help you increase your customer base when they are happy and satisfied, making your revenue grow. That's why you should manage your clients' inquiries, analyze customer portfolios to improve their experience, and help achievebuyers'goals. Now that you know whycustomer success is crucial, it's time to find out how it works to manage the process properly. How does customer success work? If you want todelivercustomer success effectively, you need tohave a tool, team, and strategy. Select a tool or software. Choosea solution that suits your team's needs best to attain healthy relationships and establish seamless communication with customers. Search for your perfect software to communicate with clients when they need help and lead them to success. As a result, you'll get happy customers who stay loyal. Assemble a team of professionals. To lead customers toward success and assist them during every step of the process, you'll need a team. Look forfriendly and supportiveprofessionalswhoactually like your company and understand the products or services you offer.They should be able toreact fast and provide solutions. Once you have a team, conduct training to ensure that your success reps know all the peculiarities of your products or services. Whenyour company starts to grow, you can increaseyour customer success team size. Develop a strategy. You can use customer success strategiesbased on the solution you offer and customers' needs. However, you still need to gather a team, select your tools, and define customers' goals andyour company's expectations. Make sure that every team member is aware of each step of your customer success strategy. It's time to jump into the next section to explore the duties excellent customer success reps should perform. Customer Success Roles and Responsibilities Answering emails and managing tickets aren't the only responsibilities of customer success managers. Since customers' needs and goals are a priority for any company, a team of professionals who will manage theseresponsibilitieseffectively is anecessity. Customer success representatives are responsible for making a company and a customer gain value. Let's review more customer success reps' responsibilities: onboard new customers; call clients and assist them whenever they need help; provide training to clients so that they can get the most out ofa product or service; build healthy, strong relationships with customers; checkif a productmeets customers' needs; implement innovations to bring customers to success and ensure value; establish trust, transparency, and credibility; pay attention to customer feedback to eliminate problems andenhancecustomer experience; act as a mediator between a customer and a company; offer clients to upgrade theirsubscription plans; track clients whosesubscription plans are about toexpireand offer to renew them. Now that you understand customer success team responsibilities better, it's time to proceed to the difference between customer success andcustomer service. These two terms are often used interchangeably, yet they have distinctfeatures thathelp reach different targets. Customer Success vs. Customer Service People often confuse customer success and customer service— what are they, and how do they differ? Let's take a look at each term in more detail to figure it out. Customer success is a proactive process. It means that reps prevent customers from facing any problems that might arise. Customer success teams bring value to clients and strive to help them reach theirprimary goals. To do it, team members collectcustomer data and develop specific strategies, aimingto lead customers toward success.These teams focus on delivering value, increasing satisfaction, achieving goals, and providing a seamless experience. Customer service is a reactive process. It indicates that customer support takes action only whena problem arises. Once issues appear, customer support reps search for solutions to help their customers. However, they don't prevent these problems. Customer service entails solving issues and assisting with processes that might be confusing for clients. In a nutshell, customer success is about preventing customers from having any issues with a product in the future and reaching success, whereas customer service is about solving a problem once it arises at a specific moment. The difference is clear now, so let's have a look at the process of creating a customer success program. It'll help youbuild your strategy more efficiently. Howdo you build a customer success program? Thereare numerous reasonsbehind customer success programs— a low number of customers who churn out, the opportunity to upsell, higher profitability, and more loyal clients are just a few of them. If you are interested in making your business more profitable and efficient, consider the following steps to create your plan. Define customers' goals. Understandingbuyers' ultimate goals is the key to your team's success. Thus, you should learn what success means to your customers to create an effective program. Ensure you have a well-developed sales workflow tohelpidentifyclients' goals and align them with your product. Onceyou meet your leads'expectations, they become customers. Afterward,your customer success teamstarts assisting your new consumers. Identify the key metrics. Besides customers' goals, pay attention to the essential metrics. With their help, you'll be able to know the health of each account. The metrics you choose to assess each account depend on the product you provide to these users. Train your customer success team. Remember, a strong team of professionals can do wondersfor your business. Since interactions betweenyourreps and customers play an essential role in your brandgrowth, choose your employees carefully. Friendly andempathetic customer success managers can bring in new clients, but cold andgrumpy ones can scare customers away. Ensure consistency in product and customer success teams. Product and customersuccess teams should work hand in hand to develop a product people will appreciate and benefit fromand ensure consistency when communicating with customers. Sincethese teams often have different intentions and ideas, it can cause several problems. That's why you should be ready to prevent such issues and ensure seamless communication between product and customer success teams. Shareyour company's goals with them and use tools that suit both departments. Search for the right tool. Customer success is a popular methodology among different businesses, so you can find multiple solutionsto keep an eye on your key metrics. There are many customer success tools thatcan meet your key needs, including ChurnZero, Planhat, Whatfix, and many more. Gather customer feedback. This step is mandatory since you'll be able to get a clear picture of customer satisfaction with your product and company in general. The net promoter score will help you assess whether your customers will recommend your brand to other people. This way, you'll have insights into your future steps. Now that you know how to build a customer success program, let's walk you through the key metrics. These indicators will allow you to evaluate your customer success managers'performance. 5 Key Customer Success Metrics To find out whether your customer success strategy is effective, you need tokeep tabs ontheprimary metrics that help measure it. Customer health score. Thismetric helps determine whether customers are healthy or likely to churn. Todiscover whether a customer is healthy, you need to evaluate how often they use your product, how many users from one accountuse it, andwhat features they prefer to implement. A customer who logs in often has a healthy account. Still, if only a few users implement your product, it means that this account is at risk. Thisis a sign thatyour customer doesn't receive enough value to achieve their key goals. Customer churn rate. This metric helps instantly point outcompany representatives who establish strong and trusting relationships with clients and those who don't. A goodcustomer success rep will have a lower churn rate. Building healthy relationshipsenables you to make more people stay loyal toyour brand. Net promoter score (NPS). Ask your customers if they would recommend your company to their friends to evaluate your NPS. However, before doing it, make sure that your companyprovides the best customer experience. Check whether your clients are satisfied with your product and feel content about your customer support. Remember, relationships and communication with your brand's reps will influence their responses. If customers are happy with your company, they will tell their friends about your products or services. Customer lifetime value (CLV). This indicator helps you estimate the revenue you can earn from one customer. Brands use it to determine the value of each client.If this value increases, it means that your business grows and brings you higher profits. Check out the formula to calculate CLV for your business. Monthly recurring revenue. It allows you to find out how much money customers spend on your products each month. You can compare your revenue each month and determine whether it increases. This will give you an understanding ofhow useful your product is. If the value increases, it means that it helps customers succeed, and they continue purchasing it. You know a lot about customer success now, so it's time to scale your business using it. Track these metrics to figure out whether your product helps customers thrive and succeed.

ABC analysis is a method that entails categorizing items based on their perceived value and is used in inventory management. It helps companies identify the most valuable products that match their customers’ demand, control and allocate resources efficiently, reduce obsolete inventory, and increase sales. Watch the video below to uncover how ABC analysis works. We will discuss an inventory categorization method based on the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. According to this principle, 20% of a company’s main goods represent 80% of itssales volume. In this article, we’ll review the use of ABC analysis, explore its advantages and disadvantages, and check out the six steps to conduct the analysis. What is the use of ABC analysis? ABC analysis enables businesses to figure out how to manage their inventory based on the key metrics. A brand needs to understand customer demand to determine whether its clients will buy a certain product. Companies that opt for ABC analysis have a chance to analyze their demand and manage their inventory based on this data. One more reason businesses use ABC analysis is stock optimization. To meet customer needs, obtain a significant sales volume, and a higher profit, a company should categorize its products based on demand, importance, and profit. With the received information in mind, business owners can set prices for their products or services strategically. ABC analysis helps identify and reduce the number of products customers don’t like or those with a low-profit margin. After the method is implemented, entrepreneurs obtain a smoother supply chain, reduce costs on additional stock, and allocate resources efficiently. Now that you know the use of ABC analysis, we’ll proceed to the pros and cons of this technique. Advantages and Disadvantages of ABC Analysis By evaluating inventory and classifying it under the principles of ABC analysis, companies can identify the areas of manufacturing or sales that bring in the most value. The main advantage of this technique is that it enables you to determine the goods that consumers buy most often and monitor their availability to avoid stockout. Hence, businesses can focus on high-priority products that bring good ROI. One more advantage of this method is the efficient allocation of resources. With ABC analysis, you can spend more money on purchasing goods popular among customers and ultimately bring good profit to your company. Moreover, it enables you to reduce costs on items that bring little or no profit and just gather dust on the shelves of your warehouse. The disadvantages of the method include conflicts with traditional costing systems and substantial expenditures. Routine analysis of high-priority products requires higher expenses, which is why a company should prepare some extra costs. The pros and cons are clear now, so let’s figure out how to organize the process. 6Steps to Conduct ABC Analysis To do an effective ABC analysis, you need to follow a particular sequence of actions. We’ve prepared six steps for you to consider when implementing this method into your business strategy. Stick to these steps to conduct a successful analysis. Define the things you want to analyze. The main goal of ABC analysis is to determine the importance of each product. The method enables you to identify the most and least profitable items. As a result, you’ll be able to improve the financial performance of your company. Think of the items you need to analyze to understand their value for consumers and the profit they bring. Gather the necessary information. Once you define the inventory to analyze, collect information about ordering and carrying costs. Leverage one of your accounting tools to obtain this data. Sort your goods. Before diving into the process, sort your products based on their cost. Rank them from the most expensive to the cheapest ones. Figure out the impact of your products on the company. List down the products in a spreadsheet and find out the influence each of them has on your business. Divide the goods and their annual costs. Divide your products into three classes based on demand. Now it’s time to split up your goods into categories based on the main principle of ABC analysis. Divide your products into three groups: A — the most valuable products that bring 80% of your profit, category B — less popular and valuable products that bring 15%, and C — items that bring 5% of revenue. Analyze the obtained data. In the end, you’ll have a spreadsheet with items that generate the most revenue and those that aren’t popular with your buyers. Check out the list to find the money makers at the top. Once you obtain the necessary information about high priority and low priority products, use it to your advantage. Remember that you still need to track your goods’ pricing and selling performance to ensure that their positions don’t fluctuate. In a nutshell, the technique is especially useful in terms of warehouse management. It helps identify the items that bring the highest profit and products that a business owner doesn’t need to replenish. The analysis gives business owners a clear picture of the sales performance of certain goods.

Brand differentiation is an essential aspect of a brand marketing strategy. It enables companies to reveal their profitable qualities that help develop a unique selling proposition. This way, they understand their competitive advantage and stand out among competitors. Why is brand differentiation important? Customers don’t value brands that sell the same items and don’t provide them with new solutions. It makes them believe that these companies are easily interchangeable. This can cause a price war among brands because the only thing left to compete for is the price. As a result, undercutting your competitors’ prices leads to lower net profit. Companies need their brands to stand out to avoid predatory pricing. This strategy provides them with both short-term and long-term goals. The main one is to find your competitive advantage — a unique offer that your business opponents don’t have. It will help boost your market share in the long term. As a result, you’ll increase your targeted audience, sales volume, and revenue. In addition, a clear and valuable unique selling proposition will help you build an army of loyal clients who love your brand not only for your product but for the positive user experience and values you share. Hence, it’s crucial to thoroughly analyze your potential clients to reveal their problems, wants, and needs. This way, you’ll create a successful brand differentiation strategy. Let’s find out how to create one for your business. 5Brand Differentiation Strategies Become an innovator Choose a winning pricing strategy Solve clients’ unique problems Appeal to emotions Deliver unique customer support In this section, we’ll share some ideas that will help you differentiate your company from competitors. Become an innovator. This method is a surefire way to stand out. You can either create a product that people have never seen before or optimize and improve an existing one. For this purpose, you need to carry out research to understand your customers’ needs, pain points, preferences, etc. Brands that bring innovations to the market are the most successful, remarkable, and trusted. Choose a winning pricing strategy. You can make your brand stand out eitherwiththe lowest price for a high-quality product, which will make you a leader in the mass market, or you can become a premium brand charging more for a better experience like Starbucks does. Solve clients’ unique problems. You may successfully occupy a concentrated niche offering an exceptional quality that your competitors don’t provide. Today custom T-shirt design or sewing lingerie according to personal measurements is not surprising, but someoneoncecame up with this idea. Hence, you can also create a better product. Appeal to emotions. People will definitely remember such a brand and come back for an extra dose of dopamine. These brands sell not products but experiences customers have after buying them. Coca-Cola is associated with joy, happiness, and holiday; Nike motivates people to take action with their “Just do it”; Apple makes its clients feel like they belong to something huge by selling products that have their own ecosystem. Deliver unique customer support. While taking care of a prospectbefore the purchase is mundane, do your best to support your client after the sale. You can offer a prolonged guarantee or any special and personalized services depending on your product type. Customers appreciate brands that care about them after they’ve paid. Congrats, now you know why brand differentiation matters, can use its benefits, and have five effective strategies at hand.

A customer satisfaction survey is a marketing instrument used by businesses todetermine clients’ level of satisfaction with a brand. This questionnaire helps companies identify dissatisfied consumers, better understand their needs, optimize products, and improve customer service. In this article, we’ll explain why customer satisfaction surveys are so important, shed light on their types, offer some tips on how to create them, and provide several examples. Why is a customer satisfaction survey important? It’s impossible to evaluate a product without customer feedback objectively.First, you need to determine who your product is designed forsincethose you identify as your target audience will be your company’s source of the most valuable insights. You can’t launch a new product successfully if you don’t know for sure if your customers actually need it. Similarly, you can’t optimize and improve your current product if you haven’t identified your clients’ pain points. You also can’t simply fire your customer service rep who received a few complaints and hire new staff without analyzing what they did wrong. To reveal your weak points and understand how to optimize your product, you should implement several types of satisfaction surveys. Types of Satisfaction Surveys A satisfaction survey is a general namefor all surveys that help obtain valuable information about your brand and analyze clients’ feedback. Try to use different types of surveys depending on what insights you want to get. Check them out below. Net Promoter Score (NPS). This is the most popular satisfaction survey both for customers and employees. Its goal is to find out whether customers would recommend your product or service to their friends and colleagues. Detractors (score 0-6) are dissatisfied clients who may even harm your brand reputation. Passives (score 7-8) are clients who are satisfied with your productbut are not ready to promote it. Promoters (score 9-10) are your most loyal clients who recommend your product to their friends. Post-Purchase Survey. Businesses offer clients to answer several questions after they make a purchase. Thegoal here is to discover whether customers are satisfied with yourproduct quality, checkout, and customer service. You can send a post-purchase survey via email with LIKE.TGfor free. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Survey. With the help of this survey, businesses measure whether clients are satisfied with their products in general. Respondents have five options: very unsatisfied, unsatisfied, neutral, satisfied, or very satisfied. This type of survey allows companies to understand how well they meet their clients’ expectations. Product or Service Development Survey. This survey is extremely helpful for businesses as it allows them to predict the success of a new product. Marketers send this survey before a product is launched to determine whether their clients actually need it. This survey aims to discover users’ needs and learn more about product improvements that can be made. Usability Survey. As the name suggests, this type of survey allows product owners to gain some insights into the user experience. They are usually shown as pop-ups on websites and in apps. This survey helps users better navigate a company’ssite, find the necessary content, andget the best user experience. Now that you know several types of satisfaction surveys, it’s time to learn how to create one, so follow our tips below. How to Create a Customer Satisfaction Survey Use different types of questions Keep your questions short Only ask the most important questions Try to make consistent scales and stick to one survey type Stick tostylistically neutral words Indicatehow much time the survey will take Inform yourusers about the goal of a survey and possible rewards In this section, we’ll share some tips that you can use for different types of surveys. They will help you create effective surveys. Use different types of questions. Asking the right questions is crucial foran effective and well-performing survey. Multiple-choice questions make it easy for users to take a survey since they don’t have to provide open-ended answers. Binary scale questions let customers choosefrom two available options, for example, yes or no.You can ask whetheryour customer support agent helped a client with their problem.This way, marketers receive objective and unambiguous answers. Semantic differential questions help companies evaluate users’ attitudes towards a particular issue or product. This survey uses a 5-7 point scale. Likert scale questions are similar to semantic questions. They help understand how clients feel about your product or service. Open-ended questions let users speak their minds. They are considered the most useful since customers can offer some innovative ideas. Keep your questions short. The longer the questions, the longer it will take to answer them. This may result in a high bounce rate,andthe survey won’t be as effective as you expected. Perhaps only your most loyal customers are ready to spend half an hour taking your survey, meaning you won’t get accurate results. Only ask the most important questions. You should have a clear goal for your surveyand make your questions bring you closer to it. For example, if you want to predict the success of a new product before its launch, you don’t need the questions like” What is your name?” and “How did you first come in contact with our brand?”. They won’t bring you value but will take more users’ time. Instead, create a list of the most critical questions. Try to make consistent scales and stick to one survey type. Avoid mixing several types of surveys and scales since it will confuse users. Say, you decided ona 5-point scale, and users should choose an option where 1 means “would never recommend,” while, in the next question, 1 stands for “very satisfied.” They may tickan answer by mistake, so be consistent. Stick to stylistically neutral words.Take into account that a big part of your respondents can be beginners who haven’t learned the professional terminology yet. Hence, avoid using abbreviations, acronyms, slang, and buzzwords not to confuse your users. Indicatehow much time the survey will take. Many users are skeptical about surveys since they tend to take a lot of time. Let them know how much time they need to take your survey. This will prevent you from survey abandonment. Inform your users about your survey goal and possible rewards. Users need a good reason to take your survey. Tell them that you want to improve your product and their answers are extremely valuable for your business. As an additional incentive, you can offer them a bonus, for example, a 10% discount on your product. Avoid promising a freebie since users won’t give sincere and objective answers in this case. Finally, we’ll provide several examples of customer satisfaction surveys for you to get inspired. Examples of Customer Satisfaction Surveys Here we’ll share different examples of customer surveys for you to choose the best one for your business. G2 asks its subscribers to answer only one question and assess how likely they are to recommend it to their friends from 0 to 10. After subscribers click on any number, they’re redirected to the survey and asked to explain their answer in detail. Then, the company wants to understand whether users are satisfied with its customer service. The last question is open-ended. Customers are asked how G2 can improve the process of buying software. Uber app asks both drivers and passengers about their experience after each ride. This way, both can see each other’s ratings before the next ride. Such a survey takes only several seconds and is highly effective. Chubbies need their customers’ opinions before designing new shorts. The brand also offers users a20% discount on its products as an incentive. In a nutshell, there are many types of surveys and questions you can use to interview your clients effectively. Let your audience take it via email with the help of LIKE.TG!

AI chatbot is a tool that applies artificial intelligence and natural language processing to provide customers with human-like conversations and relevant answers. It’s a useful software application that enables your company to ensure support at any stage of the customer journey and reduce the workload of your team. LIKE.TG allows you to build chatbots for Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Telegram and use ChatGPT integration. In this video, the LIKE.TG marketer Anya explains the difference between AI chatbots and rule-based chatbots. So, check it out to boost your customer service! In this article, we’ll unveil the difference between AI and rule-based chatbots and the benefits of AI chatbots. We’ll teach you how to use and build an AI chatbot with LIKE.TG. ChatGPT ChatGPT is a conversational AI platform that uses technology to understand clients’ questions and respond accurately in human language. The software enables you to provide instant, accurate, and natural answers to customers’ questions, recommend products based on customers’ needs, and update on relevant discounts and promotions. There are several types of ChatGPT you can use to solve specific issues. Some help analyze the context and generate more complex text or code. Others allow you to work with translation, complex classification, text sentiment analysis, and summarization tasks. You can create QA chatbots and provide instant answers to consumers’ questions. Besides, it helps you generate new text. The model understands text structures to create simple plots and titles. With ChatGPT, you can take your customer support and sales department to the next level. The software empowers your company to provide clients and leads with relevant answers without distracting team members from urgent tasks. The language and messages look human-like so users won’t feel the difference. ChatGPT provides answers based on messages’ history. ChatGPT lets you update clients on upcoming deals and discounts based on their shopping history. Messages are sent according to customers’ preferences; therefore, they are personalized. ChatGPT empowers you to increase customer satisfaction since consumers get their desired products. Now that you know some basic facts about ChatGPT, it’s time to clarify the difference between AI and rule-based chatbots. What is the difference between AI chatbots and chatbots? Sometimes it’s hard to differentiate the rule-based chatbots and AI chatbots because they can perform the same tasks. They can engage with users and answer basic questions. However, after testing these two types of chatbots, marketers report the rule-based chatbots’ inability to understand all customers’ inputs. Rule-based chatbots operate based on pre-written responses triggered when a user types the input. Sometimes the chatbot can interpret the answers in the wrong way and provide not accurate answers. AI chatbots use language processing functionalities and can understand the context of conversations with customers. The answers this type of chatbot provides are accurate and natural. They look human-like so clients can’t figure out they are dealing with a chatbot. The answers are generated from the knowledge base the chatbot is connected to. It can be trained based on previous conversations with clients. For instance, if the question is the same, the bot can use previous conversations as a source of information. To sum it up, AI chatbots can understand the context of the conversation and provide accurate answers. They are natural and human-like. After receiving responses from customer support, your clients will be satisfied with your company’s service. AI chatbots are trained based on the existing conversations with agents, while rule-based chatbots function based on pre-written scenarios. Now that you know the difference, let’s explore the main advantages of AI chatbots. Benefits of AI Chatbots AI chatbots can help you in various areas of your business. They enable you to reduce the workload on your customer support team and sales department. A trained AI chatbot can replace your customer support agents at anytime and provide instant answers. Since clients don’t have to wait for your customer agents to reply in hours or days, customer satisfaction with your brand improves. AI chatbots can be used for lead generation and qualification, increased sales, better customer engagement, and essential customer insights. We’ll cover all the benefits of AI chatbots in short. AI chatbots help provide support 24/7; use natural language to answer questions; look human alike when assisting customers; generate prospects; qualify leads; improve sales; gather information from customer data; improve customer support; boost satisfaction with your company; increase interactions with customers; reduce bounce rates; save costs on hiring more customer support agents; respond to clients’ inquiries faster; provide personalized recommendations based on customers’ preferences. Now that you know the pros, let’s jump into the next section to find out how to use an AI chatbot. How to use an AI chatbot? AI chatbots can be used in multiple areas: customer support, sales, online learning, and many others. It can provide answers and create written content (articles, social media posts, essays, code, and emails). AI chatbot can come in handy if you incorporate it right. In this section, we’ll unveil how to use a conversational AI chatbot for your company. If your team wants to work towards the success of your brand, you need to take care of several aspects. This type of chatbot is an AI-powered chatbot that doesn't require human supervision once everything is set up. However, before the process begins, you should complete several tasks. Let’s find out what you should do to implement your chatbot successfully. Create a knowledge base. If you want your chatbot to send logical and natural answers to customers, think about developing or improving your site’s knowledge base. A knowledge base is a web page on your company’s website that stores all the information about your product (guides, how-tos, instructions, etc.). When discussing AI chatbots, a knowledge base is data stored from all conversations. The chatbot becomes better and more accurate if it’s trained with conversations. The best way to teach your AI chatbot to provide natural and right answers is to have many conversations with clients. Your chatbot should also be connected to the knowledge base on your website. It’ll serve as an additional source of information for your chatbot. Once it receives a question from a user, it’ll search the knowledge base for the most detailed answers. AI chatbots can provide responses based on previous conversations with customer support agents. If your chatbot is already well-trained, you don’t need to take care of it and track every message. An AI chatbot will do everything for you. Connect your chatbot to a live chat. Since there’s still a possibility of a chatbot not understanding customer input, you need to prepare for such a scenario. For this purpose, we connect your AI chatbot to the live chat on your website. This way, if a chatbot cannot answer the question or provide the right response, the user can always talk to a live representative. For instance, you can automatically connect with a customer support agent after the chatbot gives two unclear answers. LIKE.TG empowers you to create a live chat and add it to your site within minutes. Prevent dissatisfaction with your brand and get ready with the live chat. Support customers when they need it the most and ensure that they get appropriate responses when necessary. Adjust AI chatbot answers. To make sure that your chatbot is giving the right and consistent answers, you need to audit it. Don’t let your chatbot operate on its own for months because you can’t know the answers it provides to customers and whether they are happy with them. Your top priority is customer satisfaction, so you need to take care of it. First, consider surveying to ask how happy your customers are with the chatbot. Secondly, look through the answers your AI chatbot usually provides to users. Thirdly, analyze them and find out whether the answers are appropriate and accurate. If everything is right, you don’t have to edit the answers. However, if the answers are not satisfying, there’s a need for improvement. Train your chatbot to provide new answers to questions to make clients happy with your chatbot. Now that you know the tasks you need to complete for an effective chatbot, let's create an AI chatbot with LIKE.TG. How to build an AI chatbot with LIKE.TG? When you consider creating a chatbot, it’s essential to find the right platform for it. Make sure that it doesn't require you to have programming or coding skills to create a chatbot. In LIKE.TG, you can develop a rule-based and AI chatbot within minutes without any special skills or knowledge. The process is simple and fast. With LIKE.TG visual builder, you can set up auto-replies and develop sales pipelines on Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Telegram. Create scenarios for various messengers or social media platforms and start conversations with customers whenever they need it. You can add a multi-channel subscription widget to convert visitors into clients. To set up a rule-based chatbot, create triggers that will start the flow. The platform will launch auto-replies and message flows once a user triggers a specific action. The next step is writing auto-replies. Based on the trigger, you need to develop different auto-replies that will be automatically sent out to clients. Then, you should create the logic of your bot. With LIKE.TG visual chatbot builder, you’ll only need to drag and drop the necessary messages and triggers and connect them. Connect messages one by one to establish a sequence of messages in your auto-reply flow. Once everything is done, you need to double-check your chatbot. Use test mode to do it. If the bot works right, feel free to launch your chatbot. Below you can see how to work in the LIKE.TG editor. LIKE.TG has an integration with ChatGPT. It means that your bot communicates with clients in a human-like manner. Its answers look natural. The answers will also be more accurate since the bot analyzes previous conversations to understand customers’ inputs. LIKE.TG allows you to create chatbots using four main models: Curie, Davinci, Ada, and Babbage. The model you choose depends on your main business purpose. Some of them are designed to optimize texts, others can decrypt codes. So you need to select the type wisely after you determine your main goal. If you want to optimize texts, consider using the Ada model. You’ll be able to identify keywords, proofread your text, or optimize it to comply with SEO principles. Below is an example of an Ada model chatbot created in LIKE.TG. If you need a FAQ database, consider using the Davinci model. With LIKE.TG, you can train your bot to provide relevant and accurate answers to customers’ questions regarding a product or service. Below, you can see an example of such a model. The service enables you to create a helper bot. It will allow you to solve life issues fast with a chatbot. Users can describe their situations in the bot, and it will send them relevant solutions or advice. Below is an example of the Davinci model for such a chatbot. ChatGPT is a new level of support for customers. Besides customer support, you can perform multiple actions using this conversational chatbot. Relevant, natural, and human-like are the words to describe the help you can provide to customers without the intervention of your agents. Register with LIKE.TG to create quality AI chatbots for Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and WhatsApp.

Customer onboarding is the process that takes place during a post-purchase stage and entails leading a new user through a product or service, teaching how to use it, making a client feel comfortable with it, and showing how to obtain its value. It helps companies build strong relationships with clients, retain customers, and receive more loyal consumers. Watch the video below to obtain some insights into the customer onboarding process and make clients stay with your brand. In this article, we’ll explore the importance of customer onboarding and get to know its implementation process. Then, we’ll review the metrics and explore some best practices and examples to grab some inspiration. Why is customer onboarding important? The onboarding process is crucial since it’s a touchpoint for establishing good relationships with new customers and encouraging them to stay with a company. An excellent onboarding can improve customer retention, increasecustomer lifetime value, and turn new customers into raving fans. The first impression of using a product is fundamental. At this moment, clients decide whether this option suits them, whether it is straightforward or easy enough, and, most importantly, what value this product gives them. According to Wyzowl, approximately 90% of customers say that companies should put more effort into onboarding new clients. A company can educate new users or clients on how to use a product, provide them with onboarding content, and lead them through the post-purchase stage during the process. To put it simply, a company that wants to retain customers and turn them into loyal clients should create a well-thought-out onboarding strategy. If you are interested in doing it perfectly, let’s jump into the process and the necessary steps. How to Create a Customer Onboarding Process Ensure you know your new clients Think of a perfect onboarding strategy that fits your business Develop suitable tactics Come up with well-planned content Monitor and analyze the results It’s a vital process that needs a good understanding of your audience and the ability to create valuable educational content about your product or service. If implemented successfully, this strategy can bring you long-term and beneficial relationships with your customers. In this section, we’ll review each step of the onboarding process in detail. Ensure you know your new clients.You need to know your new users well to guide them through your product successfully. Yourbuyer personashould contain the information that can help you create a good onboarding strategy. Consider putting it to use to provide your new customers with a seamless experience of getting acquainted with your product. Think of a perfect onboarding strategy that fits your business. Before diving into the development process, meet up with your team to decide on the ideal onboarding experience for your customers. Define the best way to present its use so that your newcomers can quickly master everything they need. You should also analyze your customers’ behavior after they review your product card and analyze it to figure out how to approach these users. Develop suitable tactics. Once you determine how to approach your newcomers, create a roadmap of your steps. Build a few tactics to onboard new customers. You should also define the necessary marketing methods to use and the timeframes to do it. Choose the right time to start sending email campaignswith your welcoming and educational content. Product tours, videos, guidelines, andchatbotscansimplify the process and allow customers to get closer to their goals. Come up with well-planned content. When you have a roadmap, it’s time to think of the content. Contact your copywriters and marketers to develop useful content. It can be presented in any form, but the main point is to teach customers how to use your product effectively. Consider writing appropriate and easy-to-understand email content and video scripts and developing user-friendly interfaces. After you finish with the copy and design, it’s time to bring it all to life. Let marketers create onboarding emails and search for professional agencies to produce educational videos. Monitor and analyze the results. Once the campaign is implemented, keep an eye on the information you have about your customers. Pay attention to the content they prefer to read and products they like and dislike. This way, you will be able to identify the drawbacks of your educational content and instructions on how to use your product. Over time, you’ll need to improve the process if you see that the results are unsatisfactory. The process is clear now, so let’s proceed to the metrics. Customer Onboarding Metrics To receive insights into your onboarding strategy’s success, consider monitoring the main performance indicators. Here is a list of the most critical metrics to bear in mind: Engagement. Having some insights into yourbrand engagementcan help track the progress, identify and eliminate pitfalls, and take the necessary measures. You should find out whether your client understands your product and whether this person is going to use it. Do this by tracking login activity, usage of the features, and onboarding abandonment. Progress. Before conducting your training, consider creating a schedule and dividing it into several parts. This way, it will be easier for new users to perceive and remember new information. Bear in mind that people can concentrate for 90 minutesmaximum, and then they need a break. Approach new customers in different ways — with tutorials, step-by-step guides, videos, and chatbots to obtain the best results. Afterward, you will be able to assess how well you did the job of letting your users master your product as quickly as possible. Feedback. Surveys are a great way to determine how valuable and complete your onboarding is with all its materials and tools. Newcomers will help you identify the drawbacks of your service and eliminate them. Now that you know the metrics, let’s review some of the best practices you can use to onboard new users. Customer Onboarding Best Practices Use an email automation platform to send educational content Introduce your product with a short video Design interactive product tours Answer your customers’ questions with chatbots Create webinars to let customers master their skills Generally speaking, companies utilizing multiple channels to onboard new customers is a great strategy. Brands that use marketing tools like welcome emails, step-by-step starter guides, tutorials, educational videos, and product tours can build strong relationships with new clients and make the most out of it. These tools provide newcomers with a consistent and seamless experience. Consider applying the following tactics to improve your onboarding. Use an email automation platform to send educational content Emails with helpful information can guide your new customers through the process of exploring your product. If you want to simplify the process of sending such emails, use a special automation platform. LIKE.TG allows you to personalize your educational emails and set up your send-out. For instance, you can use the platform to share some tips with your new users on how to make the most of your product, send product tours, webinars, tutorials, etc. You can even implement cross-sellingby offering some additional items to the existing product. Say, if a customer bought a camera, you can offer them a memory card. Introduce your product with a short video If you have a visual product, the best way to introduce it is by creating a short video. It can be 1-2 minutes in length but should contain some essential facts about a product. For example, Rare Beauty by Selena Gomez provides makeup tutorials on Instagram to teach customers how to use its new eyeshadows. Design interactive product tours If you aim to let customers get more from your product, you should be ready to create great product walkthroughs. They help explain how to use a product and guide new users to the moment when they realize its value. Each product or service is unique in its features and benefits and requires an individual approach. However, don’t forget to be consistent, include the core value, and be short and sweet in your product tours. Let’s take Slack, a platform for business that helps bring all team members together, for example. It provides new users with interactive onboarding and a chatbot that guides them through the process. Answeryour customers’ questions with chatbots Onboarding is a process that requires different amounts of time and effort from different users. That’s why you should always be in touch with your customers to provide some help. To answer some FAQs, consider using a chatbot. As a result, new customers will receive instant answers to fundamental requests and resolve some of their issues in seconds. With LIKE.TG’s chatbots, you can easily set up auto-replies in Telegram, Facebook, and Whatsapp. For example, Plum, a back-office solutions provider, uses a chatbot to onboard new users. Create webinars to let customers master their skills Today, webinars are extremely popular due to the value they provide. In this case, user onboarding webinars can help understand your product, how it works, its features, and its benefits. New users can also learn how your product solves problems and provides value. Let’s take Grammarly, a writing assistance tool, for example. It would be great for new users to learn about its useful features from a webinar about its plagiarism and grammar checker. Since examples also play a significant role in understanding the process and inspiring you to create your onboarding program, let’s proceed to the next section. Examples of Customer Onboarding Payoneer and onboarding emails actiTIME and product tours Pinterest and users’ interests Duolingo and gradual engagement Wrike and webinars We’ve prepared several excellent examples from different platforms to inspire you to create a superb onboarding for your new users. Payoneer and onboarding emails Payoneer provides businesses, online sellers, and freelancers with a transparent payment platform. The service takes care not only of loyal customers but ensures a seamless experience for its new users. It has successfully implemented email campaigns to welcome new clients on board. LIKE.TG saves you from sending emails to new customers manually. With Automation 360, you can create an email flow in advance and send it when a user performs a specific action, for example, a purchase. In the example below, you can see a welcome email created with our service. A company sends an onboarding email and offers a new subscriber to check out its latest articles after some time. actiTIME and product tours actiTIME is an excellent service for project management that enables managers to track the progress of their teams’ work and time. The service provides newcomers with a short guide on its website and an introduction video. In this video, users can watch a brief overview of the actiTIME product. Pinterest and users’ interests The image-sharing service is a great example of an excellent onboarding process. After the registration, users are asked to answer several questions about their interests. The service works based on the categories users like the most. As a result, Pinterest provides users with everything they need, which is a perfect way to retain customers. Duolingo and gradual engagement This language-learning platform invites its users to go through their onboarding even before a signup form. Unlike many other services, Duolingo implements gradual engagement. It moves users through the app slowly and empowers them to experience the value of its platform first. You can set your goals and choose your path to get started. Wrike and webinars This project management tool invites new users to get started with its webinars. Wrike offers four webinars where its clients can find out how the platform helps marketing teams and how to set up the service. In a nutshell, brands spend time and effort to create a perfect welcome onboarding because it plays a significant role in customer retention and turning users into loyal clients. The most impressive apps and websites ensure that users obtain an excellent user experience using their product, platform, tool, or service. With LIKE.TG, you can automate the onboarding process with email campaigns, Facebook, Telegram, and Whatsapp chatbots, web push, and SMS.

Customer lifetime value (LTV) is an estimate of the total sum a customer spends on products or services during their relationships with your brand. This metric helps you decide how much to invest in customer acquisition and retention. Why is Customer Lifetime Value Important? A whopping 76% of companies deem customer lifetime value to be a crucial concept for their business’s success. This metric defines your customer retention efforts. Since retaining an existing customer is 5-25 times cheaper than acquiring a new one, lifetime value affects your expenditures and overall margin. Amping up your LTV affects your sales because the probability of selling to loyal customers is around 60-70%. Chances to sell something to newly acquired buyers are 5-20% on average. Better yet, returning clients spend 67% more than first-timers. Finally, a 5% growth in customer loyalty boosts your average profit by 25-95%. That means that customer lifetime value is the name of the game for your business’s profitability. To sum it up, LTV underlies your financial objectives and business strategy. Read on to learn which formula to apply to measure your customer lifetime value. How to Calculate Customer Lifetime Value There are several ways to calculate LTV. To keep everything clear, stick to the simplest formula: Value of a purchase ✖ purchase frequency ✖ customer lifespan To keep you from puzzling over calculating these elements, we made a table. You can pry into it every time you need to measure LTV. Metrics Formula The average value of a purchase The annual total revenue / the number of purchases in the same span The purchase frequency The number of purchases / the number of unique customers for the same time The customer lifespan The average number of years a customer continues purchasing from your company To help you get a clearer view on applying these formulas, let's plug some figures in them. Example of a Customer Lifetime Value Calculation Imagine that you sell running shoes to professional athletes. A pair of shoes is worth around $250. You have learned that a runner needs six pairs every year. You launched your business five years ago. Let’s calculate the LTV of your customer, who has been buying from you since your opening. Average value of a purchase = $250; Purchase frequency rate = 6 times a year; Customer lifespan = 5 years. $250 ✖ 6 ✖ 5 = $7,500 $7,500 is the lifetime value of your most loyal customer. Knowing your customer lifetime value, you can improve your performance. Explore the ways to employ LTV for your best interests. How to Use Customer Lifetime Value? Improve forecasting Find the best clients Target the most valuable prospects Choose investments for LTV growth Discover most profitable acquisition channels Increase retention We’ve already touched on the helpfulness customer lifetime value provides to your business. Now let’s delve deeper into it and uncover how exactly you can use LTV for the benefit of the undertaking. Improve forecasting Calculating customer lifetime value allows you to predict your business outcomes for the next year. This metric also allows you to evaluate the future need for your product or service. You can pinpoint how many of your current customers will stay with you for another couple of months, the amount of revenue they’ll bring to the table, and so on. With this information on hand, you can plan investments in your workforce, innovations, marketing, and so on. You can also figure out how many new customers you need to acquire to meet your business goals. Find the best clients Various customers have different value for your business. In some cases, just 5% of buyers account for 35% of a company's revenue. Better yet, a 1% increase in the high-value customer tier drives a 4% growth in total revenue. Thus, your task is to find the segment of your audience that contributes the most to your business’ well-being. To pinpoint your VIP customers, segment your audience, and calculate the lifetime value for each of the segments. For instance, the running shoe store’s audience may consist of professional runners and teenagers. Athletes buy the most frequently and choose expensive shoes, while teenagers make a purchase once in a while and go for lower-cost options. Meaning, athletes are your VIP clients. Knowing your VIPs, you can adjust different aspects of your business to their needs and gain more revenue. For example, you can expand the range of shoes for professionals or offer additional services for athletes. Another option is to make the most profitable clients contribute to your customer acquisition and brand awareness. Professional athletes can recommend your store to their colleagues or social media followers in return for free shoes or other perks. Target the most valuable prospects Less than half of prospective customers turn out to be a good fit for a business. However, data on your customer lifetime value can help you attract the most suitable audience. Knowing your best-paying customers, you can target prospects with similar features. Chances are they will become your VIP clients too. To get the ball rolling, create a buyer persona – follow our guide on building a customer profile. Once you have a VIP buyer persona analysis at hand, you can focus your marketing strategy on acquiring them. Address your PPC advertising to your most promising prospects, adjust your content marketing to their needs, tailor your offers to provoke their interest. Choose on your investments in LTV growth To calculate your customer lifetime value, you need to know at least three metrics: the average order value, the purchase frequency, and a customer lifespan. By pinpointing the weakest spot of these three, you can figure out how to improve LTV and your revenue in general. If your customer lifespan is too short, you can lengthen it by investing in tactics that drive buyer engagement – content, email marketing, and so on. If the weakest part of your LTV is the average order value, you may resort to such techniques as cross-selling or product bundling. Finally, if you struggle with low purchase frequency, stimulate regular purchases with special offers, discounts, or new product launches. Consider trying web push notifications to deliver these messages – they provide a nearly 80% open rate and 12% CTR. Try LIKE.TG’s web push builder to create and send notifications to 10,000 subscribers for free. Discover the most profitable acquisition channels Another way to benefit from knowing your customers’ LTV is by finding the most profitable acquisition channel. Take several sources of leads you use and measure the lifetime value for customers who came from these channels. This tactic helps you determine where your most profitable customers originate from. This data allows you to understand the price you’re willing to pay for each channel. For instance, your blog may bring customers with an LTV of around $500, while PPC advertising results in buyers with a roughly $250 LTV. In this case, it’s better to invest more in your blog development. Finally, knowing your average LTV, you can decide how much to invest in customer acquisition while staying profitable. This lets you understand how much you’ll need to spend to get new consumers more effectively. Customer lifetime value allows you to understand your best acquisition channels, find your VIP clients, target the most promising prospects, decide on the distribution of investments, and so on. Now let’s move on to the tactics and best practices you can adopt to increase your LTV. Increase retention Lifetime value is key to the most effective strategies for customer retention. It helps you set priorities – which buyer segments to win back first, how much to invest in different channels, and so on. The more you know about your VIP customers and their interests, the better tactics you can employ to keep them engaged with your brand. A deeper understanding of your audience will help you craft the most relevant loyalty programs, campaigns, and offers. Email marketing is one of the most efficient ways to boost and maintain your customer retention rate. Leverage email to meet your business goals, and be sure to personalize your emails and offers – over 70% of consumers say they engage with personalized messaging only. To create enticing emails, register with LIKE.TG. With our tools, you can use every piece of information you have about your clients for personalization. You don’t need to craft a stand-alone email for each customer – use variables. This feature allows you to insert any data into one template, as we did in the example below. We’ve changed the delivery time for New Yorkers in a couple of clicks. Follow our guide on smart personalization to learn more about using variables for your email marketing. 7 Tactics to Improve Your Customer Lifetime Value Upsell and cross-sell your products Consistently make special offers Improve the buying experience Re-engage dormant customers Start a loyalty program Revamp your customer service Build relationships with customers Customer lifetime value is a complex concept, which encompasses various parts. So, marketers have found a variety of ways to enhance LTV by boosting each metric in its equation. Let’s unpack a few tactics you can use to improve this indicator. Upsell and cross-sell your products If the value of a purchase is the weakest spot in your LTV, consider upselling your product or service. This tactic works great for expensive products that customers rarely buy. For instance, you can’t sell a washing machine to one person every week, but you can increase the purchase value by offering a prolonged warranty or additional services. Another option to consider is cross-selling, which implies offering complementary products. Let’s return to the washing machine example – you can show supplemental goods, such as water softener or laundry detergent. Cross-selling is the favorite method of clothes retailers. The main trick here is to offer items that complement each other, such as a pair of jeans to a sweater. Here is an example from Farfetch – the brand shows you the whole look rather than a bundle of similar garments. Consistently make special offers Timely and regular special offers and discounts are a golden opportunity to boost your shopping frequency. Customers will probably buy something from a brand they are familiar with, especially when it offers special conditions. To drive the best results, offer discounts several weeks after a previous purchase. Your customers still remember their last transaction and your brand in general, so they are more likely to buy from you again. Another trick here is to offer a discount when purchasing two or more items. This way, you encourage a customer to spend more and stimulate the value of a purchase increase. Here is a perfect example of a special offer from Topshop. The brand uses a simple scheme – the more a customer spends, the bigger discount they get. Improve the buying experience A great experience underlies the longevity of your relationships with buyers and, as a result, your customer lifetime value. If your customers struggle to find the items they need or get kicked off during the purchase, they probably won't stay with you for long. To make your customer experience exceptional, start by revising your website and optimize it for convenience. Make sure your website is easy to navigate and mobile-friendly, as mobile devices account for over 52% of internet traffic worldwide. Examine your website for barriers customers may face during their journey to purchase. One of the examples here is excessive registration forms. They help you segment customers right from the start but intimidate customers. To coordinate your business needs with clients’ preferences, try multi-step forms – they show fields gradually after a customer starts filling them in. Create beautiful responsive registration forms with LIKE.TG for free. With our tool, you can build forms in minutes and sign up your customers to their preferred channels, such as email, Facebook Messenger, or Telegram. Re-engage dormant customers In today’s world, people are often jaded with information and offers from brands. They easily get distracted and may stop buying from you just because they forget about your brand. So, it’s a good idea to remind dormant customers about your brand from time to time. The easiest way to do so is with email marketing. Email platforms, such as LIKE.TG, allow you to keep track of your subscribers' activity and send re-engagement messages automatically. All you have to do is set up a flow that starts six months after a subscriber stopped engaging with your emails. LIKE.TG will automatically send these messages at the right time. Craft your re-engagement email carefully – they should be subtle, not hard-selling. Start a message by asking your customer how they are and whether they are interested in returning to your website. The best way is to send not a single message but an email series. Follow our guide on launching a re-engagement email flow to craft a perfect campaign. Let’s learn from the cosmetic retailer, Aillea. From the first lines of its message, the company creates the impression of caring. It chooses words thoughtfully and asks gentle questions rather than pushing the recipient towards a purchase. Nevertheless, Aillea includes clear calls to action to browse its new collection. Start a loyalty program Using psychological tricks is a great way to meet your business objectives. The one that will come in handy for boosting LTV is rewarding customer loyalty. Keep your buyers engaged with your brand by implementing a loyalty program. A loyalty program is a powerful tool – it provokes nearly 80% of consumers to continue doing business with brands. However, not every loyalty program works effectively. To drive results, make sure your program offers various treats, including exclusive products, and engages with people. Learn how to craft a loyalty program from the cosmetic brand Tarte. Program members get points along with other benefits like access to exclusive sales and offers, gifts for birthdays, anniversaries, and additional purchases, as well as exclusive products. The company gives points for a sign-up with the brand's emails, purchases, and activities on social media. This way, Tarte keeps customers engaged with a brand for long hauls and creates buzz on social networks, and attracts new customers. Revamp your customer service Improving your customer service can be a game-changer for your customer lifetime value. According to a Microsoft report, high-quality customer service is a crucial factor of loyalty for 96% of people. On the other hand, poor service is the main reason to switch companies for lotsof customers. Bear in mind that customer standards keep growing – your buyers anticipate your representatives to be available any time through various channels. Moreover, they want immediate responses. To provide a high-quality yet cost-effective service, consider applying chatbots to your marketing strategy. They can handle requests from customers in an instant, and answer up to 80% of routine questions. Here is an example of a customer support chatbot on Facebook from ManyChat. The bot offers customers a solution in the ManyChat knowledge base and Facebook community or creates a ticket for a support team. It saves tons of resources on the initial steps of tackling customer issues. Chatbots are applicable for the majority of communication channels, so your customers can interact with them through their favorite social network or messenger. Better yet, this tool is easy and cheap to create and maintain. Build your chatbot for Facebook or Telegram with LIKE.TG – we offer up to three bots and 10,000 messages for free. Build relationships with customers The best way to increase LTV is to build a close emotional connection between your brand and its customers. Such an approach allows you to acquire more loyal buyers. Your current customers become brand advocates and recommend your brand to their friends, family, colleagues, and so on. And word of mouth is still the cheapest and one of the most reliable customer acquisition sources. If you want to keep your customers tight-knit with your brand, explore the possibilities of relationship marketing. The core principles of this strategy are consistent, yet unobtrusive interaction with your buyers. Deliver value with every piece of communication rather than just selling goods. The best way to do so is to spot the barriers your customers may face during their interaction with your product and help them solve their problems. You can also move to a pro-level and help your audience tackle their professional issues in general. Take a glance at the email below, where Wordstream advises a recipient on how to nail the holiday advertising this year. In this message, the brand offers its customers support and the tactics they need to achieve their goals. Customer lifetime value is a metric that can help your business reach its goals. To adopt the best practices, and employ tactics for LTV improvement with ease, sign up with LIKE.TG. We’ll provide you a bundle of tools to leverage your goals.

Customer marketing is a brand’s strategy focused on existing clients. It aims to improve their satisfaction and loyalty and raise retention and buyers’ lifetime value. In the article, we explain why customer marketing is critical, provide its benefits and compare it with product marketing. Also, we give some tips on how to build a strong strategy and provide examples. Why is customer marketing important? According to Outbound Engine, it can be 5 times cheaper to retain an existing client than acquire a new one. These statistics highlight the importance of working with an actual buyers’ base and motivate many business owners to pay attention to their customer marketing strategy. Effective customer marketing strategy lets you decrease churn rates and retain more consumers. It will directly influence your sales and profits, as increasing retention rates by 5% helps raise profits by 25% to 95%. Regular clients are likely to spend 300 percent more money than new ones. Also, repeat customers generate nearly 16 times more efficient revenue than one-time new buyers. One more advantage is that a strong customer marketing strategy helps you turn new clients into loyal ones and then into brand advocates. Slideshare states that 72% of people share a positive experience with 6 or more other consumers. It lets companies get more free recommendations and, in such a way, attract more potential clients. Semrush Blog states that word-of-mouth results in five times more sales than paid ads. Consequently, effective customer management will help you drive more revenue and avoid overspending. Continue reading to find out the benefits of customer marketing that influence your company’s success. Benefits of Customer Marketing Influitive states that 93% of B2B marketers believe that customer marketing is growing in popularity, and 62% are going to increase their budget on it. Below we describe the benefits and competitive advantages of providing consistent positive experiences to existing clients. A better understanding of consumer needs. Promoting your products to existing clients lets you study their pains and preferences based on real cases. You can get to know buyer personas better to deliver relevant and personalized marketing messages and persuade them to purchase more products. Also, regular clients tend to provide feedback more often, which lets you improve your products and service. Increased lifetime value. Effective customer management allows you to reduce the churn rate and encourage people to buy from your company again and again. According to CleverTap, 76% of brands are sure that lifetime value is an important concept, as existing clients are 60-70% likely to convert repeatedly. Moreover, high customer retention rates will let you keep a sustainable market share and increase it by attracting new buyers. Improved brand loyalty and satisfaction. Relevant marketing messages will help you provide better experiences to consumers and make them more satisfied with your brand. In such a way, you can raise your profits, as 90% of people are ready to pay more to brands that personalize their service. Also, it lets you reduce the number of complaints because 74% of loyal buyers can forgive a company for its mistake. Increased number of company advocates. Access states that 59% of regular clients are willing to recommend a company to their friends and family. Such recommendations are a powerful tool to attract new buyers and raise your sales, as 92% of people trust these recommendations. The importance of word-of-mouth marketing highlights the fact that it drives $6 trillion in global spending every year. Greater chances to sell more products. Firstly, 53% of regular clients are likely to try the brand's new products. It lets companies be more confident in their future launches and grow faster. Secondly, 65% of businesses can successfully upsell to existing consumers. Effective customer management strategy also increases the chances of cross-selling, as buyers will be motivated to purchase complementary products from the same company. All these benefits stimulate many business owners to improve their customer marketing strategy. However, it may be difficult to distinguish this type of marketing from the product one. In the next section, help you differentiate them to avoid misunderstandings and improve your performance. Customer Marketing vs Product Marketing Both customer and product marketing have the same goal: to sell more products and drive more revenue in the long term. However, their approaches are rather different. Discover the peculiarities of these two types below. Customer marketing focuses on building strong relations with consumers and providing personalized experiences. To make brands’ promotions more relevant, marketers identify the segments of clients based on their behavior, determine their needs and preferences, and create advertising strategies to deliver specific messages to each group. Customer marketing doesn’t focus on attracting new consumers and concentrates on the existing base of regular buyers. Product marketing lets you improve all stages of the sales funnel. It helps companies generate leads, motivate them to make the first purchase, and turn them into loyal clients. This type of marketing focuses on the product itself and aims to create goods that will be highly appealing to the target audience. Product marketers study buyers’ needs, analyze competition, and deliver value to potential clients through product promotions. Understanding all these differences will let you develop strong promotional campaigns and focus on the aspects that currently are more vital to your company. Let’s go further to study some tips on building a well-defined customer marketing strategy. How to build a customer marketing strategy? Building long-term relations with consumers can benefit your company a lot. Below we provide a step-by-step guide on creating a powerful customer marketing strategy. Collect consumer data and study your target audience. According to Salesforce, 97% of marketers observe the rise in the company’s outcomes when it starts delivering personalized experiences. To reach the same results, you need to understand what audience you work with. Create a portrait of typical clients. Discover their demographics, needs, pains, and stimulus. You can use analytics on your social media, study consumer data in the CRM and conduct keyword research to find out what similar topics your buyers are interested in. You can also create a focus group of existing clients and interview them to collect more qualitative information. Segment your buyer personas and prioritize them. Now you understand who your clients are, it is time to divide them into groups. It is better to define 3-5 segments of consumers based on the data that can influence your service and future promotional techniques. Also, you can create groups according to people’s stages in the sales funnel. Then, it is vital to set priorities. Smartkarrot states that 20% of your customers make 80% of your sales. Identify the most profitable segments and pay more attention to satisfying their needs. Analyze your current strategy and optimize it. You may already have a promotional strategy, so it is time to improve it and make it more customer-oriented. Study your ROI and growth potential to understand the current performance. Then ask consumers to rate from 1 to 10 their willingness to recommend your company to their friends and calculate the Net Promoter Score on each stage of the sales funnel. Use the data collected to identify the roadblocks and find ways to fix them immediately. Focus on providing positive customer experiences. It is time to optimize your products and services to meet consumers’ expectations. Pay attention to what experiences you provide at every touchpoint and make them positive and consistent. Keep in touch with consumers after the purchase to give them a feeling of their importance. Be attentive to their problems and help them solve them as fast as possible. Collect data about every buyer to make communication more personalized and build long-term relations. Collect customer feedback and adapt your strategy accordingly. When you ask people for feedback, you make them feel that their opinion is important. It will help you increase their loyalty and engagement. However, it is not enough to gain reviews. Then you should make changes to your products and marketing. It will let you create more relevant campaigns, attract more potential clients and motivate the existing ones to continue purchasing from your company. Launch customer loyalty programs. Offer people a strong competitive advantage to inspire them to stay longer with your company. It may be some coupons for holidays or a discount that grows after every purchase. If you sell services, you can offer every fifth or tenth procedure for free. Such a strategy will help you build long-term relations and motivate people to stay with your company. Now you are ready to make your product, service, and promotions really customer-centric. However, it may not be enough to stand out from the competitors. Continue reading to study specific marketing tactics to engage with consumers effectively. 6 Customer Marketing Tactics According to the survey by North Highland, 87% of businesses consider customer experience as their top-growth engine. It is vital to implement well-defined tactics in such a competitive market and make every touchpoint special. We provide some ideas to empower your marketing strategy below. Deliver certain emotions. To empower your promotions, we recommend you avoid boring describing the product’s features. Instead, show the way your goods can make consumers’ lives better. It lets you give people a feeling that they need to purchase your product if they want to live ‘like in the ad.’ Remember that you should provide consistent experiences at every touchpoint to make emotional connections stronger and turn new customers into loyal ones. Create a feeling of exclusivity and urgency. Marketers often use this technique to attract leads, but it also works with existing clients. You can provide buyers with a unique offer or a discount that they can use for a limited time. Such a method will let you raise sales of specific products you promote and, at the same time, allow consumers to feel their exclusivity. It will lead to a rise in their satisfaction and prevent them from brand switching. Use content marketing and engage with consumers online. Social media is now one of the most suitable places to build relations with your audience. Choose a few platforms your clients use the most and build your community there. You should create content that will be helpful for both potential clients and existing ones. Also, you can create your company’s blog to provide more specific data and engage with clients through different channels. It will let you save money and drive more revenue because content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates 3 times more potential clients. Stay in touch with clients after the purchase. It is vital for clients to feel an emotional connection with your brand. Ask for feedback and later report on changes in the company based on the reviews. Also, you can create tutorials on how to use your products on the website. It will help people study your goods better and feel that you care about them after the purchase. Congratulate the most loyal buyers on birthdays to give them a sense of their importance and deliver more personalized messages. Use reviews in your promotions. When you have already collected the feedback, it is a good idea to use it in your marketing campaigns. Customer success stories will let you attract more leads because 90% of consumers tend to trust a recommended brand, even if it is a review from a stranger. Moreover, 95% of buyers read reviews before purchasing anything. Such promotions will benefit both your lead generation and retention of the existing clients because they will feel that their opinion is valuable to your company. Motivate consumers to become your brand advocates. You can make your clients work as your best brand’s promoters. Create a referral program to inspire people to recommend your brand. Offer a discount for buyers' mentions of your company on social media, promo codes for consumers’ friends after the first purchase, or gifts for the ones who attracted more clients. It will keep them engaged, let you save costs on traditional marketing, and help generate already warm leads without much effort. Use these ideas to make your customer marketing strategy powerful and effective. Study the examples of successful strategies from well-known brands below. Customer Marketing Strategies with Examples Attention to the experiences you provide and consistent service are the most important aspects of successful work with existing clients. Find out the brands that stand out from the competition and have effective customer marketing strategies below. CULTNAKED This clothing brand uses UGC content on their social media constantly. In such a way, they show their products worn by existing clients, create a strong connection with consumers, and raise loyalty. The brand posts photos of both famous personalities and unknown girls. It lets the company create an image of a premium brand chosen by the stars but affordable for everyone. Such collaboration is beneficial for both a company and a client. When brands post user-generated photos, buyers consider that they are important and feel motivated to purchase again and build long-term relations. Linkedin This employment-oriented social media platform allows companies to find their ideal candidates. Also, they have a blog that they use to post success stories of businesses that use Linkedin to improve their performance. This tactic is powerful for attracting new leads and retaining existing ones. Every brand wants to get their story into the Linkedin blog because many people read it and the article can work as a company’s promotion. At the same time, the platform also benefits from such content as it helps them provide value to existing consumers and build strong relations with them. Moreover, other companies can use these articles as guides to improve their performance and, in such a way, get interested in working with Linkedin. IKEA This world-famous furniture and home accessories developer cares about consumers’ experiences by using concern reporting. Buyers can always write to the company about their problems with discrimination, corrupt activities, or environmental violations connected with IKEA’s work. The company will solve them and raise the level of their services. At the same time, people will feel that their problems are vital for the brand. It can help IKEA retain clients even after negative experiences. Congrats, now you know what customer marketing is and why it is essential. Build a strong strategy and empower it with LIKE.TG’s products. We offer email, SMS, and web push services to deliver relevant messages to different segments of your clients. Collect data about every buyer in our CRM system to make communication more personalized. We provide free plans on most products to make your customer marketing performance even more successful.

A customer health score is a metric that allows customer success teams to predict which consumers will grow and which will churn out. It helps reduce churn, understand customers’ needs and desires, and improve products. In this article, we’ll unveil the reasons to calculate the customer health score. We’ll also learn how to assess and enhance this indicator. Why is a customer health score important? Often, entrepreneurs who own startups make a wrong focus. They care too much about customers who will leave the brand anyway without noticing those customers who contribute more to the business's success. You need to evaluate a customer success score before the situation escalates and leads you to clients who have already decided to leave. This indicator is essential since it helps you avoid a high level of customer churn. Once you have it identified, you’ll be able to address risks and prevent unpleasant scenarios. A customer success team uses a customer health score to determine standards that aren’t met. As a result, some customers become unsatisfied. Customer success managers investigate the issue to solve a product or service problem. Knowing that they are cared for, customers stay happy and loyal. The executive and product teams also analyze the score to stay in the know of the healthy customers and those at risk. They can conclude what is wrong and fix the problem in the product, improve customer support, increase usability, or ensure a better user experience. Now that you know about the importance, let’s move to the ways to measure the metric. How to measure a customer health score? Once you decide to evaluate your customer health score, you should pay attention to the 6 main metrics. We’ll review them one by one so that you know what exactly you should analyze. Customer engagement. The metric evaluates interactions and communication with your customers through various channels. You can use many effective tools, such as email campaigns, messengers, social media, websites, events, etc. To get customers involved, you need to communicate with them and provide different offers that might be interesting. Make use of the most essential customer engagement tools such as chatbots, surveys, emails, listening tools, and push notifications. With LIKE.TG, you can develop outstanding email campaigns, set up chatbots and web push to inform customers about your new offers. Product usage. In SaaS products and services, it’s crucial to track product usage. Pay close attention to stages like customer onboarding, training, and resources you provide. Identify the issues that occur with your product. Consider conducting a survey or asking for customer feedback. This process will help you identity bugs and problems before they escalate. Remember, customers always expect a seamless experience. Customer relationship. To have healthy customers, you need to establish strong relationships with them. Good customer relationships bring you good ROI, a loyal customer base, and growth. To achieve that, you should meet customer service expectations, help solve clients’ problems, establish trust, reward existing customers for their loyalty, show empathy, be consistent in communication, and ask for feedback. Customer advocacy. If your customers tell about your brand and recommend it to their friends, it means that they approve and appreciate everything you do. They feel happy with your product. Moreover, word-of-mouth promotion is the most powerful tool that helps you win more clients. Customer sentiment. This is the most difficult metric to measure since it relies only on your feelings about certain accounts. Customer feedback is the main source of information. There are many points you should count on when estimating customer sentiment. They include the level of contempt with onboarding, product’ features, customer support, website, etc. Customer ROI. This metric shows the benefit your product brings to customers. You need to figure out whether your customers earn more than they spend on your service. For example, if your customer spends $3 on your product and earns $20 per month, it means that you managed to bring profit. The metrics are clear, so it’s time to proceed to the ways to improve the score. How to improve your customer health score? There are several ways you can find out about the problems in your product or service and eliminate them. Ask for customer feedback. The most effective way to unveil why customers are unhealthy is to ask about the problem that bothers them. You should do it quickly before the issue escalates and influences customer retention. If you don’t want to lose customers, you should act. Ask customers to answer several questions about your product, customer support, user experience, usability, etc. Once you have the answers, you’ll get to know the areas that impact customer experience. Work hand in hand with other teams to solve the problem as fast as possible. For example, if the analytics indicates that users churn out after registering with the service, you should think about the quality of onboarding. Analyze usage patterns. The second way is to analyze and evaluate the usage patterns of your product or service. Maybe it’s time to review your product and incorporate new features to help customers explore your product. For instance, consider creating in-app guides to bring clients to success faster. With deep analysis, you’ll know which areas require your attention. Since it’s related to the customer success team, its members should work on it. Congrats, now you know the most important facts about the customer health score. This information will help you measure your metric and improve it.

Customer relations is the sum of interactions and experiences between the company and the client over a period of time. Companies aim to foster long-term relationships based on frequent communications. In the article, we explain the importance of customer relations and the difference between this term and customer service, highlight the benefits of positive customer relations and provide the ways to build them. The Importance of Customer Relations According to the Microsoft study, 56% of consumers have higher expectations for customer service from year to year. This is why customer relations today are essential: people choose the company to buy not only by the product features but also by their previous customer experiences and service you provide. Working with existing clients is easier than with new ones because they are already loyal to your brand. On the other hand, your company needs to spend a lot of time and costs to attract new leads, make them trust you, and turn them into customers. Establishing good customer relations is the way to decrease these spendings without loss in profit. Customer satisfaction and good relationships help increase customer retention and customer lifetime value (LTV). All well-known brands provide excellent service to build strong relationships with their customers. It helps them make the company grow and get a stable income. However, the difference between customer relations and customer service is not obvious but extremely important. Discover more about it in the next section. Customer Relations vs Customer Service Some beginners misunderstand the terms ‘customer relations’ and ‘customer service’ and do not pay enough attention to these processes. We describe the difference and provide the peculiarities of each one below. Customer service is an inbound function and usually involves solving clients’ problems when something goes wrong with the product. It is the support team's responsibility and depends only on certain managers. Customer service is focused on solving short-term customer pains. Customer relations focus on proactive steps that will make the customer experience better in the future. Companies build customer relations with a long-term approach to get the benefits for years. The advantages of good customer relations are inspiring, and we will describe them in the next section. 4 Benefits of Positive Customer Relations Good relationships can help your company grow faster and become the leader in the market. Discover what benefits you get from building strong customer relations below. Customer satisfaction. HubSpot states that 68% of people are ready to pay more to a brand that offers positive experiences. If your company has good relations with the clients, they will be more satisfied, and, consequently, you will be able to get bigger profits. Customer loyalty. Satisfied clients are more likely to become regular ones. Such people ignore small mistakes in your company, they recommend friends and come back again and again. Good customer relations can help you get more regular customers and make them more loyal. Customer retention. According to Khoros, 65% of customers switch brands because of a poor experience. Strong customer relations prevent you from losing clients because they have only positive experiences. Moreover, they help you increase profits. Retention Science states that increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%. Customer feedback. Good customer relations make it easier to get customer feedback. If people trust your brand, they are more likely to share their needs and pains. Moreover, strong customer relations lead to more individual interactions with every customer, and such an attitude positively influences their buying decisions. Now you understand why good customer relations are vital. Continue reading to discover the ways to build strong relationships between your brand and clients. 5 Ways to Build Strong Customer Relationships There are lots of details that most companies miss while building relations with their clients. We will provide the most important ones and explain how to take advantage of them. Understand your customers. You should analyze your target audience and define your future customers' needs, pains, and problems before starting to work. It might be a good idea to create an image of your ideal clients and describe their interests, preferences, and social status. Then think of ways to solve their problems and provide amazing service. Support this strategy by conducting market research and regularly interviewing your customers about their needs. Hire people with good communication skills. All the companies’ employees should work on building good customer relations, but especially they depend on the customer service department. Hire people who can find the way from any situation, be patient and polite with every client. It might be a good idea to make every manager responsible for a certain group of regular clients and create client cards to make your communication more personalized. Communicate on social networks. Strengthening a company's social media profiles can help you become closer to the clients. You can show backstage of product development, announce future launches and gain more insights into customer experiences. Additionally, it becomes easier for the client to contact your brand and solve their problems faster. Ask for feedback. Customer feedback can help you define the needs of the target audience and estimate clients’ satisfaction. It will be easier for you to develop your future products and attract new customers based on the experience of existing ones. Moreover, people feel more loyal to the brand that values their feedback and takes it into account. Be thankful to the clients. You should give people more than they expected to build strong relations and make them regular clients. Thank your customers for being with you. You may do it by providing special discounts for regular customers, certain gifts or congratulating them on birthdays and other holidays. Congrats, now you understand the importance of customer relations and the difference between them and customer service, know the benefits of good relations, and the ways to build strong customer relations with your company.

A customer journey map is a chart that includes certain actions customers take to achieve specific goals as well as the emotions and experiencesthey havewhile doing this. It helps companies understand consumers, predict their behavior, provide customers with a smooth user experience, and improve their marketing strategy based on customer demand, needs, and preferences. The video below will provide you with the definition of a customer journey map and some essential facts you should know. In this article, we’ll unveil why a customer journey map is essential, what purpose it has, and how to use it. We’ll also review how to create a map and see several real-life examples. Why is a customer journey map important? Now, when the choice of companies varies greatly, a business needs to meet customers’ expectations and wants to attract new consumers. A good customer journey map allows brands to step into consumers’ shoes and obtain a profound understanding of their needs, behavior, and actions. As a result, businesses can provide the right solutions for their clients’ problems and satisfy them. If a company’s departments use this information wisely, they can enhance customer experience, customer support, and communication with clients. Maps help boost customer satisfactionwith a certain brand and providecustomers with more reasons to come back and become loyal to this company. They also enable entrepreneurs to increase customer retention, develop a customer-centric strategy, and obtain a new target market. A good visual representation allows business owners to optimize theircustomer onboarding process, approach prospects and customers by using different marketing methods, meet clients’expectations, and develop sequential buyer journey steps. Companies create diagrams because of their main advantage — the ability to depict the stages consumers need to go through, which allows them to understand clients better and address their needs promptly. Let’s now proceed to the primary purpose of a customer journey map. What is the purpose of a customer journey map? Since technology and buying trends often change, getting into consumers’ minds and understanding what they want can be a challenge for companies. To do it, brands create customized offers and use different techniques. However, to reach out to consumers, businesses should pay attention to clients’ needs and wants and have a clear understanding of their customer journey. By visualizing the buyer journey, a company’s team can receive some insights into the process and obtain essential customer data. A team designs an accurate diagram that serves as a source of information about consumers. Customer journey maps encompass the actions clients perform during their interaction with a particular brand or product, their wishes, complaints, feelings, and experiences. It’s time to dive into the process of visual representation of customers’ actions. How to Create a Customer Journey Map Determine your goals Get customer feedback Focus on one ideal buyer Specify the main touchpoints with consumers Analyze customer interactions with your company Eliminate possible and existing drawbacks If you want to create a great customer journey map, followthese six main steps. Determine your goals. Before designing a map, define the main objectives of your mapping. Determine what you want to achieve: increase customer retention, find some information necessary for your future business decisions, or improve customer loyaltyand customer experience. Afterward, specify the audience you target. You might also need to develop a buyer persona that will represent your ideal customer during the process. It helps direct all your efforts and aspects of your map towards reaching one ideal customer. Get customer feedback. Once you set the goals, conduct research. Consider using surveys and questionnaires to receive comments from leads who are interested in purchasing from your brand and customers who already have experience interacting with your company. Focus on one ideal buyer. After figuring out the types of people who interact with your company, you need to pay maximum attention to one persona that embodies your ideal customer and combines the most important characteristics. This step is essentialin creating a map that describes customer experience in detail. Specify the main touchpoints with consumers. Conduct research to unveil the stages at whichprospects and clients interact with you and the channels they come from. Brand touchpoints include your site, blog, social media, online and offline events, online ads, and more. Monitor how often customers interact with you using these channels. As a result, you can get insights into the performance of your website and social media content and identify your most effective marketing channels. Analyze customer interactions with your company. Once the map is ready, you need to jump to the most important part of the process — evaluating your results. You can perform a website analysis, see how your leading competitors approach customers, leverage CRMto collect customer feedback, and use net promoter score to let customers rate the likelihood of recommending your brand. With these strategies, you can assess the results, define the steps you should take, and meet customer needs. Eliminate possible and existing drawbacks. After analyzing the acquired data, you can improve your website, content, and the quality of customer support according to customers’ wishes. Say, your blog articles don’t convert. In this scenario, you need to write expert informative material, create tutorials, and offer demos. For example, suppose your landing pagedoes not bring many registrations. In that case, you might have poorly described the benefits of your product, and visitors don’t understand what they can obtain after registering. Consider writing a more detailed and clear description of your product and its benefits to solve this problem. Now that you know about the necessary steps, we’ll move to the next section to discuss how to use these maps. How to Use Customer Journey Maps There are various scenarios in which it will be useful for a business to create a customer journey map. Improve customer experience (CX). Insights into the current customer experience can help you improve your service. Different problems might occur and negatively influence CX. They include the absence of customer service in social media profiles, lack of information, personalization, empathy, inability to deliver solutions, etc. After identifying the problems, you can eliminate them. Utilize effective strategies to make customers feel comfortable with your brand, and encourage them to return.Helpyour customer support team respond to clients faster using multiple channels, personalize customer interaction, and conduct training programs for your sales and support departments to establish positive relationships with customers and understand their pain points. Startimproving your company. Pay attention to the internal communication in your firm. Customer service is a factor that shapes the image of a business in consumers’ minds, so make sure that your reps provide the best service. You should also prioritize customers and their satisfaction with your product. Next, we’ll review several examples of customer journey maps. Examples of Customer Journey Maps You can encounter different types of maps that bring various benefits based on your primary purpose. To achieve the best results, you should choose one that can help you reach your goals. Check out the examples below. Current state map The map encompasses consumers’ actions, thoughts, emotions, and experiences when interacting with your brand. From this chart, you can find out about your customers’ current experience. With its help, businesses can improve their customers’ buyer journey. Below you can see an example of a customer profile that includes expectations and opportunities. The client wants to pay a lower price for a plan without having any usage limits. This customer expects clear online information, excellent customer support, and an opportunity to compare plan breakdowns. Amobile company can provide support across different marketing channels, compare alternative plans, and break their current price into smaller amounts to retain this client. Service blueprint map This chart uses the basic structure other maps have. However, unlike the current state map, this one also includes factors responsible for providing customers with the best experience. They include response time, convenience, product, expectations, etc. Service blueprint maps help businesses identify things that negatively influence current buyer journeys and decide what needs to be done to ensure a smooth customer experience. Simply put, businesses develop customer journey maps to enhance clients’ interaction with their brands. This way, they improve their clients’ onboarding process and buyer journey andboost customer loyalty.

Customer perception is the customers’ opinions and impressions about your brand. This term summarizes their feelings about your company from direct and indirect interactions. In the article, we explain why customer perception is important, provide top factors affecting it, and provide ways to build and measure positive customer perception. Why is customer perception important? Positive perceptions of your clients can help your brand grow, improve and become one of the best companies in the market. Read why it is so and how to profit from good customer perceptions below. They shape long-term relations with your clients. Customer perceptions form their experiences and play an essential role in building customer loyalty. Brands that provide positive perceptions have more regular clients, lower churn rates, and fewer clients that switch the company to another one. In other words, good perceptions help build a sustainable customer base. They influence word-of-mouth marketing. Perceptions form your brand image in the minds of your customers. Many consumers who gain positive perceptions tend to share their impressions on social media and promote your brand with UGC content for free. However, people tend to share negative experiences too. According to Invesp, 86% of people hesitate to do business with a company if it has negative online reviews. Consequently, customer perceptions affect your brand reputation directly, and they can either attract more potential customers or turn them away from your brand. Perceptions influence purchasing behavior. The Keenfolks states that 80% of customers are sure their experiences and perceptions are as important as the products themselves. Positive perceptions from communication with your support team, social media and websites, packaging, etc., can persuade your customers to buy more than they planned. On the other hand, even if you offer a lower price but your customer support is bad, clients may choose your competitor and pay more for a higher quality of service. Understanding customer perceptions helps you improve. Analyzing clients' feelings about your brand gives you knowledge about your company’s drawbacks and shows ways to improve them. You can discover more about customers’ preferences and use this information to improve your marketing, service, and products. They influence your profits directly. The consequence of all the previous points is that companies that provide positive perceptions earn more. They are more resistant to market changes because they have many loyal customers and brand advocates. Now you understand why perceptions are so important in today's competitive market. Let’s go further to discover the factors that affect customer perceptions. 4 Factors Affecting Customer Perception Both direct interactions with your clients’ service and company’s products, and indirect interactions with your brand’s social media, website, reviews on the products, etc influence customer perceptions. Below we explain the main factors affecting clients’ perceptions and their peculiarities. Company’s values. According to Small Business Trends, 71% of people prefer buying from brands that share their values. Identify your company's values and transmit them through your website, social media, and promotional campaigns. Build trusting relations with consumers. Edelman’s 2020 Trust Barometer states that if people trust your company, they are more likely to engage with it and buy your products. Marketing. Your advertisements and the way you promote your product can describe your company and view certain associations. You create expectations about your brand and should meet them later. Be consistent in product promotion and highlight only the problems your product can solve. Customer service. The way you communicate with your clients and help them with different questions influences their perceptions. People prefer brands that provide fast and qualitative client support. Friendly customer service representatives cause 73% of customers to stick with a brand, states Nextiva Blog. Reviews. According to Qualtrics, 93% of consumers say online reviews influence their purchase decisions. Positive reviews help you build a good reputation and attract more potential customers. Note that 52% of people believe that companies need to act on customer feedback, states Nextiva Blog. It is not enough to answer the review. Improve your company according to client’s needs and become better. Understanding these factors can help you concentrate on the most important issues while working with customer perceptions. In the next section, we provide tips on building and maintaining positive perceptions. How to build customer perception? According to SuperOffice, 45.9% of companies think that customer experiences and feelings are more important than pricing and product. It is logical because the same study showed that 86% of people are ready to pay more for great experiences. Below we provide some tips to build a positive customer perception of your company. Understand your target audience’s needs and values. Customers will perceive your company in a good way if you solve their problems and strike their positive emotions. Consequently, you need to identify their pains and use this knowledge in product development and promotion. Emotional needs and values are also very important. According to Zendesk, 63 percent of people want to buy from socially responsible companies. Provide excellent customer support. Representatives use customer service as a factor in deciding whether or not to do business with a company. Client support is an integral part of the service. Your support team should answer the questions fastly and clearly, be positive and polite. You can also save time on answering FAQs by using chatbots from LIKE.TG. Build a customer-centric culture. Providing positive emotions should be one of the main values of your company. Start from the top managers and gradually teach all your employees to focus on clients’ perceptions. Value your team, and they will transmit this attitude to the customers. To increase collaboration, make communication easier, and streamline operations try CRM from LIKE.TG. React to customers' feedback. To make people feel you care about them, you should answer positive and negative reviews. In such a way, you will encourage consumers to give more feedback and know what aspects of your company you need to improve. PWC states that 32% of people would stop buying from a brand they loved after one bad experience. Answering negative reviews can help you enhance their experience, improve perceptions and prevent clients from leaking out. Share positive customer feedback on your social media. Firstly, according to Oberlo, 89% of people read reviews before purchasing, and 79% of users trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Positive customer feedback is a powerful tool to persuade potential clients to buy your product. Secondly, sharing customer feedback will motivate people to create more UGC content connected with your company and promote it through word-of-mouth. Stay consistent in all aspects. To make users feel that your company has strong values, you must constantly transmit them. People positively perceive brands that provide a pleasant experience in all aspects. Deliver the same messages through your branding, marketing, and customer service. Do not forget that your company should share the same values as your audience is. Now you know how to work with customer perception and improve the way they perceive your company. Let’s go further and discover how to measure this metric. How to measure customer perception? There is no formula to calculate customer perception because we cannot measure it quantitatively. However, there is some data we need to focus on. Below we provide the most important steps you need to do while measuring customer perception. Interview customers. Conducting surveys and providing questionnaires is one of the main ways to discover what people think about your brand. To understand consumers’ behavior, collect clients’ feedback on different stages of the customer journey. Ask open-ended questions about their motivation to do such actions and what aspects you can improve. Monitor online reviews. Checking customer ratings and the content they create with your brand can help you discover more about its advantages and drawbacks. You can also find out more about their pains and ways to solve them in such a way. Conduct Customer Satisfaction surveys (CSAT). This metric lets you quantitatively calculate clients' satisfaction with your product and service. While conducting a survey, ask people to rate their satisfaction from one to ten, then calculate the total rating and divide it by the number of respondents. Track Net Promoter Score (NPS). Marketers use this metric to identify how likely customers are to recommend your brand to their friends. The way to discover it is similar: you need to conduct a survey, ask people to rate this possibility, and calculate. Based on the results, you can find out how people perceive your company and what aspects you need to improve. Measure Customer Effort Score. Studying it will help you define the amount of effort your clients need to make a purchase. According to InMoment, 96% of people who need to make a lot of effort are likely to churn. By asking to assess the complexity of each step of the respondents’ buyer journey, you will be able to identify its most difficult parts and improve them. Analyze. Having collected all the data and calculated all the related metrics, you need to analyze this information. Try to understand the whole image. Take action and remove the drawbacks after a thorough analysis. Congrats, now you understand what customer perception is and why it is important, know the factors that affect it, and can build a positive perception of your company.

Customer loyalty is a measure of a customer’s likeliness to do repeat business with a company or brand. It is the result of customer satisfaction, positive customer experiences, and the overall value of the goods or services a customer receives from a business. When a customer is loyal to a specific brand, they are not easily influenced by availability or pricing. They are willing to pay more as long as they get the same quality product or service they are familiar with and love. Other characteristics of a loyal customer include the following: they are not actively searching for different suppliers; they are more willing to refer a brand to their family and friends; they are not open to pitches from competing companies; they are open to other goods or services provided by a particular business; they are more understanding when issues occur and trust a business to fix them; they offer feedback on how a brand can improve its products or services; as long as there is a need, they will keep purchasing from a business. All businesses should strive to improve customer loyalty to keep clients purchasing and make them promote their brand to new audiences. With email marketing, brands can boost relationships with their existing customers, in turn, improving loyalty. Email marketers build relationships by sending relevant campaigns that increase retention and build customer loyalty, thereby yielding quicker growth than other marketing strategies. Why is customer loyalty important? Repeat customers spend more than first-time customers Loyal customers produce higher conversion rates It boosts profits Retaining an existing customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one Customer loyalty helps in effective planning Loyal customer shop regularly Repeat customers spend more during the holidays Regardless ofthe size of a company, customer loyalty is essential. First-time customers are harder to convince because they do not have any experience with the services or goods offered by a business. As such, the brand needs a comprehensive marketing funnel to get them to purchase. However, customers who have already shopped from a particular store are more accessible to sell to because they know what to expect. That said, here some reasons why customer loyalty is essential: Repeat customers spend more than first-time customers. They have a way higher average order value that increases with the duration they have been doing business with a brand. Loyal customers produce higher conversion rates. Existing customers have way higher conversion rates than new ones. The average conversion rate of a loyal customer is 60% to 70%, while that of a new one is 5% to 20% It boosts profits. To enjoy better profits, brands need to foster customer loyalty. Business profits go up by 25% to 95% when customer retention rates are increased by only 5%. Retaining an existing customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one. It is cheaper to keep an existing customer than to bring a new one on board. Studies show that getting a first-time customer is 5X more expensive than retaining a loyal one. Customer loyalty helps in effective planning. Customer loyalty enables businesses to predict growth more effectively, thus helping in financial planning. Marketing teams can identify committed customers who can be relied upon hence making it easier to make anticipatory decisions based on their budget. Loyal customer shop regularly. Given their good experience with a brand, repeat customers have higher chances of returning. Moreover, their likelihood of making future purchases increases as they make more transactions. Repeat customers spend more during the holidays. While all customers tend to spend more on busy holiday seasons, loyal customers tend to perform way better. Even though 82% of U.S. adults say they are loyal to companies, many businesses focus on acquiring new customers. Research shows that 44% of companies still pay attention to customer acquisition, while only 18% implement strategies aimed at boosting retention.One of the things brands can focus on to build customer loyalty is meeting and even exceeding the expectations of their customers. A staggering 89% of businesses say that customer experience is critical for driving customer loyalty and improving retention. How to Build Customer Loyalty Reward loyal customers with a loyalty program Make customer care a priority for the brand Boost customer experience by introducing VIP tiers Segment your clients Send event-based emails Optimize the businesses’ referral program Encourage customers to give feedback and act on it A business needs to make its customers happy because happy customers will be willing to spend more money on its products or services more often. This and other benefits of having a good relationship with customers should make any business invest in building customer loyalty. Here are some practical ways to do that. Reward loyal customers with a loyalty program A reward system for the most loyal customers is a great way to keep them coming back. The simplest and probably the most popular loyalty programs use a point system, that is, customers earn loyalty points every time they buy from the brand. Then, these points, when accumulated, earn them a reward, e.g., discounts, special client treatment, freebies, etc. Another type of loyalty program is a card-based system where customers get rewarded for loading up and spending money through the card. With a loyalty program that rewards customers — with monetary or non-monetary gifts, people will feel compelled to keep coming back. The Merci loyalty program from LIKE.TG rewards customers for being active users. Make customer care a priority for the brand A vital part of any business is customer service. An effective client relationship management strategy translates to more focused solutions for specific customer needs. First, learn all you can about the brand’s different customer segments, including their buying habits, favorites, feedback about products, or the brand as a whole. Use this information to improve the service. Also, make sure employees dealing with customers directly have the information that they need to serve customers effectively. Boost customer experience by introducing VIP tiers Social status is a great motivator and influencer of customer behavior and can be leveraged in a business’s customer loyalty strategy. By adding VIP tiers for the most loyal customers, a company can boost loyalty among existing customers and entice new and less engaged customers to interact more with the brand. Start with smaller rewards for all customers who are in the program, then encourage repeat purchases by increasing the rewards for each step up the loyalty ladder. Forever 21 approaches its VIP clients with a unique 50% discount offered via an email campaign. Segment your clients It’s difficult to imagine any customer loyalty program without a personalized approach. It allows every client to feel special and cared for. To be at the right time with the right message, make use of segmentation. It will enable marketers to divide their mailing list into segments according to age, gender, geographic location, occupation, preferences, interests, engagement, and so on. Then, they craft different email campaigns with relevant offers to each group. This way, every subscriber receives what they want. LIKE.TG offers ready-to-use segments based on user activities. Send event-based emails This is the best way to personalize communication with your customers. Stop sending the same email to the entire mailing list and choose event-based marketing. This means that every time a user performs a specific action interacting with your brand, you respond to their efforts with the relevant email automatically. A new user subscribes, an abandoned shopping cart, order placement, booking a tour — these are the events that trigger sending the corresponding email. No need to do it manually, rely on a marketing automation service. Automation 360 allows users to send personalized emails, web push notifications, and SMS to thousands of customers in one go. Find out more about triggered emails in LIKE.TG in this article. Below is an email flow triggered by an abandoned shopping cart. Optimize the businesses’ referral program Consumers trust recommendations from a friend or family member over other forms of markets when buying a product.That is why creating a program where customers can get rewarded for recommending the brand to other people is so important. Boost the referral program by offering rewards for both the senders and receivers, encouraging customers to spread a word about the brand on different channels, and creating motivating and shareable referral messages. Example of a referral program from LIKE.TG: Encourage customers to give feedback and act on it Make it easy for customers to reach the brand and encourage them to provide feedback. Ask them why they prefer to buy from the brand as opposed to competitors and areas they think the business could improve. Also, set up a dedicated line of contact for customers who have an issue to get assistance with. Lastly, always thank customers after they give feedback and use it to identify problem areas in the business. Bonobos give subscribers a10-minute survey to improve the service. How to Measure Customer Loyalty Lifetime value Churn rate Referrals Net promoter score Marketers can measure loyalty by looking at customer behavior. Repeat customers make more purchases, stay customers for a long time, and make referrals. All of these things can be easily measured. So, here are the metrics for determining loyalty. Lifetime value (LTV). Lifetime Value refers to the total amount of money shoppers spend on a brand right from their first to their latest purchase. Marketers can get this metric from various subscription payment systems. Increasing Lifetime Value is a good indicator of loyalty. To boost lifetime value, brands need to develop relationships with customers, cross-sell, and upsell. 76% of companies see LTV as an essential concept. Churn rate.This is all about customers who cancel or disengage. Marketers determine this metric by calculating the percentage of customers lost based on the number of customers at the start within a specific timeline. To get the user churn rate, divide the number of customers churned by the number of customers at the beginning. The percentage can help marketers understand the number of customers lost monthly or quarterly. Another more critical churn metric is revenue churn. It allows businesses determine churn in terms of lost revenue as customers cancel. Revenue churn presents a more accurate picture of how business is going. Referrals. A business that runs a referral program can keep tabs on the number of new customers who register based on recommendations. By measuring referrals, a brand can track not just new conversions but also customers who are satisfied enough to tell others about it. Net promoter score. NSP estimates a customer’s intent to tell others about the brand. Though this metric does not tell the business if the customer recommends the product or brand, it helps the company to find out the general loyalty rate of its users. Customer Loyalty Examples Below is an email from Starbucks offering a reward (food or drink) to a customer after they collected 125 stars from their interactions with the brand. This email from David’s Tea appreciates the customer making them feel valued and loyal to the brand. Below is an email from Uber providing a discount offer to a customer. Additional Tips to Increase Customer Loyalty Make the loyalty program visible on the site: the more visible and accessible it is, the more likely that customers will engage and value it. Speak the customer’s language to make the brand relatable: use words and emoji that your audience can understand. Offer flexible payment plans: for example, customers can pay for a product little by little through flexible monthly plans. Come up with ways to frequently communicate with customers: send warm birthday and anniversary email wishes, reminders, recommendations, or monthly newsletters to keep customers engaged. Build emotional relationships with customers for long-lasting loyalty: show each customer how valuable they are to the brand by creating an experience that caters to their specific needs.

A customer lifecycle is a path a person takes from becoming aware of a product until converting into a loyal client. The process is divided into the five key stages: reach, acquisition, conversion, retention, and loyalty. This article will uncover the importance and stages of a customer lifecycle. We’ll also show how to manage it. Why is customer lifecycle important? According to Conversational, repeat customers spend more money with brands than new consumers. Loyal clients shape 40% of eCommerce companies’ profit while making up only 8% of the entire list of clients. So, the profitability of your business relies heavily on customer retention. Retaining consumers and encouraging customer loyalty requires you to analyze the customer lifecycle. Since this process consists of five stages, you need to keep an eye on each of them and assign metrics to evaluate the success of each step. As a result, you’ll have a clear understanding of overall company health. Customer lifecycle management provides a comprehensive picture of the buyer journey and shows at which point leads drop off. A customer lifecycle empowers you to identify the most and least profitable channels to allocate budget wisely. You can also find out which content users like and dislike and improve your content strategy. Tracking the customer lifecycle allows you to unveil the stages where potential clients churn out. Once you have these phases identified, you can analyze them and figure out the reasons why people churn. Moreover, you can unveil your strengths and understand why your prospects convert into loyal consumers. As a result, you’ll be able to revise your strategy and make some alterations to prevent customers from leaving. Customers’ preferences may change over time. That’s why you need to keep a track of each phase of your customer lifecycle. After analyzing the changes in consumer behavior and preferences, adapt your offer to retain customers. Align with customers’ needs, be active on social media, and make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. When customers are happy with your product, they will become brand advocates and maximize your profits. Your main task is to provide a relevant offer to help consumers solve their problems. Use preferred marketing channels to reach your audience, communicate, and promote your offer. Now that you know why customer lifecycle is essential, it’s time to review customer lifecycle stages. The next section will give you a hint of how you should act at each of them. 5 Customer Lifecycle Stages In this section, we’ll review the five elements of the customer lifecycle. Knowing the phases enables you to choose the right framework to communicate with consumers at each touchpoint. Reach. People are likely to search for a specific product after they face a problem. Users search various options on the internet and ask friends for recommendations. It’s the moment when you have the chance to communicate your offer and obtain new customers. Yet it’s not that easy since prospects compare different options to find the best in terms of price and quality. At this stage, you need to do all to educate leads about your product. Consider hosting webinars, investing in advertising and SEO, using social media marketing, and creating a blog to generate interest and share cases. Acquisition. A lead visiting your brand’s site or profile on Instagram denotes the start of the acquisition stage. Ensure fast page load time, mobile-first design, and usability of your website. Provide users with information, such as product features, pricing, an “About Us” page, etc. You should also have a knowledge base, blog, and other materials like ebooks, podcasts, and tutorial videos to educate about your product. Once potential customers have urgent inquiries, they will contact customer support. A live chat is a brilliant alternative. It helps reduce the workload of your customer service team and provide instant assistance. With LIKE.TG, you can create a live chat for your website for free without any coding skills. If you have profiles on social media, make use of chatbots to set up auto-replies and respond to customer questions 24/7. LIKE.TG’s chatbot builder allows you to create a message flow for subscribers on Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp, and Facebook and answer users’ requests fast. Conversion. At this stage, a prospect makes a purchase and converts into your customer. It is the beginning of relationships with your consumer. At the conversion stage, you need to do all in your power to establish loyalty and retain customers. Develop a loyalty program, ask for customer feedback, improve user experience, and run a referral program. You should build trusting relationships with consumers, meet expectations, improve your product and service, and provide personalized offers. Retention. According to OutboundEngine, attaining new consumers is five times more expensive than retaining the current ones. Give sufficient attention to existing customers. Contact clients to figure out whether they enjoy your product. You should know what your customers feel about your product. Ask consumers to go through customer service surveys. Consider implementing the voice of the customer program because it allows consumers to speak out their opinion and suggest improvements. Loyalty. At the loyalty stage, your consumer is the most valuable asset. Customers can become your brand advocates. So you need to care about their needs and prove that your company is worth their recommendations. Provide your clients with attractive offers, discounts, loyalty programs, and new releases. They will refer friends and multiply your revenues. Now that you know how to act at each phase of your customer lifecycle, you’ll be able to meet customers’ requirements and address their issues. In the next section, we’ll unveil steps that will help you capture attention and attain loyal customers How to manage your customer lifecycle? Sometimes brands have difficulties communicating with consumers because they have limited knowledge of their customer lifecycle. This short step-by-step guide will enable you to manage this process properly. Determine your target audience. Before marketing your product, define your target audience. You need to have a clear picture of your ideal customer. Targeting everyone isn’t a good idea. After identifying your target audience, you can craft personalized offers and share relevant content based on the customer lifecycle stage. If you want to use your resources efficiently, consider developing a buyer persona. It will represent your ideal customer and cover demographic and behavioral characteristics. Create relevant content. To earn trust and build a positive reputation, you need to put all your knowledge and experience into your blog articles, social media posts, and website information. As a result, you’ll share quality guides, detailed instructions, engaging video tutorials, etc. To rank high on Google, you need to use keywords people use to find answers to their questions. Provide answers to these questions in your articles. Writing informative and helpful blog posts ensures that users will find your website and use your content. Provide a centralized base of your brand information. Provide self-service resources to let users explore your product in more detail. Develop a website covering your company, pricing, and product features. Create a knowledge base and a blog to deliver essential materials about your product and answers to FAQs. Users with access to a centralized database will make informed purchasing decisions and won’t contact customer support for small things. Ensure support during the purchasing stage. If a purchase is expensive, decision-making can be stressful for consumers. To dispel customer doubts, consider ensuring support during all stages. A live chat widget linked to a support representative can help users avoid several problems. Once customers have inquiries, they can contact your support and get assistance. With LIKE.TG, you can create a chatbot for Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Telegram or design a live chat widget for your website. Our drag and drop builder enables you to respond to customer inquiries and provide 24/7 support instantly. Consider using a CRM. Once your startup starts turning into a bigger business, you need an easy-to-access place where you can store the data about your subscribers. CRM enables you to have a centralized database, interact with prospects, and improve customer service. The software will help you manage your list of contacts and their personal data. LIKE.TG offers a free CRM that helps you store clients’ personal data, automate communication with customers, and check the statuses of deals. Ask customers for reviews. If your consumers are satisfied with your product, offer them to share their experience with others and help them make buying decisions. Send customer surveys, share your profiles on Yelp and Google Reviews sites, and build referral programs. They will encourage word-of-mouth promotion. Reward customers with discounts, gifts, and special products for bringing friends. We offer you to leverage LIKE.TG to lead consumers through the stages of your customer lifecycle with email campaigns, chatbots, SMS, and web push notifications. It’ll help you collect detailed information about consumers, which results in personalized communication. Moreover, multichannel marketing will enable you to have more touchpoints for interaction with your audience, increase the possibility of customers’ seeing your offers, send relevant email newsletters, and more.

Customer lifecycle management is a process of identifying the stages of the customer lifecycle and assigning certain indicators to evaluate the performance of a company. It allows businesses to improve conversion rates, increase customer retention, and build customer loyalty. In this article, we’ll unveil the importance and benefits of customer lifecycle management and compare customer lifecycle and customer relationship management. We’ll also review 5 stages, KPIs, and best practices of customer lifecycle management. Why is customer lifecycle management important? The success and prosperity of a business depend on satisfied customers. Companies’ sales, marketing, and customer service teams strive to establish strong long-term relationships with customers rather than focus on one-time deals. They provide excellent usability, seamless user experience, and other benefits to turn one-time buyers into regular customers. To improve conversions, increase revenue, and obtain customer loyalty, you need to build relationships that bring profit to both parties, for you and your customer. Certain departments of your company should care about customer lifetime value since it indicates the profit you can receive from one customer. Customer lifecycle management enables you to keep an eye on the buyer journey and encourage customers to stick to the brand. In turn, they will recommend the product to friends and family. With its help, you can improve customer experience resulting in higher customer loyalty of existing clients, great ROI, more brand advocates, and higher brand awareness. Now that you know about the importance, it’s time to reveal some main benefits of this process. Benefits of Customer Lifecycle Management By improving customer experience and customer satisfaction, brands can enhance several areas of their businesses that influence sales volume and revenue. Customer lifecycle management becomes a source of crucial information for sales, marketing, customer service teams. This data helps eliminate problems during the customer lifecycle, assist and support customers, meet their needs and expectations. Strong relationships between your customers and teams ensure better customer acquisition, higher conversions, and retention. Once you have trusting relationships with your customers, you can experience the rise in sales and profitability of your company. If clients are satisfied with your customer onboarding, customer service, website’s usability, and user experience, they will promote your brand for free. Consumers can become excellent word-of-mouth promoters and help you enhance your customer base. As a result, your sales and profits will boost. When your team keeps every stage of the customer journey under control and pays attention to areas that need improvement, your company has a competitive advantage. Customer lifecycle management empowers you to keep up with trends and stay ahead of the competition. The biggest advantage of customer lifecycle management is that you can collect all your data in one place and act on it. The pros are clear, so let’s proceed to the next section to see a distinct difference between customer lifecycle and customer relationship management. Customer Lifecycle Management vs Customer Relationship Management People often confuse the terms customer lifecycle management and customer relationship management. We’ve decided to explain the difference to avoid any misinterpretation. Customer lifecycle management is a process that entails a company’s team focusing on customer relationships and constantly trying to improve them with all available methods. The process can be divided into 5 main stages. They include reaching, acquiring, developing, retaining customers, and encouraging advocacy. The company’s team controls customer lifecycles to make sure that clients feel comfortable with a brand and stick to it. If a company does everything properly, customer retention and ROI will increase. Customer relationship management is a set of technologies, strategies, and tactics businesses use to ensure interactions with clients and throughout the customer lifecycle. This tool allows marketers to analyze available data. It helps improve customer service, provide the company’s team with a centralized source of customer information, and drive sales. CRM system includes customer data from different channels and sources and stores it in one place where the company’s staff can access it. Now when the difference is clear, let’s take a closer look at the stages. 5 Stages of Customer Lifecycle Management Customer lifecycle management can be divided into 5 main stages. We’ll review each stage in more detail to clarify how the process works. Hope this information will come in handy when you decide to implement customer lifecycle management into your business. Reach. Once people have problems, they seek solutions. They look for the right product to solve the problem and attain the necessary goal. If your brand resonates with their needs, you’ll be able to encourage them to become customers. At this stage, customers pay attention to all available options your competitors offer. They compare similar products from different companies, look through reviews, and conduct their research. If you want to appear on the prospect’s radar, you need to use various marketing techniques. Take care of your SEO, inbound and outbound marketing so that your product catches the eye of a lead. Once users notice your product, they will explore it further. You can also consider using PPC ads and paid ads on social media networks. Acquisition. The acquisition stage starts at the moment a user lands on your website. This stage depends on the channel a potential customer decided to choose. For example, if people encounter your site first, they will search for educational content, pricing, blog posts. These materials will provide users with a clear understanding of your product, its features, and prices. As a result, they can decide whether this product is a perfect decision in terms of value and pricing. Since the content of your website influences purchasing decisions, you need to ensure that you have clear, informative, and complete information both about your company and product. This is very important for acquiring new customers. Customers can also come from other channels, so their buyer journey can vary. Conversion. After potential customers collect all the necessary information, they can finally make a purchase. Once they do it, they convert into customers. You need to develop relationships with customers who just converted. To encourage people to stay with your company and purchase from time to time, you need to establish strong, trusting relationships. Stay in contact with your clients, send them email newsletters with offers, make targeted ads of products they see, and update on new arrivals. Do your best to retain your customers. Retention. To retain customers, you should know whether they are healthy or at risk of churning out. For this purpose, conduct a survey or ask for feedback. Find out if your clients enjoy your product or service. You should also let customers assess your customer service and customer satisfaction through surveys. Besides, you can create the voice of the customer program to gather customer feedback and find out what requires improvement. Consider providing your customers with special perks to improve their experience with your brand. For instance, you can offer discounts, referral programs, loyalty programs, and 24/7 support. Loyalty. If you do everything right and your customers are satisfied, they will stay with your brand and purchase constantly. In this stage, people can share information about your company on social media, become free advocates of your brand, and refer their friends. You need to encourage them with special offers and VIP service. Make sure that they have the best experience with your business. Now that you know all 5 stages, it’s time to jump into customer lifecycle management KPIs. Customer Lifecycle Management KPIs If you want to maintain good relationships with customers, you need to keep an eye on the customer journey. To ensure that everything works properly, you need to identify and control KPIs. We’ve prepared a list of metrics that are a must to evaluate. Customer acquisition. When you calculate customer acquisition costs, you can figure out how much your company spends to bring new customers in. You should also estimate how much money each of the customers spends with your business. As a result, you can find out whether all your marketing and sales efforts manage to bring your targeted revenue. Net promoter score. To get the measure, you need to conduct a single survey and ask customers’ likeliness to recommend your product. Customers should rate how likely they are to share information about your brand with friends on a score from 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest score. This metric identifies different types of respondents. For example, if customer A provides your company, product, or service with a rating of 9 or 10, it means that this client can become your actual brand promoter. Churn rate. This metric informs about the number of customers who stop interacting with your company at a specific period of time. For example, users who canceled the subscription. You need to calculate the number of customers who churn out to find out the rate. If the rate is high, you need to revise your marketing efforts since it indicates that customers aren’t satisfied. To reduce customer churn, you should identify the root cause of the churn, make sure that people are provided with all necessary educational materials, check whether you target the right people, and act before consumers show any signs of dissatisfaction. Now that you know the main KPIs, we need to uncover the best practices. Customer Lifecycle Management Best Practices There are different tactics you can use to ensure the effectiveness of your customer lifecycle management. We’ve gathered a list of the most powerful practices. Check it out to learn something useful for your business. Leverage welcome campaigns A welcome email is an excellent tool for introducing your company to new customers. With its help, you can pay consumers’ attention to the most important areas of your brand. For instance, below you can see a great example from FitOn. After installing the app and signing up for the company’s newsletter, the user receives the following first email. The email contains workouts for different levels, such as beginner, intermediate, and advanced. The person can choose based on abilities and liking. Consider free trials You can apply different marketing techniques to convert subscribers into customers. Sometimes, when users can’t understand the product's functionality to the fullest, they leave. That’s why there’s a point in considering free trials. Allow new subscribers to try the service for a limited period of time. If they like your product, they’ll purchase one of your paid plans soon. For example, Shopify entices users with a 14-day free trial. People can use the service for different types of businesses. Recommend additional products You can provide extra value for customers and increase revenue by offering possible combinations of products. To do it, use the frequently bought together technique. Below you can see an example from Amazon. If you look for a laptop under the product card, you can notice products frequently bought together. In this case, these are a laptop case and a wireless mouse. Expand to new products Your current customers can become consumers of your new products. So, you can create an outstanding new product and suggest it to your existing clients. Look what Uber did. The company is famous for vehicles for hire. However, it’s also Uber Eats, a service that allows users to order food and have it delivered to their place. Hope our best practices will come in handy when you decide to implement customer lifecycle management. This process will help you advance your relationships with customers and retain them.

A customer feedback loop is a process of gathering and analyzing customer feedback to amp up a company's products, services, or overall customer experience. It's about staying in the loop with customers and crafting a plan that's all about developing cool, new solutions that match what customers really want and need. In the video below, Anya explains how to use customer feedback to your advantage. Check it out! In this article, we’ll explain why a customer feedback loop is essential and how it benefits a business. We’ll also uncover forms of customer feedback and show you how to create an effective customer feedback loop. Why is a customer feedback loop important? First, a customer feedback loop is essential since it helps increase customer satisfaction. Collecting and analyzing feedback helps you eliminate the gaps and improve specific areas of your product or service. By responding to customer concerns, you can make the experience with your brand more pleasant. Secondly, you can improve your product or service. Customers give you fresh eyes to see what's awesome and what needs work in your product or service. Their feedback? It's like striking gold, giving you the lowdown on what's hot and what's not with your product, service, site, or customer support. They shine a light on problems and gaps you might've missed. When you dive into that feedback, you're armed to make savvy decisions on making your product better, launching new stuff, or giving updates that hit the spot. Thirdly, you can retain customers who perform repeat purchases. When incorporating a customer-centric approach, you demonstrate to customers that you care about their opinions, needs, preferences, and problems. By listening to your clients, you establish reasons for them to stay. If you pay attention to your gaps and resolve them, you encourage customer loyalty and returning customers. Now that you know why a customer feedback loop is crucial, it’s time to find out the main benefits of this marketing strategy. How does a well-structured feedback loop can benefit businesses? With a well-thought-out feedback loop, companies can benefit in various areas. In this section, we’ll uncover the most common reasons to consider implementing this marketing approach. Product improvement. When you're giving your all for the company, but the results don't quite hit those business goals, there's a gap somewhere. But before or when that situation creeps up, it's time to turn to your customers for a hand. Those loyal customers? They're gold mines of insights and crucial information to improve your product. Knowing where your product or service falls short is the ticket to always aiming higher, bringing in innovations and updates that keep things top-notch. Lower customer churn. When you proactively respond to customers' concerns, you prevent your clients from walking out the door. If you do everything possible to meet customer requirements, you keep them sticking around instead of scouting for other options. Higher customer satisfaction. Gathering customer feedback is key to spotting the gaps in your product, service, or overall experience with your brand. Feedback is information that helps identify the issues and eliminate them. When you dive into those customer inquiries and tweak your product to shine brighter, that's when clients dig your brand. They stick around, keep coming back for more, and keep your business buzzing. Competitive advantage. Regularly snagging that customer feedback helps your company stay nimble, adapting on the fly to make your product even better based on what customers say. Changing trends and market conditions often push businesses towards change, but they aren’t always ready for this. In this scenario, you'll leap ahead of the competition, serving up what customers want in a flash. Customer loyalty. Ensuring constant customer engagement and interaction is the ticket to winning their loyalty. When clients see that their thoughts count, they're all in for your brand. Plus, when they notice real changes after speaking up, they're here to stay. They'll keep coming back to your company, not even thinking about checking out the competition. Inspiration for innovation. Customer feedback can serve not only as a tool for eliminating the gaps but also for creating space for innovation. Clients’ insights, preferences, desires, and needs can inspire you for some additional features, products, or services. These add-ons will align with customers' requirements and market demands. Customer-centric approach. A company incorporating a customer feedback loop demonstrates its care about customer input and is willing to improve. It helps establish a customer-focused mindset and strive towards improvement. Clients, in their turn, will appreciate such dedication with loyalty and repeat purchases. Preventions of bigger problems. A customer feedback loop allows your business to catch tiny issues before they snowball into big problems for your business. Customer feedback serves as a risk mitigation tool. When you manage to solve customer concerns in time, you’ll be able to avoid consequences resulting in a bad reputation, public discussions, and disqualification of you as a business. Now that you know the advantages of a customer feedback loop, let’s review the existing customer feedback forms. Forms of Customer Feedback You can gather customer feedback through different forms. The choice depends on the channels and information you want to receive. In this section, we’ll uncover some of the most commonly used customer feedback forms. Reviews. Your business will receive valuable insights if you allow customers to leave their reviews on your website. Clients can also share their reviews on third-party sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google Reviews. These reviews will allow you to level up your product or service. Surveys. Surveys can be both online and offline. However, nowadays, business owners prefer to send questionnaires to email addresses or ask clients to fill them out on a brand’s site. It’s more convenient and accessible. Well-thought-out questions can do wonders for your company, identifying the problems and helping you resolve them. LIKE.TG empowers you to manage several channels like chatbots and email to send surveys to clients and get their feedback. Feedback forms. A feedback form enables you to gather opinions on your product or service. By adding such forms to your site, you can clearly understand customer experience with your brand. After receiving this data, you’ll be able to make improvements that influence the experience with your company and increase customer satisfaction. Social media. If you want to know what people think about your product or service, social media is your hotspot. From comments and mentions to DMs on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, that's where the buzz is. Customer support communication. When customers have some complications or problems with your product or service, they instantly contact customer support agents. That’s why your customer support team can become a perfect source of information. Phone calls, live chats, and emails help you collect information about your product and obtain some valuable insights. It's the fuel for making your next moves, improving, and updating like a champ. Focus groups. One more helpful form of customer feedback is a focus group. It’s a group interview that contains a small number of people with common traits and experiences. These people discuss specific business areas, such as a product, service, or experience. They help you figure out the strengths and weaknesses of your company. Chatbots.Chatbot is a multi-purpose solution that promotes your product, sells, and collects feedback. After training the bot, you can set it up to gather feedback on a specific day and time. This is very convenient since it doesn't require human intervention. With LIKE.TG, you can build chatbots and collect feedback through the most popular messengers and social media platforms like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Telegram. You can also add a live chat to your site to gather customer insights. Customer forums. There are many reliable platforms where customers share their experiences with specific brands, exchange opinions, ask and answer questions, and leave feedback to the community. These platforms can be used for sharing experiences and exploring information for further purchases. By analyzing information about your product or service, you can draw conclusions and make improvements to your business. Usability testing. Running a test on usability is always a good idea if you want to ensure customers feel comfortable. It allows clients to use your product and provide their feedback regarding their experiences. As a result, you can resolve the existing issues. Now that you know the most widely used forms of feedback, let’s proceed to the next section to find out how to create an effective customer feedback loop. How to build an effective customer feedback loop? An effective customer feedback loop requires you to systematically gather, analyze, and use available information. We’ve identified the most essential steps to consider when creating a customer feedback loop, so let’s check them out. Determine your goals. First, you need to clearly understand your intention for incorporating a customer feedback loop. You should know the goals you want to achieve and the information you want to collect. Understanding the data for attaining your key objectives is essential to reach your goals. Define main touchpoints. Once you know the objectives, you’ll need to identify the key touchpoints where you can receive valuable feedback. For instance, it can be purchase, customer onboarding, product usage, etc. Select the most effective channels. Choose the channels while keeping in mind your goals and touchpoints. The most important thing is to pay attention to the communication channels your target audience prefers to use for interaction. You can use various feedback forms for WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, live chat, chatbot, email, Telegram, etc. Create accurate questions. Work on the development of well-thought-out questions that are clear and concise. Ensure that your survey questions are specific and correlate with your key goals. Your surveys should encourage your customers to provide actionable insights rather than to answer “Yes” or “No.” Make use of innovative technology. Businesses use technology to conduct surveys, collect feedback, and analyze it. This is because it’s impossible to manage large amounts of materials manually. Enter survey tools, customer feedback software, and analytics platforms—these tech champs make collecting customer insights a breeze and crunching those numbers lightning-fast. Include open-ended questions. Consider implementing open-ended questions if you want to receive qualitative feedback. Let clients share their experience with your brand, product, or service. Customers can help you identify problems and effectively resolve them by providing you with their thoughts and suggestions. Use Net Promoter Score. Net Promoter Score is a one-question survey asking the likelihood of customers recommending a business to their friends and family. With this metric, you can evaluate satisfaction with your brand and identify three types of clients: promoters, passives, and detractors. This information might be useful for further marketing strategies. Take measures promptly. Develop a plan of action and use specific tools to respond to your customers’ feedback quickly. You should be fast at reviewing, analyzing, and acting once you receive information from clients. Divide feedback into groups based on priority and address urgent problems first. This way, you’ll show appreciation for consumers’ contribution to your business and its success. Tell customers about the positive changes. Once you consider customer feedback and solve the issues, inform clients about it. They will be pleased to find out that their opinion, thoughts, and experience is valued. Be transparent to show your gratitude for feedback and build trusting relationships with your audience. Train your customer support agents. It’s necessary to provide your customer support agents with the skills, knowledge, and tools to proactively collect customer feedback. During the call, agents can obtain all the needed data to improve a product or service. Your team should be ready to respond to clients’ issues correctly. Let your customer support team collect feedback. Consider implementing a closed-loop feedback system, which implies customer support reps following up with clients who have shared feedback. Doing so will show your company's commitment to finding the real solution to existing problems. Reward customers for feedback. Rewarding systems are a good reason for customers to leave their feedback on your company. Encourage your existing customers to provide valuable feedback that brings changes to your business. You should consider the incentives as rewards that might interest your audience. Document customer feedback. Documenting all the valuable insights is necessary for all your company’s teams. Spread that information across all departments, and you'll have everyone in your company marching to the same beat, all geared up to hit those business goals together. Congrats, now you know what a customer feedback loop is and why it’s a game-changer. Hope that our step-by-step guide on building an effective customer feedback loop for your business will come in handy. When it's time to automate that feedback collection, count on LIKE.TG, with its chatbots and bulk email service, to be your ace in the hole.

Customer experience management is organizing a company’s interactions with the audience to provide positive experiences, improve satisfaction and build strong relations. It aims to study the client's behavior, analyze it and optimize your strategy accordingly. In the article, we explain what customer experience management is and why it is important, highlight its benefits, and provide tips on managing customer experience effectively. We also describe the 5 best customer experience software. Why is customer experience management important? According to Smartkarrot, 89% of companies compete mostly based on customer experience. These statistics prove that customer experience management now plays a crucial role. Markinblog states that retaining an existing client is 7 times cheaper than acquiring a new one. Generating new leads may be rather expensive because you need to spend costs on building a marketing strategy and product promotion. On the other hand, customer experience management allows you to save costs on launching large-scale advertising campaigns by retaining existing clients. Providing positive experiences helps increase customer loyalty and satisfaction. According to the Semrush blog, 96% of satisfied consumers are more likely to tell other people about your brand. The same article states that word-of-mouth marketing influences 90% of purchases, so recommendations are a powerful way to increase your revenue. Finally, loyal clients are 50% more likely to try new products than potential ones. This fact helps companies be more confident in their future launches and gain feedback quickly. Effective customer experience management means gaining more reviews from consumers and improving roadblocks immediately, which leads to faster company development. Now you understand why working with the customer experience is so important. Discover more about the benefits of effective management below. Benefits of Customer Experience Management According to Salesforce, 80% of people believe that a brand's experience is as important as its products. In this section, we’ll review the benefits of a positive customer experience for both businesses and consumers. It allows brands to improve customer loyalty and increase profits. Gartner states that customer experience drives over two-thirds of buyers’ loyalty. Effective customer management allows you to build strong relations with clients, increase their retention and turn them into regular ones. Moreover, it helps businesses drive more revenue because brands that provide excellent experience 14% are more likely to increase profits. You can charge higher prices as 86% of consumers are ready to pay more for an amazing customer experience. It lets companies understand customer needs better. Effective customer experience management involves a deep analysis of the target audience’s behavior. It enables businesses to provide more personalized experiences. Also, you can make more informed business decisions and create products that are necessary for the market. Customer experience management helps gain insights on required changes and optimize products immediately. It helps increase sales. According to Semrush Blog, existing customers are 60–70% likely to buy new products, while new ones are only 5-20%. Focusing on retaining clients allows you to reduce the number of efforts needed to make a sale. You can create a product line and use loyalty programs and discounts for regular clients to motivate them to buy again. Also, you can increase the number of purchases by cross-selling and upselling. It increases word-of-mouth references. 23% of consumers talk about their favorite products every day, so providing positive customer experiences lets you get more recommendations. Such free reviews are a powerful way to promote your products because 90% of buyers tend to trust a recommended brand. You can attract new clients and drive more revenue using word-of-mouth marketing. It allows companies to reduce complaints and improve their reputation. Clients who have a positive interaction experience with a company are less likely to pay attention to small mistakes. They tend to provide feedback to the brand directly and highlight the aspects that need improvement. It lets you avoid crises and overcome them much faster because you discover the possible roadblocks immediately. Moreover, it can help you build a strong reputation and reduce the number of similar complaints in the future. Building a strong customer experience management strategy is necessary in today's competitive market. We provide some steps to do it successfully in the next section. 6 Steps to Effective Customer Experience Management Brands with consistent experiences have higher brand awareness, employee satisfaction, andaverage order value. Continue reading to reach such results and improve customer experience management in your team. Study and segment your target audience. To satisfy customers’ needs and provide positive experiences, you need to understand their buyer behavior. Start from demographics, preferences, and pains of the audience. Then define a few segments of consumers based on their differences and highlight the peculiarities of each one. Consider these groups to provide more personalized messages during every interaction. Analyze your current strategy. Once you understand how your clients behave, it is time to discover the pros and cons of existing customer journeys. Collect qualitative and quantitative analytics to understand the roadblocks consumers meet at every touchpoint. Such metrics as reach, engagement, and conversions will help you discover the weakest parts of the journey, and buyer feedback can highlight the ways to improve them. Align content and personalize it. Make interactions with consumers more personalized based on segments you have created. Remember that all customer experiences should be consistent, so it is better to align the messages you deliver. Define the company’s values and use them as a basis for all messages you transmit. Design a customer journey map. To deliver the right message at the right time, you should create a consistent buyer journey. Combine the touchpoints from the previous paragraph and think about how you can provide the most value during every interaction. Your plan should not finish after the purchase. Look for ways to increase customer lifetime value and motivate clients to buy again. Build long-term relations. According to Markinblog, improving customer retention by 5% increases profits by 25-95%. That’s why so many companies invest in building relationships with their clients. Use customer loyalty programs, and provide discounts and special offers to regular buyers. You should also develop an emotional connection because 82% of people with high emotional engagement always purchase from the brand they are loyal to. Collect reviews and improve your management. In today's ever-changing market, it is not enough to build a customer experience management strategy at once. You should constantly track many different metrics, analyze them and optimize your interactions. Ask consumers for feedback and use this data for future improvement. You can also identify a few of the most important metrics to make your analysis more effective. If some of these steps seem complicated to you, use one of the services discussed below. In the next section, we provide the top 5 best software to help you with customer experience management. 5 Best Customer Experience Software According to LeanData, 75-85% of managers consider CRMs, productivity apps, email marketing, and social selling the most important ways to succeed in sales. This statement highlights the importance of using different tools for customer experience management. Discover more about the top 5 ones below. LIKE.TG CRM This platform offers many opportunities to track your interactions with consumers and optimize them. You can collect data about clients into the database, accept orders, control the stages of your deals and assign tasks to different sales managers. It allows you to streamline processes to increase buyers’ satisfaction with excellent service. We provide the main features of LIKE.TG CRM below. Deals management and sales pipeline optimization. You can add deals to the CRM, define their stages, assign them to different sales reps and control their success. It allows you to get a holistic image of the sales processes in your company. You can prevent clients from leaking out and reveal the cracks in your pipeline. Well-defined database. Store all the information about clients in one place. It can help you gain more insights into their behavior and provide better experiences with every interaction. Quick connections. You can connect with buyers from the opened deal or contact record to save time and solve problems immediately. Also, LIKE.TG lets you get in touch with consumers through email, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, or WhatsApp based on their preferences. Integrations with other products. To provide more consistent experiences and automate your sales processes, you can integrate LIKE.TG CRM with other products. Launch email campaigns, answer FAQs in chatbots, use SMS and web push notifications to engage with consumers through different channels and satisfy the needs of different audience segments. Pricing: CRM is completely free for one client. If you want to use it for the team, choose one of LIKE.TG email marketing paid plans. Look at the screenshot below. Here you can see the client card in LIKE.TG CRM. It lets you collect all the data about your client and use this information to provide more personalized experiences and build stronger relations. Medallia This platform helps you track and analyze consumer behavior to gain insights and provide better experiences. You can use AI and machine learning to predict the clients’ future actions and personalize every interaction. Also, Medallia offers a wide range of integrations your sales reps can use to serve consumers more effectively. Below are the main features of this service. Data capture. You can collect information about interactions with consumers from any touchpoint and combine it with operational data. Also, you can gain sales reps’ feedback to discover more ideas on how to improve the consumer experience. Insights into interactions with consumers. Medallia provides analytics across all channels you use. You can discover more about buyers’ behavior at each touchpoint and find out opportunities to improve their experiences. Additionally, the service helps with client segmentation and offers pre-built templates for deeper personalization. AI to predict consumer behavior. This service allows companies to analyze their customers’ journeys using machine learning and artificial intelligence. You can discover trends in people’s behavior and predict them with dynamic dashboards. Real-time analytics. This platform lets you calculate and analyze data automatically. Also, Medallia provides suggestions on how to improve your clients’ experiences in real-time. Integrations with other apps. You can interact with consumers through different channels, such as email, web push, SMS, messengers, and social media. There are also integrations with sales, service, collaboration apps, and various applications designed for specific business industries. Pricing is discussed individually. There is a dashboard interface in Medallia below. You can track consumer problems with real-time alerts and find out suggestions on how to provide better experiences to your clients. Adobe Experience Manager This cloud-based service allows you to manage content and paid promotions, conduct A/B tests and gain insights into consumers’ behavior. Adobe Experience deals with social media, websites, and mobile sources, combines all the data, and creates holistic customer profiles. Discover more about the features of the service below. Content management. This platform allows you to ensure that your content is consistent. You can use it to rapidly deliver information to consumers and automate some interactions across different channels. Data collection. Adobe Experience collects information about clients in real-time, coordinates it, and provides insights about each customer. You can use these profiles to offer personalized experiences and make your engagements more effective. AI analysis. This platform tracks and matches data throughout the customer journey to define possible roadblocks. You can use machine learning to streamline cross-channel processes and find new opportunities for development. Digital documents. Adobe Experience Manager provides forms that let you collect customer responses and make end-to-end customer journeys faster. Consumers can enroll on any channel with a few clicks and e-sign securely, which helps you prevent potential clients from leaking out. Integrations. This service has open data architecture and allows you to integrate with any platform or enterprise software system you need. You can collect real-time insights on consumer behavior and help sales reps optimize the service they provide during cross-channel communication. Pricing is discussed individually. On the screenshot, you can see the interface of the Adobe experience platform. You can choose the sections, such as segments, profiles, sentiments, etc on the left sidebar. On the main screen, there are recent datasets, sources, segments, and destinations. There are also recommended articles on how to improve your customer management. Clarabridge This platform helps you manage customer reviews, gain insights from their behavior across different channels and interpret the meaning behind the words during every interaction. AI manages data automatically and notifies sales reps if something unusual happens using real-time alerts. Below we provide more Clarabridges’ features that can help you optimize your customers’ experiences. Natural language processing. You can collect and analyze data with a language processing engine from Clarabridge. It categorizes, evaluates, and creates a summary of every call automatically that saves your employees’ time for more important issues. Sentiment analysis. This platform provides lots of templates for different industries to study consumer interactions across the channels. You can understand the real meaning of buyers’ words and their attitudes toward your company and use this data to improve roadblocks and design future personalized experiences. AI-powered analytics. Artificial intelligence helps you identify potential clients who need personal support and provides suggestions to the sales managers on what to focus on. Also, you can gain insights into conversations with buyers and get to know if something goes off the script to react accordingly. Integrations. Clarabridge collects insights on communication through social media, emails, and chats. The service provides over 100 pre-built connectors to integrate with different applications and effectively manage feedback. Pricing is discussed individually. Below you can see analytics provided by Clarabridge. You can discover more about consumers’ activity, check the number of your company’s mentions, and unique contacts and find out the types of the clients’ actions. Response Tek This platform aims to collect customer feedback and provide insights on consumers’ experiences and how to improve it. It helps streamline processes by responding to the reviews automatically and notifying sales reps only if it is required. Response Tek is cloud-based and can connect with many applications for you to make customer experience management more effective. Find out more about its features below. Gathering customer sentiment and experience data. This platform lets you track customer demographics, behavior, and details of their journeys. You can manage this data in real-time and improve your service immediately. Also, Response Tek provides text analytics, sentiment, and social media analysis for you to create a more holistic image of the experiences you provide to your customers. Targeted surveys and promoters classification. You can survey randomly selected buyers and ask them about their satisfaction with the experiences you provide. Response Tek classifies the most loyal respondents as promoters and helps you convert them into your brand advocates. Trigger alerts. You can define the scenarios that need sales reps’ immediate reactions. If some problems happen, they will get push notifications. Also, Response Tek sends alerts when your clients’ follow-ups are missed. Automatic reactions to consumer feedback. This service has a Listening Platform that can analyze people’s reviews and answer them automatically. Responses are highly-personalized and fit the context. Moreover, if there is negative feedback, Response Tek notifies your sales reps immediately. Real-time analytics. You can get an overview of the experiences you deliver at every touchpoint. The service provides automated on-demand reports and can combine customer experience analytics from different channels in one place if it is needed. Pricing: 30 days free trial, then pricing is discussed. There is a statistics page of ResponseTek on the screenshot below. You can discover the overall success of the customer experience you provide, track it by channels and rank your clients according to specific attributes. Congrats, now you realize what customer experience management is and why it is important, understand its benefits, and the ways to improve it. Also, you know the best platforms you can use to manage customer experience effectively.

A customer database is a software that stores all personal information about customers, including names, emails, shopping history, and demographics, in one place. It helps establish good communication with consumers, keep the information updated, and improve efficiency. In this article, we’ll uncover the benefits of building a customer database and ways to do it. We’ll also review the 5 best customer database software. Why is building a customer database important Today, when the number of customers and businesses is constantly increasing, it’s vital to store all your customer information in one place. It will help your sales representatives provide consumers with proper communication and relevant offers. A customer database serves as a source of information for the sales team when interacting with consumers and enables them to establish good relationships. A personalized approach increases the chances of converting subscribers into customers and winning more sales. Special platforms prevent you from having chaos in your customer data when your website traffic boosts and the number of consumers increases regularly. A customer database keeps all records about your clients and prospects up to date. Customer profiles serve as roadmaps for your salespeople. After exploring information about each customer, salespeople can identify their needs, desires, problems, and challenges and prepare the right speech, presentation, phrases, etc. This data helps send personalized email campaigns. Consider tailoring your emails based on customers’ preferences. Now that you know why creating a customer database is essential, it’s time to explore the main advantages. Benefits of Building a Customer Database After creating a customer database, companies reap many benefits. It helps update consumers on relevant offers, events, promos, and discounts; reach them through preferred communication channels; establish trusting relationships; obtain loyal customers; build customer targeting; create personalized email campaigns; reach the right people at the right time; understand customers’ needs and pain points. Now that you know the pros, let’s proceed to the following section to unveil how to build a customer database. How to create a customer database? A clear understanding of the process of creating a customer database for your business enables you to save the time and effort of your team. We’ll walk you through this process to increase your productivity. Identify the functions of your database. The first thing you should do is to think of your database’s main functions. You need to clearly understand the goals you want to achieve with this platform. Databases perform four main functions: operational, collaborative, analytic, and strategical. They help your team run your business and communication with subscribers daily. CRM enables you to align marketing channels and establish proper interaction with consumers and partners. Analytical functions of your customer database ensure that you provide the maximum value for your clients and pay attention to their problems and desires. Strategic activities allow you to tailor your marketing strategy based on people’s needs, marketing trends, competition, and available distribution channels. Determine the sources of personal data. Partner with your company's sales and marketing departments to collect subscribers’ personal information and define the main sources. When you know where your customers come from, you can craft a better strategy and target the most successful channels. Choose the most suitable database type. There are different ways of storing customer information in your database. We can differentiate three main types: hierarchical (simple visual way), network (customer information linked to the owners), and relational databases. The choice of database depends on your budget, database size, and users. Split up information into segments. If you want to ensure the proper functioning of your company’s departments and teams, you need to organize your database. Determine tasks and ways to attain them. Once you finish with the plan, consider dividing your database into segments. Find additional sources of information. Conduct research to find more sources that will enhance information about your customers. They will provide additional details that will be useful for communication with clients. Consider searching for additional sources of information to find the missing information about your consumers. They can provide email addresses, phone numbers, additional contacts, full names, etc. Consider using a CRM. CRM helps you keep all your information in one place. CRM is a multi-functional tool that can store customer data, deal with statuses, and serve as a communication tool. Your marketing and sales team will get access to the necessary information, add and manage deals, and monitor the progress of every customer journey. LIKE.TG’s CRM is a platform that enables you to perform all these tasks within one place. This way, you can ensure that all your customer data and deals are secure. Now that you know how to create a customer database for your company, it’s time to explore the 5 best customer database services. They will help you increase your company’s efficiency and store all customer data in one place. 5 Best Customer Database Software In this section, we’ve gathered the 5 best customer databases regarding functionality, usability, and price. These detailed reviews of each service will help you decide which is perfect for your business goals and customers. Let’s start with LIKE.TG, a multi-functional platform that is perfect both for starters and experienced employees. LIKE.TG LIKE.TG is an all-in-one marketing solution that helps take control of your communication with customers. Its CRM enables you to collect customer data in one place and build marketing campaigns. With the Kanban board, you can visualize all your deals and have them at hand. This is essential for tracking the status of your deals and taking the required actions to achieve more sales. CRM’s Kanban board provides you with total visibility of open deals so that you know when to allocate tasks to your sales representatives. Once you do it, you can easily track their successes and failures with each potential client. To keep your sales and marketing teams updated about customers, you can organize their personal information in one place. LIKE.TG enables you to add their emails, phone numbers, and names and add notes to every record to have quality conversations in the future. After creating contact records and deals in your CRM, feel free to contact your prospective customers right away. Consider getting in touch with your potential clients through the channels they came from. You can chat with them on Telegram, Facebook Messenger, or WhatsApp or email them. Below you can see how to add contacts to your LIKE.TG’s CRM. LIKE.TG’s CRM allows you to receive orders and keep an eye on them. Consider creating a sales pipeline for your company to understand your prospects and develop a well-thought scenario of how to win them. Moreover, the service enables you to set up an automated flow to send order confirmation emails, abandoned cart emails, and reactivate passive subscribers. You can set statutes for your deals and take care of their progress. If you have many deals, you can distribute them to your team members. Consider setting up alerts if you want to get notified about new deals and delegate them instantly to your sales representatives. You can use our CRM for free for 5 users in your account. If you want to invite more users, and have an unlimited number of live chat agents and task templates, upgrade to the Basic pricing plan, which costs $37 per month. Freshsales Freshsales ensures that your team organizes all customer data fast without spending extra time on this process. With its help, your sales representatives can focus on effective sales by using all available information about your leads and existing consumers. The solution is easy to use and cost-efficient. Your team will be happy to implement Freshsales and pay attention to customers' needs. A 360° view of your clients allows you to improve your sales process, deliver personalized experiences, and win more sales. The platform enables you to ensure proper communication with customers via email. It helps you monitor your sales teams’ email conversations, send outbound campaigns, and improve sales. Freshsales takes care of one of the most popular means of communication - emails. Two-way email synchronization allows you to connect your third-party email accounts to Freshsales and manage all deals from your CRM. if you need to contact your prospective customer with an email campaign, consider ending personalized emails or emails in bulk. The platform offers free, and three paid plans. A free plan covers contact and account management, contact lifecycle stages, and built-in chat, email, and phone. You can invite up to 3 users for free. Paid plans start at €18 per month and include a visual sales pipeline, AI-powered contact scoring, sales sequences, up to 2,000 bot sessions per month, and WhatsApp business. Below you can see how to add a contact to Freshsales CRM. Salesforce Salesforce CRM is a great choice for both small and big businesses. If you are using a CRM for the first time, you need to consider this service. It’s easy to set up and equal to other platforms in terms of features and quality. Salesforce’s sales pipeline is visual, so your team members will figure out how everything works fast. You’ll be able to identify the stage of your prospects in the sales process. With an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, you’ll be able to manage all your contacts and deals fast and pay more attention to providing personalized sales experiences to your customers. With the platform’s activity tracking and workflows, you can boost the productivity of your sales representatives and increase sales. The forecast management feature enables you to receive insight into pipeline health. Once you get this data, you can make informed business decisions. Performance dashboard allows you to track the progress of your sales and marketing reps in real-time and make adjustments. If you are a newcomer, you can start with a free trial and decide which plan is more suitable for your goals. Salesforce has four paid plans, starting at $ 25 per month (if billed annually). Below you can see how to add contacts to your Salesforce customer database. Pipedrive Pipedrive is a platform designed by salespeople and aimed at selling. With its help, you can collect leads from different sources and store them in one place. You can create web forms for your website to generate more qualified prospects. The platform allows you to add and communicate with your customers and see the full history of emails, calls, and meetings. It helps you understand the stage of your prospect and identify strategies to win customers. Consider setting up reminders to track your deals and reach your contacts in time. Those will enable you to get notified about upcoming sales activities. Since personalized messages enable you to win deals faster, Pipedrive invites you to apply lead segmentation. You can categorize and filter your prospective customers based on specific characteristics. The platform provides a 14-day free trial. After that, you’ll need to purchase a paid plan if the features, pricing, and usability satisfy you. Paid plans start at €15 and include lead, deal, calendar, pipeline management, simple data import, easy customization, 24/7 support, and 300+ integrations. Below you can see how to add contacts in Pipedrive. Zoho Zoho helps you input all customer data in one place and automates workflows, processes, campaigns, and customer journeys. The platform lets you nourish trusting relationships with your consumers and bring more deals to your company. The service is simple, so if you have no experience working with a CRM, it’ll take minutes to learn. The dashboard is intuitive and easy to understand. With advanced analytics tools, you can easily identify your strengths and weaknesses and make well-informed decisions regarding your target audience. Customer insights help you improve your strategy and bring more customers. Zoho offers you to use a dedicated admin panel, state-of-the-art customization, and a powerful developer platform. Moreover, it enables you to integrate all the necessary third-party apps. Zoho CRM offers a free trial and three paid plans. The cheapest starts at €20 monthly and gives you basic modules, tasks, calls, events, advanced filters, multiple pipelines, scoring rules, sales forecasting, and email insights. Below you can see how to add contacts to Zoho CRM. Congrats, now you know what a customer database is and why it’s essential. Choose one of the recommended platforms above to improve the effectiveness of your efforts working with customers.

Customer experience (CX) is the result of clients’ interactions with your company throughout the customer journey. This term involves everything that impacts the person’s perception during every touchpoint. Watch the video to learn 4 exceptional customer experience strategies! In the article, we explain why customer experience is important, compare it with customer service, and provide ways to measure and improve customer experience. Why is customer experience important for your business? According to Super Office, 86% of customers are ready to pay more for a better experience. Such inspiring statistics show the importance of a positive customer experience for every company. Read more about its advantages in this section. Increased customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. When clients get a positive experience during every touchpoint, they feel satisfied and become more loyal to your brand as a whole. These people want to interact more with your company and buy more products. Better customer retention and lifetime value. Satisfied customers are less likely to pay attention to small mistakes and switch companies after the first lucrative offer. Such a fact positively influences your budget because it is cheaper to retain an existing customer than attract a new one. Word-of-mouth marketing. Customers who get a great experience are more likely to share this fact with friends and on social media. Semrush Blog states that 90% of people are much more likely to trust a recommended brand. Consequently, if you provide a positive experience to one customer, it can help you attract more potential customers and save money on paid promotions. Reducing clients’ complaints and returns. When people get a positive experience, they are less likely to complain about something and return your product because it has minor disadvantages. Now you understand why customer experience is so important. Continue reading to discover its difference with customer service. Customer Experience vs Customer Service Customer experience includes service, but it is much wider. Below we explain what these two terms include and how to differentiate them. Customer experience involves the client’s perception during the whole customer journey. Such touchpoints may include interacting with your website, watching content on your social media, buying process in the retail market, or communicating with your sales team. Customer service focuses on clients’ support. Usually, it includes interactions with the customers who need advice, assistance, want to complain, or leave feedback about your products. Customer service is more concentrated on direct communication while customer experience focuses on increasing clients’ satisfaction and providing a positive impression about the company. According to Deloitte, 88% of companies now prioritize the customer experience. In the next section, we provide the ways to improve it and highlight the things you should concentrate on. 6 Ways to Improve Customer Experience According to Bain Company, while 80% of companies are sure that they provide a great customer experience, only 8% of clients believe that their experience is positive. Below are ways to make your brands’ customer experience really good and stand you out from the competitors. Define and understand your target audience. You should collect as much information about your clients as possible. Create portraits of your ideal clients and identify their age, gender, social status, pains, needs, interests, and preferences. Usually, there are 3-5 segments of buyer personas. Then work with each separate group and identify what product and service they would like to get. It might be a good idea to conduct market research at this step. Develop a customer journey map. To create it, you need to define all the key steps clients go through during their buyer journeys. Visualize how your brand can attract attention and make people interested. Think about the point of contact and potential customers’ impressions. Then define the way you can engage them after the purchase. Analyze the map to understand people’s problems at each stage and find ways to avoid them. Create an emotional connection. According to the research of Beyond Philosophy, more than 50% of a customer’s experience is based on emotions. Look beyond the product and think about the impression you want to provide the clients. Check the customer journey map and think about the ways to develop emotional contact with your audience. To provide a positive experience, you need to focus on your brand’s availability, the convenience of purchase, and personalized communication with every client. Educate your team. If you want your employees to provide excellent service, you need to train them. Make education one of the main values and provide as many opportunities to study and improve skills as possible. Develop guiding principles of your company and transmit them to the employees. Your team members should understand that providing a good customer experience is necessary and know how to do it. Ask clients for feedback. Your customers can show you the non-obvious drawbacks of your product. Encourage them to write reviews: place questionnaires on your website, ask for feedback on social media, by email, or by phone calls. You can provide a discount or bonus for the review. Note that your requests should not be annoying. Also, your company should react to the feedback and remove the disadvantages mentioned in the reviews. Measure ROI from the positive experience. It can be rather difficult to calculate your profit from delivering a great experience, but this step is necessary. When you know how effective the changes in your company are, you can be more confident about your future strategy. Discover the ways to measure customer experience and the peculiarities of each one in the next section. How to measure customer experience? Measuring customer experience looks rather difficult because this metric is based on people’s emotions. However, marketers know the ways to deal with this situation. Below we provide the steps to measure the experience of your clients. Discover the most important metrics Customer experience is complex and consists of many parts. There are some metrics marketers usually use to measure how effective the customer journey is. Net Promoter Score (NPS). This metric identifies how likely your customers are to recommend your brand. It is used to discover the percentage of clients who love and are neutral to your company. To calculate NPS, you need to ask your clients how likely they are to recommend your brand and provide a scale from 0 to 10. 0-6 is a bad mark, 7-8 is neutral,and 9-10 is positive. The formula of NPS is the percentage of positive answers minus the percentage of negative ones. Customer Effort Score (CES). This metric measures how much effort people need to make to reach the next point in their customer journey. According to Gartner, 94% of customers with low-effort interactions will buy the product again compared with 4% who made high efforts. To calculate it, ask your clients to score how easy your product is to buy from 1 to 7. Then calculate the total score and divide by the number of responses. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). This metric shows how satisfied your customers are with your product and service. To discover it, conduct a survey and ask your clients about their satisfaction from all the steps in their customer journey. CSAT is defined as the average score of the whole survey and each separate step. This number can show the whole journey's effectiveness and each separate phase.You can choose one metric or use all of them. Do not focus only on these three metrics to get a more complete picture. Define other relevant metrics There is no hierarchy of analytics that measures customer experience. However, below we provide some more metrics to choose the most important ones for your brand. Customer loyalty, retention, churn rate, and lifetime value. All these metrics indirectly show the quality of customer experience you provide. Employee engagement. According to Firstup, companies with engaged workers outperform competitors by 147% in earnings per share because they provide a better experience. Customer support trends. The number of issues your clients meet shows the effectiveness of your service. If this number increases, it may influence the experience negatively. Collect more information about these metrics to discover the difficulties your customers meet. Conduct customer surveys Besides all the mentioned metrics, you can conduct surveys to ask clients about their personal experiences and collect non-numerical information. The answers may be subjective, but they can help you understand consumers better. Ask questions about specific touchpoints and react to the feedback to improve the experience your company provides. Congrats, now you know what customer experience is and why it is important, understand the way it differs from customer service, can measure customer experience and improve it.

Customer care is building an emotional bond and fostering long-lasting relationships with clients while troubleshooting customer service. The term is related to customer service, however, requires fewer calculations, focusing on satisfying users' emotional needs. In this article, you'll find out why customer care is important and the way it differs from customer service and customer success. In the end, we'll provide examples of companies caring for their clients. Stay tuned! What is the role of customer care? If you want to concentrate on retaining loyal clients rather than acquiring new leads, focus on customer care. However, it's important to know that answering users' questions and providing the necessary assistance on your product define excellent customer service, but not care. Customer care implies building an emotional connection with your customer, genuine interest in their needs and pain points, kind treatment, and empathy. Listening and adjusting to client's needs and preferences allows businesses to reap several benefits. Firstly, a respectful attitude towards clients' problems helps boost their satisfaction with your brand. Although customer care impacts figures and stats not that much, clients appreciate it. Secondly, customer care helps you increase your consumers' loyalty. Satisfied clients are likely to buy again from the brands they loved. So, showing that you care makes them stay with your company. In long term, it positively influences your customer's lifetime value. This metric allows business owners to forecast the sum of money a client can spend during the relationship with your brand. The more customers are taken care of, the more they want to reward a company. Treating consumers with respect helps improve brand reputation. Finally, excellent customer care allows you to generate higher revenue. Although, if your main goal is making money, this approach won't do, since people appreciate brands that don't put their earnings in the first place. In addition, you can make customer care your competitive advantage. Low prices and free shipping is awesome but they have nothing to do with building trustful long-lasting relationships. So, decide what plays a more important role in your business and make the right choice. We've mentioned customer service while covering the topic. Very often, marketers use the following terms interchangeably: customer care, customer service, and customer success. Still, they differ, so let's make it clear. Customer Care vs Customer Service vs Customer Success As we've already defined, customer care implies special treatment towards a client while providing customer service. So, customer service is an element of customer care. We'll illustrate the difference with an example. Say, you've ordered a vase. After opening it, you find out that it's broken. You contact customer service to fix this issue. If they ask you to send a photo of the vase from the pick-up point and promise to refund it, it is an example of customer service. If they don't require any proof from you, apologize, and send another vase, it is customer care. The goal of customer care is to provide not only a solution but make the interaction with a brand as pleasant as possible. Clients will realize relationships are more important for a brand than money. Customer success is what you can experience when dealing with a SaaS or any complex product. SaaS platforms require some learning curve which may be stressful for each client. So, companies invest in customer success departments to smooth this process. They take each client's hand and walk them through the entire path of discovering the service. Customer success teams answer users' questions, provide informative tutorials and instructions, and share cases for better understanding. Their goal is to show all the benefits of choosing their service. So, these are three different shades of customer service but they perform better when used in a mix. For you to get a clear picture of this approach, let’s discover examples from popular companies. Customer Care Examples Showing you care is not necessarily worth a big investment. All you need is to demonstrate your kind heart and understand your customers’ needs. Check out several inspiring examples of customer care. Virgin Trains, a train operating company from the United Kingdom, received several moving words from its client on social media. A client is thankful to the company not only for arranging another travel day due to the hospital appointment but for moving a family to the 1st class for a child to have a nice relaxation after. This way, the company not only solves the customer’s problem but shows its big heart. A happy customer created an Instagram post to give thanks to the Canadian grocery store. It allows consumers not only to make an order and take it from the store but takes care of people who need it. It can be challenging for mothers with children to do shopping so the grocery store staff brought the products out to her car. So, the woman didn’t have to shop with her babies and saved her time. Congrats, now you know why customer care is so important, and how it differs from customer service and success, and you’ve got inspired by several examples. Make use of LIKE.TG services to bring your relationships with clients to the next level!

Customer acquisition is a process that entails various marketing methods to attract new customers. It helps convert leads, boost sales, and expand businesses. In this video, a marketer at LIKE.TG unveils tools, techniques, and strategies to convert users into customers. In this article, we’ll uncover the importance of customer acquisition, show you how to create a customer acquisition strategy, review B2B customer acquisition strategies, and review the best customer acquisition tactics and examples. Why is customer acquisition important? Companies constantly use popular marketing channels such as social media, paid advertising, email marketing, referral programs, and SEO to obtain new customers who will engage with their brand. They implement different marketing techniques to ensure the company’s growth, increase sales, and gain profit. Brands aim to meet people’s needs, wants, and expectations to win their interest and encourage them to become customers. With the help of digital technologies, companies collect vast quantities of data about their prospects both online and offline and use different methods to drive their attention. As a result, businesses receive their love and trust and get more loyal customers. Let’s get to know the benefits that customer acquisition can bring: increased sales; improved brand awareness; your company’s growth; new investors, influencers, and partners involved; empowerment to systematically convert new customers; an opportunity to expand your business. If you aim to grow your business, customer acquisition and customer retention are equally important processes. Let’s review the difference between customer acquisition and retention. Customer Acquisition vs Retention Customer acquisition and retention have some similarities, including improved customer experience and a wide customer base. Yet, they are two different concepts that occur at different customer journey stages. Let’s find out this difference. Customer acquisition is the process of attracting new clients to a business. Marketers use lead generation tools, marketing campaigns, and collaborations to identify prospects, attract them, and convert them into customers. Customer retention is the process of preventing existing customers from leaving by re-engaging with them using personalization, customer loyalty, and email campaigns. The strategies aim at encouraging customers to perform repeat purchases. In short, customer acquisition and customer retention differ in primary goals. While customer acquisition focuses on bringing new customers to a business and expanding its reach, retention focuses on keeping existing customers for higher customer lifetime value and more consistent revenue. Now when the difference is clear, it’s time to unveil the stages of the customer acquisition funnel. 8 Stages of Customer Acquisition Funnel Customer acquisition is a complex process requiring multiple steps to achieve the necessary result. We’ll uncover the steps and strategies you can use for each. Awareness. At this stage, you should focus on establishing awareness of your product or service. You can create content for your site and social media, run ads, or collaborate with opinion leaders to build it. Interest. This step involves gaining interest in your target audience by providing information and educating prospects about your product. You need to show how valuable your product is. By offering whitepapers, eBooks, webinars, and blog posts that provide detailed information about your product, you can encourage leads to look at your product as a potential solution to their problems. Consideration. At the consideration stage, you should provide proof persuading prospects to purchase your products. Consider incorporating free trials, demos, and samples to let prospects test your product and find whether it suits them. Besides, add detailed product descriptions, publish comparison blog posts, and use retargeting campaigns to prove that your product is the best alternative. Intent. Next, you need to use incentives to encourage prospects to purchase. Provide special offers, detailed FAQs, cart abandonment campaigns, and personalized follow-ups. Evaluation. This stage is for you to provide excellent support to positively impact customer purchasing decisions. You should share customer testimonials and success stories, ensure real-time support, information on pricing, etc. Purchase. During this stage, prospects convert into paying customers. You need to provide a seamless and fast checkout experience, allow several payment methods, and send confirmation and follow-up emails after the purchase. Post-purchase. If you want to build customer loyalty, improve retention, and encourage repeat purchases, you should follow up with a post-purchase experience. Send onboarding emails, share tutorials, establish loyalty programs, and offer related products. Advocacy. To make customers your advocates, you should encourage the creation of user-generated content, referral programs, and customer reviews. These techniques will help you establish a positive reputation for your brand. Now that you know about the funnel, let’s discover customer acquisition cost and all the calculations and processes associated with it. Customer Acquisition Cost To determine the effectiveness of your customer acquisition strategies, you need to know all the peculiarities associated with customer acquisition costs. We’ll unveil them in this section. But, first, let’s start with importance. Why is customer acquisition cost important? Customer acquisition is one of the most important metrics because it helps measure the cost related to the strategy, tactics, and tools you use to attract new customers. It influences a company's revenue, business decisions, and financial performance of your brand. Yet there are even more reasons to calculate customer acquisition cost. We’ll uncover them below. Financial health. Calculating customer acquisition cost allows you to identify whether your company gains profit and how good it is. In case CAC is too high, it means that your business might have challenges with obtaining profitability. Allocation of resources. After measuring customer acquisition costs, you can make well-thought-out decisions on allocating your budget to the right marketing and sales efforts and strategies. This way, you invest money into the best ways to bring new customers. Pricing. Understanding customer acquisition costs enables you to identify the best pricing and profit margins for your products. Depending on the metrics, you can adjust the prices for products to ensure that they cover all costs associated with customer acquisition, helping you ensure that your business is profitable. Customer lifetime value (CLV). Customer acquisition cost is always associated with another metric called customer lifetime value. This is because it helps evaluate the viability of a business model. In this case, CLV should be higher than CAC, ensuring that customers bring more revenue in the long run than you’ve spent on bringing them. Competitive advantage. If your business has a low CAC, you can focus on improving other areas of your business to establish a competitive advantage. For instance, you can invest in product development, customer support, product recommendations, etc. These will help you stand out from the competition. Data-driven decisions. Whether your CAC is low or high, it allows you to make data-driven decisions on your budget allocation, pricing, sales initiatives, and business goals. Depending on the calculations, you can improve your strategy to reduce CAC, obtain more new clients, and higher profits. Investor appeal. When investors search for business opportunities, they pay attention to CAC and CLV. Low customer acquisition costs, when compared with customer lifetime value, are enticing offers to invest in. Now that you know about the reasons to measure your CAC, you might be interested in the average customer acquisition cost for your industry. However, you can’t fully rely on the indicators below because every niche and business is unique and might vary drastically. What is the average customer acquisition cost? To evaluate your cost, you need to know the average customer acquisition cost for each industry. In this section, we’ll unveil them for various niches. There are numerous factors that influence the average CAC. It depends on your industry, business model, target audience, and strategies associated with marketing and sales. That’s why you can’t find an average number for all. If your company operates in construction, your organic CAC can amount to $190, while paid CAC can total $468. These costs arise because marketers need to integrate online advertising and digital marketing. These costs might be higher or lower depending on your product and the level of competition. These costs are different when you are in IT. Product demonstrations, long sales cycles, and seamless customer support require business owners to allocate more resources. The average combination of organic and paid CAC can be $454. B2B SaaS companies will have to spend quite a lot on customer acquisition. The organic customer acquisition cost will be around $205, while paid CAC might total $341. Higher CAC, in this case, is related to personalized sales approaches, more marketing efforts to establish strong customer relationships, and long sales cycles. If you are engaged in higher education, your average organic and paid CAC combined could be $1,143. Whether you have an online school, online course, or physical educational institution, you’ll have to invest in targeted marketing to educate about your product and attract potential students. Now that you know the average customer acquisition cost for various industries, it’s time to find out how you can measure it for your business. How to calculate customer acquisition cost? CAC is essential for your company since it allows you to assess your ROI. Successful businesses always try to reduce this cost as it shows how healthy your sales, marketing, and customer service strategies are. Besides, decreasing this value empowers your company to allocate resources efficiently and receive a higher profit. A marketing strategy that performs well doesn’t require big expenditures on advertising that often generates low-quality leads. This is because a company that provides people with valuable and informative blog posts can bring organic prospects. Additionally, your current customers can also help you in customer acquisition. If your clients are satisfied with your product or service, they will recommend your brand to their friends and colleagues. Below you can find a formula to calculate CAC. Firstly, define the time frames you’re evaluating. Secondly, add your total sales and marketing costs together. Thirdly, divide the resulting amount by the number of your acquired customers during the specified time. After estimating your customer acquisition cost, if you find that it’s too high for your business, target market, and strategy, you’ll need to reduce it. The next section will show you how to do this effectively. How to reduce customer acquisition cost? Reducing CAC is a must for every business striving to improve profitability and sustainability. Below you’ll find some effective strategies for your company. Optimize communication channels. Consider using A/B testing to identify the most effective strategies, content, and marketing channel combinations. After finding out which channels work best for your business and bring the highest ROI, allocate more budget to them to improve profitability. Leverage analytics tools. With their help, you’ll be able to assess your marketing campaigns’ performance. When using analytics platforms, you can identify the most effective channels for your product and optimize these strategies for even better results. Simplify the checkout process. For a seamless and fast checkout process without abandoned shopping carts, you need to optimize it. Make sure that customers can check out items in the cart simply and securely. Consider creating detailed instructions, providing multiple payment options, ensuring security, and adding simple forms. Improve user experience with your site. Optimize your site and landing pages’ speed, clarity, and usability. They should also be mobile-friendly to allow smartphone users to access them. Your call-to-action buttons should be visible, clear and encouraging action. Incorporate loyalty programs. Consider creating loyalty programs for your existing customers to improve their lifetime value. Rewarding customers with special offers and discounts will help you establish trusting relationships and increase repeat purchases. Use automation. By setting up automated emails, you can keep in touch with your subscribers and lead them down the sales funnel. If you personalize your email campaigns based on subscribers’ behavior and preferences, you’ll be able to boost engagement and conversion rates. LIKE.TG will help you not only send personalized emails but also segment the audience based on their criteria, schedule email campaigns, and send them at perfect timing. Interact with your customers on social media. Show your activity by engaging with customers in comments and mentions. This way, you’ll show them you care about every customer, educate them on products, and unveil how your product can solve their problems. Create referral programs. This is one of the most cost-effective ways to attract new customers who are really interested in your products. Consider rewarding your existing customers with small gifts or points for bringing their friends. You’ll have a wider customer base and new purchases. Now that you know how to reduce CAC, let’s proceed to the next step — developing a customer acquisition strategy. How to Develop Your Customer Acquisition Strategy Let’s dive into several strategy steps if you want to acquire new customers. Define your ideal customer. If you want to reach your target audience, it’s crucial to collect the personal information of your target groups. Consider creating your buyer persona to keep this information in order. Ask yourself questions that will help you define your customers’ goals, problems, and interests. Determine your goals. Once you have your ideal customer profile, you can set your objectives. This will help you develop a customer acquisition plan and implement various marketing methods to achieve your main goal. Besides, you can define your revenue expectations to see whether your business meets them. Choose an appropriate acquisition channel. You can “meet” your new customers anywhere, either on social media channels or with the help of organic search. Remember that you can find the most effective channels by using buyer personas. The first thing you can do is find out where your personas spend their time and reach them through these platforms. Secondly, run an experiment by developing a hypothesis about the most popular communication channels that bring the highest ROI. Once you measure their performance, you can decide where to run your campaigns and how to allocate resources. Create a specific strategy for each channel. Pay attention to the content your customers interact with, their favorite social media networks, and information your competitors post. Keep in mind that reaching your audience through each channel will cost you a lot. Communicate with your audience. If you want to improve your customer acquisition process, you need to establish your communication with clients. Surveys, interviews, social media engagement, and blog posts are excellent forms of interaction with your customers. With their help, you can find the gaps in the tactics you use to win new customers. Keep in touch with your clients to identify what they expect from you. Analyze and improve your strategy. Consider utilizing analytics to be aware of your company’s performance. Various factors can influence your customer acquisition process, and it’s essential to be aware of them. Analytics can help you learn where customers buy your products, where they live, how they got to know about your company, and even more. With the right customer acquisition approach, you can engage high-value consumers who can be loyal to your brand and stimulate its growth. We’ve prepared the most effective techniques to help you in this process. 12 Customer Acquisition Tactics In today’s world, many great marketing methods help win new clients. Let’s walk you through the most valuable techniques that will attract new customers. Video marketing According to Wyzowl, 86% of people would like to see more brand videos. Videos tend to bring many benefits to companies since they are visually appealing and encourage people to engage with your brand. Moreover, videos build trust, increase social shares, boost conversions and sales, influence buyer decisions, and even more. For example, Wix provides their potential customers with design tutorials on creating a strip-based website. Subscription forms Brands often use subscription forms to generate leads and legally collect subscribers’ personal information, like names and email addresses. They can be located on their website or blog and enable users to fill in the form with their personal information. By doing this, they can receive the latest updates in newsletters. When subscribers agree to receive emails from your company, it means that they are interested in your products or services. By registering with LIKE.TG, you have a great opportunity to create any type of subscription form for free. Besides, our service allows you to make multi-channel forms. They enable users to subscribe to your company’s newsletters by using an email or a messenger. Below you can see a subscription form example designed with the LIKE.TG builder. Co-branded products This process involves cooperation between two companies that aim to create a product or piece of content and promote it through various marketing channels. It can be presented as an article, video, new product, app, and more. Co-branding helps companies reach new audiences, generate leads, and boost their brand recognition. Let’s take the partnership between Airbnb and Flipboard. As you know, Airbnb is a room-sharing app. Flipboard is an app that gathers content from different social platforms and blogs. These two companies cooperated to create a product called Trips. It enables Airbnb users to connect with hosts with the same interests. This way, the two brands can reach new clients worldwide. Giveaways and contests Consider conducting giveaways to increase your social media presence and boost engagement metrics. By tailoring a great giveaway or contest, you can reach a wider audience and obtain new clients in the future. Use your leading social media platforms to conduct a giveaway and set the rules that include tags, comments, shares, and likes to make your brand more recognizable. Let’s take a giveaway from Forever21, for example. The brand used Instagram for its contest. Users had to follow the rules mentioned in the post below to win the brand’s items. Informative blog posts Content marketing is one of the easiest ways to obtain new customers. Although it can be a challenge to come up with high-quality articles, this allows your leads to make more informed decisions. As a result, you’ll gain their trust and loyalty. Besides, valuable, engaging, interesting, and informative blog posts help drive conversions. Let’s take LIKE.TG, for example. The service has a blog that contains articles on various relevant marketing topics. This allows customers to study a specific topic, learn more about this service, and make a deliberate decision. Influencer marketing This type of marketing is growing faster than digital ads. Influencers can help you quickly attract new buyers since a large percentage of people listen to their recommendations on social networks. Besides, people start to engage when they see their opinion leaders in commercials, on a brand’s website, etc. Once you choose the channel, decide on influencers who can generate leads. Here you can find a step-by-step guide on how to create your influencer marketing strategy. For example, consider Puma’s partnership with Selena Gomez. The singer often promotes the brand’s products on her Instagram account. With this opinion leader’s multimillion audience, Puma can easily attract new clients. SEO This is one of the most critical techniques that helps in acquiring new customers. The strategy entails optimizing your website to rank better in search results. Since users tend to visit the top five websites on the search engine results page, optimizing your pages for users and search robots is essential. SEO helps your company obtain organic traffic and acquire new customers. Use industry-related keywords and backlinks from authority websites and ensure that your web page is mobile-friendly. Read our article to learn about the main principles of a great SEO strategy and useful SEO tools. Referral programs Running a referral program is the basis of any customer acquisition strategy. Offer your current customers discounts or special rewards to encourage them to recommend your products to their family, friends, or colleagues. Let’s take GREATS, for example. This brand designs sneakers and offers a special discount to customers who bring their friends. Optimized landing pages If you want to attract more customers, make sure you have a great landing page with an appealing and convenient design, concise copy, clear benefits of your products, images, and a CTA button. Improving the elements of your landing page can increase conversion rates. Your website should also be mobile-friendly since many users search for information on their smartphones. Several tips should be considered when creating a landing page: make it simple, add your contact information, be consistent, and keep important information above the fold. This will help you boost your conversion rates. Our blog has an article that will help you dive deep into landing page design, find best practices, and grab some inspiration from the examples. Paid ads Paid advertising can be a great fit for many businesses. These ads provide your company with instant visibility in search results and an opportunity to reach a wider audience and acquire new customers. With paid advertising, you can control who sees your ads on social media by setting targeting parameters. Web push notifications These instant messages open you an excellent opportunity to reach your largest audience — site visitors. You can set them up for onboarding to inform your leads about the value of registering with your website, tell them about your news, interesting events, new products, features, and releases, and share various offers. LIKE.TG allows you to choose a contact list, personalize and design web push notifications, send them to the necessary leads, and obtain conversions. Below, you can see how to create a web push notification by simply using our service. Chatbots Although you might have heard that chatbots are primarily used for messaging applications, some companies use them for landing pages. Chatbots help visitors gather information about a particular product faster, serve as a support service, and guide them through a large quantity of information. For example, with Kayak’s chatbot for Facebook Messenger, a new customer can easily find hotels, flights, and things to do. Within seconds, this chatbot searches many travel websites to find the information you need. Besides travel and tourism companies, chatbots can be used in the healthcare industry, eCommerce businesses, online service providers, etc. They help improve your customer service, increase engagement, automate various processes, and collect information. Find out how to create a chatbot for Telegram with LIKE.TG. Live chat With a live chat, you can easily acquire new leads. Add a live chat widget to your website so visitors can ask questions, learn more about your brand, get help on a product, and make a purchase. This is your chance to convert a site visitor into a client. Below you can see how HubSpot does like that. Now let’s jump into B2B customer acquisition strategies that will help you attain clients in this industry. 7 B2B Customer Acquisition Strategies Building a customer base in a B2B environment is a comprehensive process requiring business owners effective marketing strategies and approaches. In this section, we’ll delve into the best of them to help you attain new customers. Conduct online events. To show your expertise and products, consider organizing webinars and other online events. This will help you share knowledge latest trends and address customer concerns and pain points. As a result, you can position your company as an expert in your field trusted by people. Incorporate targeted campaigns. After identifying high-value potential customers, tailor your marketing campaigns to their needs, preferences, and problems. This will help you personalize your offer and craft it to the specific needs of your potential clients, encouraging them to convert. Use LinkedIn ads. Since, in a B2B environment, reaching customers is harder, you need to use special platforms like LinkedIn. With their help, you’ll be able to communicate your message faster and make your products visible to prospects. For better results, consider using LinkedIn ads. Sponsored content and InMail campaigns will help you reach decision-makers and discuss your offer. Share content on LinkedIn. Consider sharing valuable content on LinkedIn, including industry insights, company updates, and thought leadership articles. This way, you’ll make your company and products visible to businesses that might be interested. Create an affiliate program. With affiliate marketing, you’ll be able to attain new customers faster. You can partner with other companies that will bring your new clients for specific commissions. This way, you’ll prevent yourself from contributing a lot to other marketing efforts that might be less cost-effective. Engage in LinkedIn groups. Search for groups related to your industry and interact with their participants. You can share your knowledge and show the value of your products. As a result, companies will notice your product and take it into consideration. Attend conferences. Industry conferences, trade shows, and other offline events can be perfect places to showcase your products and communicate with potential clients face-to-face. By showing your expertise, you can establish a base of potential customers. Now let’s find out how different brands incorporate these strategies to acquire new customers. In the section below, you’ll find our best examples. Customer Acquisition Examples Remember that to engage new people, you’ll need a multi-channel strategy that ensures effective messaging with your potential clients. Let’s see how famous brands manage to do this through various marketing channels. AssignmentMavens The service uses PPC ads to encourage customers to use their website and order an essay. As you can see, this ad appears when a user searches for websites that offer skilled writers’ services. HubSpot Twitter is one of the great ways of attracting customers since people are highly engaged in social media. Hundreds of millions of Twitter users enable companies to promote their business each month effectively. This example allows you to see how HubSpot tries to engage new viewers in their virtual customer experience conference called “CX Spotlight 2021”. By mentioning digital industry leaders and free participation, the company invites new participants. Pepe Jeans London Influencer marketing is another great way to win the trust of new clients. The team of the famous jeans brand decided to cooperate with a world-known singer Dua Lipa. This opinion leader, with more than sixty million followers on Instagram, helps Pepe Jeans London build brand engagement. ASOS As you can see, ASOS uses Instagram ads for its promotion. Since the brand is aimed primarily at young and stylish people, using this platform is a great idea for attracting new customers. It involves a call-to-action button to drive traffic to their website and boost conversions. Pollfish This survey platform provider uses pre-roll ads to promote its service through the popular YouTube platform. The ads describe the benefits of the website, encourage users to visit the platform, and obtain real-time insights from actual customers. If you aim to win new customers, boost ROI, and ensure your company’s growth, be ready to implement various approaches. Research to discover the most appropriate marketing channels and methods that will allow you to attract more people to your business.

Customer acquisition cost is the amount of money you spend to attract each new customer. This metric demonstrates how successful your business model is. In this article, we will discuss the difference between CAC and lifetime value, explainhow to calculate CAC, andprovidefour tips to reduce it. Why is customer acquisition cost important? CAC isthe money spent on marketing and salaries. You can build a marketing strategy, monitor your marketing channels’ effectiveness, and optimize costs without losing customers if you track this metric. Customer acquisition cost is frequently compared with lifetime value (LTV) and is particularly important for SaaScompanies.Here are three more reasons why you should keep an eye on your CAC: It helps optimize the LTV/CAC ratio.Try todo cost optimization regularly. As a guideline, you can aim for a 3:1 ratio. This means that for every dollar spent, you earn $3, which is quite good for anybusiness. You can define and optimize the payback period. If you have just started your business, CAC will give you an idea of ​​how long the paybackperiodcan take. This is especially true for companies that practice the freemium model. CAC shows yourfuturebusiness health. If you want to know what amount of profit you will receive, add upyour CAC for previous months, and subtract the projected revenue. It is vital to understand the difference between CAC and cost per action (CPA). CAC measures the cost of attracting a customer, while CPAreflectsthe cost of a specific action a user performs. For example, if you watch YouTube for free, you are measured using CPA. If you have bought a YouTube Premium subscription, you are measured using CAC. Read onto discover more about the average CAC in different spheres. Average Customer Acquisition Cost The problem with CAC is that some companies calculate their ‘blended’ costs and include the number of customers acquired without taking the funds they invested in marketing into account. However, there are different types of CAC you need to differentiate between: Organic CAC includes the total number of new customers acquired across all channels. Inorganic CAC includes only new customers acquired through paid marketing. Take a look at the table below to discover the average CAC in different industries. We can see that CAC varies for different spheres. Both average organic and inorganic CAC are the highest in the education industry. This means that acquiring newuniversity and college students is the most expensive. Thelowestorganic and inorganic CAC arein consumer eCommerce and retail. Keep in mind that you should not concentrate on your industry’s average CAC. Your companycanreduce customer acquisition costs using some tips we will describe in one of the next sections. There isanother important metric connected with CAC — the LTV/CAC ratio. Let’s find out the difference between the customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value. Customer Acquisition Cost vs. Customer Lifetime Value Customer acquisition cost is related to customer lifetime value. LTVreflects how much money you earn from one customer, and CACmeasures how much you invested in attracting them. In other words, the rise of LTV means that your profit is increasing,while therise of CACindicates that it’s decreasing. Tracking these metrics ison the to-do list ofevery successful business owner. We will explain how to calculate CAC in the next section, but now let’s discuss therole of the LTV/CAC ratio. 1:1. Such a model is not viablebecause the company losesthe profit it gained with every acquisition. 2:1. This means that your business earns twice more money than the amount you spend on customer acquisition. You make very little profit. 3:1. You earn 3$ for each 1$ spent on acquiring new customers, which is agood result but not the best one. More than 3:1. Great result! Continue working to maintain this value. The high LTV/CAC ratio is the basis of many successful SaaS projects. Note that you need to calculate both metrics regularly andfor the same period. It’s time to discover how to calculate CAC. How to CalculateYour Customer Acquisition Cost Reducing CAC is one of the ways to earn more from your business. To do it, you need to know how much you spend on customer acquisition. Now let’s have a look at the waysto calculate CAC. There are two methods: basic and complex. The basic formula shows an approximate CAC, as it doesn’t include a lot of expenses. The complex formula includes overhead costs, such as using professional services, sales and marketing wages, software costs, and other coststhat are not incurred in marketing. Use a complex method to get a more exact result anddraw informedconclusions. Basic formula This formula allows you todeterminethe approximate customer acquisition cost for a certain period of time. You cancalculate the total marketing cost for acquiring new customers (MCC) and the total number of customers acquired (CA) — divide the first number by the second one. CAC = MCC / CA For example, you have spent 3000$ (MCC) on marketing for the last three months and acquired 100 customers (CA). So, your CAC for the last three months is 30$ (3000/100). However, you spent much more on customer acquisition than you invested in your ad campaign budget.You cannot ignore the salaries of your employees, premium subscriptions they need to use, and other expenses. These spendings often significantly affect the real CAC. It is reasonable to calculate CAC for each channel. Different channels require different expenses, and they can give different profits. To takethis into account, you need to use a complex formula. Complex formula To calculate CAC, add MCC, wages connected with sales and marketing (W), marketing and sales associated software cost (S), professional services (PS), and other overheads (O), and then divide the result by CA. Don’t forget that you should use all metrics from the same period. CAC = (MCC + W + S + PS + O) / CA Let’s look atan example. You still have spent 3000$ on marketing (MCC), but you have also spent 200$ on wages connected with sales and marketing (W), 100$ on marketing and sales associated software cost (S), 300$ on professional services (PS), and 100$ on other overheads (O). Your company has acquired 100 customers, so your CAC is 37$ (3700/100). Calculate CAC for different channels, and compare the results. You’ll see where you spend less money on acquiring one customer andwill be able to make changes to your marketing strategy. If you think that yourcompany’scustomer acquisition cost is too high, there are effective ways to reduce it and earn more from your business. 4 Tips to Reduce Customer Acquisition Cost At some point, everybusiness owner considers reducing CAC as a way to increase profits. Follow our tips if your goal is to make acquisition costs lower without losing the number of customers. Optimize your sales funnel. Quantify each step of the sales process, analyze the buyer journey, and pay attention to each step. Find the problems and difficulties customers faceto solve them, and test different strategies. YourCAC may grow at first, but you willgradually determine which customer acquisition methods work for you and focus on them. Build loyalty. Loyaltyis a measure of a customer’s likelihood to buy from a company or brand again. It is a wayof improving both CAC and LTV. Segment your clients, encourage customers to give feedback, and act on it to build customer loyalty. People should feel that customer care is a priority for the brand.Check out our article about customer loyaltyto get more tips. Improve your marketing channels’ effectiveness. If you calculate CAC for every channel, youshould concentrate on more effective ones. You need to know your audience, provide quality, write eye-catching titles, and proofread and optimize your content. Remember that content marketing is the way to encourage people to buy as fast as possible. Use CRM marketing. CRM marketing helps you analyze, manage and improve customer relationships. To succeed in it, choose the right CRM system, qualify and segment your customers, use a customer-centric approach, and support clients at each stage of the buyer journey. CRM implementation lets you optimize the sales funnel and reduce CAC. Congrats, now you knowmore about CAC and the difference betweenthis measure and LTV. You also have all the information necessary to calculate this metric and reduce it. Use your knowledge to earn more from your business.

Customer data platform (CDP) is a software aimed at collecting data about the users from multiple tools, centralizing it in one database, and making it available to other systems in real-time. Companies can use information gathered by CDP to create accurate portraits of the customers and improve their marketing and sales strategies. In the article, we explain what a customer data platform is, highlight its benefits and compare CDP with customer relationship management (CRM). We also provide the top 5 platforms to collect customer data. Benefits of Customer Data Platform According to CDP, 81% of users prefer brands that use AI to personalize recommendations. These statistics show how important customer data platforms are to attract more clients and boost companies on the market. It creates holistic images of your customers. CDP allows companies to gain more insight into their clients and use this information to plan their future actions. Understanding the behavior of each separate consumer enables you to increase personalization and improve the customer journey. You can use customer data in product management, marketing, sales, service, and other business departments. It saves your employees time. According to Forbes, companies that use data-driven marketing have a competitive advantage and are six times more likely to increase profits. Such impressive statistics motivate many businesses to gain information about their clients. However, it requires lots of time and effort to collect the data, and organize and analyze it. CDP allows brands to automate this process, making it more accurate and productive. It lets marketers segment their clients. Segmentation of the target audience allows companies to increase the efficiency of their marketing campaigns and attract more clients. CDP can segment consumers based on any actions, create a few groups and even predict their future behavior. It will help you develop more personalized offers and avoid communicating irrelevant marketing messages. It helps to improve customer service and provide a better experience. Consumers may be annoyed by your recurring advertisements or dissatisfied when they have to explain their problem a few times to different managers. Using a customer data platform helps avoid such situations and makes your communication with consumers more effective. It will reduce the churn rate and decrease cases of brand switching. It allows users from different tools to access the data. It is a very useful option when your staff works remotely. It increases the rate of the company’s flexibility and effectiveness. Also, it will save your employees' time because they will not need to ask each other for certain information about the customers anytime they need it. Now you know why CDP is a useful tool to make your business more effective. Let’s go further and discover the difference between customer data platforms and customer relationship management. CDP vs CRM Some business owners do not understand why it is necessary to use CRM and CDP in their companies. However, combining these two software platforms can significantly improve your business processes. In this section, we explain the difference between CRM and CDP and provide some tips on how to combine them effectively. CDP is software that automatically collects data about your consumers’ behavior from different platforms. It gathers both online and offline data, analyzes it, and provides analytics using AI. Data platform creates unified consumer profiles influenced by consumer behavior during the customer journey. Also, it can account for information about anonymous users on your media platforms. CDP helps staff handle the data about consumers’ steps to optimize all processes in the company. On the other hand, CRM allows sales teams to track their interactions with consumers. CRM is focused on direct interactions with consumers and helps analyze the effectiveness of the sales pipeline. You should enter information manually and can track only the data about direct connections with your clients. It can not give you a holistic image of the customers but can provide valuable insights into your sales processes. Understanding these differences is crucial for choosing an effective tool for your business automation. Continue reading to discover the top 5 customer data platforms and how to use them effectively. Top 5 Customer Data Platforms According to CDP, the size of the global market of data platforms will reach $20.5 billion by 2027, which is 34% more than it is now. It may be difficult for business owners to find the best customer data platform for their companies. In this section, we provide 5 CDPs that can help you improve your business processes. Segment This software allows companies to collect, optimize and use consumer data in real-time with one API for any platform. It enables users to customize data pipelines, manage consumer information and use AI to increase client engagement. Below we provide the main features of this service. Collecting the data. You can collect customer data from any application and unify it from all platforms and channels to create a holistic image of the user. Also, Segment allows companies to create a single tracking plan to standardize information. Data warehouse. This platform can automatically send data from any part of the product, such as a website or social media, to the warehouse. Segment allows companies to switch on or switch off collecting of the information. It also backs up the data to your storage provider so that you can download and use it. Personalization. You can build audiences in real-time and use this data in all your tools to make your advertising consistent. Segment allows marketers to personalize messages based on consumers’ behavior and even analyze their initial intentions. You can also track how many times the users have already seen a certain ad and set frequency caps to avoid their irritation. Analytics. This tool allows users to identify anonymous users as new or existing customers and track how they interact with your products. Moreover, Segment provides a wide range of analytics, A/B tests, and studies on how new features affect your KPIs. Data management. This platform integrates with 300+ marketing tools and allows users to add new ones in a few minutes. You can process the data, control its quality, and optimize user requests for deletion in a few clicks. Pricing: Free plan. It allows you to track 1000 visitors per month, use 2 sources of data, and provides integration with 300+ tools. Team plan. 120$/month. You can track up to 10 000 visitors per month, use unlimited sources, and have one data warehouse destination. Business plan. Pricing is discussed individually. It offers everything from the Team plan plus advanced permissions, historical replies, and single views on the customers. Look at the interface of the customer profile in Segment. In this tab, you can see the users’ actions and analyze them to predict their future behavior. Redpoint Global This service provides total control of data security. It uses machine learning to optimize your business processes. Also, Redpoint Global gives real-time access to standardized information and allows companies to exchange data between systems effectively. Discover more about its features below. Data intake. This tool allows users to connect and enrich information at scale automatically. You can also build machine learning models to collect high-quality data faster. Customer profiles management. Redpoint lets companies match customer profiles to identify new or existing visitors. Also, you can automate this process and get access to real-time data by driving machine learning algorithms. Segmentation. This tool also allows companies to segment their clients based on billions of data points. AI helps identify engagement segments and offers the most relevant content to consumers in real-time. Personalization and predicting consumer behavior. Extracting insights from consumer data helps provide more personalized experiences. Moreover, AI allows companies to understand users' intentions and predict their buying behavior to persuade people more effectively. Data management. Redpoint can help you unify all the data sources to create a holistic image of every customer. You will be able to make the customer experience consistent and change future strategies according to incoming real-time information. Pricing is discussed individually. Below you can see the dashboards that help track and identify changes in the behavior of different user’ segments. Redpoint Global uses machine learning and AI to streamline these processes and predict consumers’ future actions. ActionIQ This cloud-based platform provides security and privacy for customer data. It can directly integrate with your business tools to gain insights into consumer behavior. Read more about its features below. Collecting the data. This CDP collects data both online and offline from any platform. You can use historical information, enrich it in real-time, and create holistic profiles of your consumers. Also, ActionIq has proprietary data architecture that allows its user to be more flexible and scale the information. Customer data management. This platform allows companies to stitch variable records to make persistent users’ accounts. You can centralize all the data on ActionIQ to make future analysis easier. Segmentation. There is an ability to create complex audiences based on your customers’. This platform provides predictions of users’ actions based on their intentions, specific needs, and trends in each segment. Management of customer journey. You can test and coordinate unlimited customer journeys to conduct future analyses and make sales more effective. Analytics and reporting. ActionIQ provides reports and operational metrics you can use to optimize your business processes. Also, there are predictive analytics and recommendations on future interactions with every account. Security. ActionIQ conducts security audits and tracks the safety of the data across all parts of the platform. There is a single sign-in and multi-factor authentication to ensure secure authentication. You can also track your employees' access to the data on the platform. Pricing is discussed individually. There is a chart of users’ activity and computing capacity in ActionIQ. You can use it to define the best time to communicate with your clients and promote your products effectively. Adobe Experience Platform This is a tool for data management in both B2B and B2C spheres. Adobe Experience allows companies to collect information from multiple lines, unify consumer and professional data and create hybrid profiles. We provide the main features of this platform below. Collecting and managing the data. Adobe Experience aggregates information about new and existing clients with an AI-powered algorithm. You can use data collecting models across Adobe and non-Adobe connections, standardize this information and activate in real-time using any preferred system. B2B and B2C data management. This platform allows businesses to collect and analyze both consumer and professional data from all channels and create unified profiles. You can also differentiate these two spheres to create holistic images of different types of clients. Instant reactions. Adobe Experience provides users’ profiles that update in real-time. Also, this platform allows companies to react to any changes in the customer data instantly and deliver new experiences from different channels, such as websites, social media, messengers, etc. Segmentation and personalization. There is also a wide range of segmentation opportunities based on the data collected with the Adobe Experience drag-and-drop editor. You can personalize clients’ experiences using data about their intentions from existing profiles. Security. This platform has patented tools that help give consumers control over their information. You can customize the data governance framework and mark data sources to prevent privacy policy violations. Pricing is discussed individually. There is an interface of Adobe Experience tab where companies can manage their audience’s segmentation. You can track the number of consumers, check their profiles, find activated destinations and check the users’ behavior summary. mParticle This is a platform for managing data from mobile applications. It helps simplify data collecting using secure APIs and SDKs. mParticle gives access to A/B testing and more than 300+ analytics that enables you to provide a more personalized consumer experience. Discover more about its features below Data intake. You can capture data from different platforms and load it into a data warehouse in real-time. This platform also allows companies to measure video and audio usage metrics and save them to conduct future analysis. Data management. You can use filters to make collected data more effective, organize it, and transform it at any sales pipeline stage. mParticle allows companies to manage customer profiles and identify key stages of the customer journey. Also, you can integrate this tool with any existing data source or warehouse and control the data flow according to requirements such as GDPR / CPRA. Segmentation and personalization. This platform allows companies to create personalized experiences based on historical and real-time consumer data. You can create segments of clients and enrich them with computed fields to get more insights into people’s behavior. Unified customer journey. This AI-powered platform gives companies a complete view of their customer actions. You can identify the roadblocks, discover the trends in your consumers’ behavior and understand how people engage with your brand to improve your future strategy. Security. There are also regular tests of mParticle’s security that helps this platform avoid phishing attacks and save clients’ data. Pricing is discussed individually. Below you can see the activity tab in mParticle. This platform allows companies to track the time, location, and device consumers use to make an action. You can also set up filters to get more specific data. Congrats, now you know what a customer data platform is and its benefits and understand the difference between CDP and CRM. Also, you have discovered the top 5 consumer data platforms and are ready to choose one of them to improve your business processes.

Customer expansion is a process of generating maximum value for current customers and encouraging them to purchase more. It enables brands to retain customers and save costs on customer acquisition. In this article, we’ll cover the importance and 3 types of customer expansion. We’ll also review how to use customer expansion to increase sales. Why is customer expansion important? Companies spend a lot of money to acquire new customers and boost their revenues. Yet if you have an established company, many cost-effective strategies will help you get most of your existing customers. As a result, your sales volume and profits will increase. Customer expansion focuses on creating more value for current consumers and encouraging them to perform more purchases and use a product or service regularly. If you succeed with your customer expansion strategies, you’ll retain existing customers and avoid spending costs to acquire new consumers. To increase revenues, you need to ensure a seamless customer experience, improve customer satisfaction, and provide additional value to your clients. You can hook your users’ attention with an upgraded version of your product, complementary products, or additional features for subscription-based services. Now that you know the importance, let’s dive into the 3 types of customer expansion. 3 Types of Customer Expansion We can distinguish three main types of customer expansion: add-ons (a company offers additional features to improve product customers already use); upselling (a company encourages customers to buy a more expensive premium version of the chosen product or service); cross-selling (a company offers complementary products to a chosen item). Let’s take a look at each of them in more detail. Add-ons It’s a great idea to use add-ons if customers already use your product. You can provide users with the opportunity to upgrade a product by purchasing add-on plans. Below you can see Zoom’s optional add-on plans. Upselling Upselling is an excellent sales technique that helps you find out more about your clients’ needs to provide them with the best solution to reach their goals. After exploring consumers’ preferences and desires, a salesperson contacts customers and offers an upgrade or premium version of a product or service. If you succeed in providing the solution people are looking for, you can establish strong relationships with customers and boost sales. For example, Tesla allows clients to make custom orders. For an additional cost, you can choose wheels and autopilot features. Cross-selling Cross-selling implies offering products related to an item customers want to purchase. When current clients see complementary products, especially with a discount, they consider buying them together. For instance, Amazon encourages customers to purchase complementary items, which users can see under the main product card. Let’s explore some effective customer expansion techniques to increase sales. How to use customer expansion to boost sales? To increase your sales volume and profits, you need to select productive approaches to reach customers and make them engage. We’ve prepared several techniques for you to consider. Drive fear of missing out. Marketers use different FOMO techniques to signal customers to shop for limited offers as soon as possible. You can set time limits, offer product bundles, use several channels to push consumers towards purchasing. These methods appeal to customers’ desires and evoke the feeling of regret if they don’t buy something. This way, you can boost sales in a short period of time. If you succeed in creating a proper message and offer, consumers will make impulse purchases. Provide customers with trials of premium features. Sometimes the most effective way to make users upgrade a product or service is to offer a free trial of these premium plans. Once your clients try, they can know the value the plan brings and the benefits they obtain. After the free trial expires, they can purchase your premium plan to reach their goals. Update customers on your new products and premium plans. If you have some new products or plans, you should inform your customers. When they explore your new products, they can purchase or upgrade their plans to more expensive ones with more features. Use social media networks, send email campaigns, implement web push notifications, and chatbots to reach your audience. Send email campaigns to upsell. If you want to upsell, consider email marketing. Research consumer needs before sending email campaigns. Once you do it, you can notify customers about your offers. With LIKE.TG, you can create professional email campaigns and send them to customers on your list. You can choose one of the available email templates or create one from scratch in our drag-and-drop editor. Congrats, now you know a cost-effective way to boost sales. Make use of the techniques above to increase your company’s profits.

Customer equity is the sum of customer lifetime valuesfor every client of a particular brand. It is the potential profit that all of the company’s customers can bring during the business-customer relationship. Why is customer equity important? Companies often face the challenges of increasingly discerning customers and extremely high competition in the market. Each brand’s survival over its surrounding competitors depends on its ability to increase customer equity. In today’s market, customer equity is essential because it helps you estimate the financial profit you can obtain from all your customers during your relationship. This allows companies to estimate their customer asset value and make sound financial decisions regarding add-on selling, retention, and acquisition. It focuses on every customer and uses interactions with consumers that aim at strengthening communication. Nowadays, a company's success depends on its ability to generate as manyloyal customersas possible. To understand what customer equity is, it's useful to explore the difference between customer and brand equity which are oftenconfused although each hasdistinctive features. Customer Equity vs Brand Equity Both customer and brand equity underline the level of loyalty a client has toward a brand and the value consumers add to a specific business. The two concepts have something in common, but customer and brand equity have different features and goals. To understand the difference, let’s analyze each of them. Many brands pay attention to customer equitybecauseit defines the financial success of a certain brand. The higher the customer equity, the higher the revenue a company receives and the more valuable it becomes on the market. Brands like Levi’s and Burger King have high customer equity and an excellent competitive advantage. Brand equity defines the level of influence a company’s name has on customers. This is based on the way customers perceive a particular brand and their positive and negative experiences purchasing from it. You can create this value by offering recognizable and high-quality products to your customers to increase brand recognition. Besides, companies provide customers with excellent experiences that entice them to continue purchasing with the brand. Companies with positive brand equity benefit in several ways. Firstly, customers are more likely to purchase from a brand they know and admire even if it has higher prices. Secondly, they won’t buy from competitors because they know that their brand sells the best quality products. Thirdly, since consumers are ready to pay a premium price for products, the brand can receive high profits. On the contrary, if a brand disappoints buyers to the point that they won’t recommend purchasing from this particular company, it will obtain negative brand equity. As a result, such brands are deprived of several benefits mentioned above. Now that you know the difference, let’s walk you through a start-to-finish guide on how to calculate customer equity. How to Calculate Customer Equity Determine the budget necessary to acquire a new customer Calculate how much money your brand spends on customer retention Estimate the approximate amount your client spends each year Find out how much money you receive from each customer List the cash flow of an average customer for a specific period Separate the cash flow for each year Sum up the present values of all the cash flows throughout the defined period Throughout company-customer interaction, consumers generate a value called customer equity. Consider the steps below to calculate it. Determine the amount of money your company spends to acquire a new customer. For instance, if your brand spends $60,000 a year on pre-roll ads that attract 600 customers, you spend approximately $100 oneach new customer. Calculate how much money your brand spends on customer retention. Customer loyaltyprograms, member cards, customer education programs, holiday marketing, andreactivation emailsrequire additional spending. For instance, you may pay $200 per year to send your email campaigns. Estimate the approximate amount your client spends each year. Let’s imagine that your average customer purchases with your company 10 times a year and spends $10 on every purchase. The annual spending would be $100. Find out how much money you receive from each customer. For instance, if you spend $4 for every $10 you earn, you would have a profit margin of 60%. List the cash flow of an average customer for a specific period. Set your expectations about every customer. For instance, you expect a customer to stay with your company for five years. Create a chart listing the estimated cash flow you'll receive over the years. Separate the cash flow for each year. Starting from the first year (plus your discount rate), divide the cash flow to calculate today's cash value. The discount is based on your circumstances. Sum up the present values of all the cash flows throughout the defined period. To get the customer lifetime value for your business, add up all the present values for a given period of time. To increase customer equity, let’s proceed to five tactics that will help you in this process. 5 Tactics to Increase Customer Equity Show your clients that you appreciate them Be more convenient than your competitors Be ready to solve problems Provide customers with unique value propositions Ensure to provide the best quality There are several steps to help you improve your company’s customer equity. Show your clients that you appreciate them. To keep loyal customers, you should regularly improve your brand. Before implementing any innovations, find out what your clients want instead of just going with your gut. For instance, create a poll containing some of your ideas and send it to your customers via email campaign, blog post, Instagram, etc. It’s crucial to let clients make suggestions and share their ideas. Don’t forget to thank them for participating in the poll by giving a small gift. Be more convenient than your competitors. Ensure that your customers can obtain the product they need as fast as possible. For example, if your client needs a new pair of contact lenses necessary to finish their work immediately, they don't have time to call and wait for hours to make an order. So it’s useful to consider using automatic orders, refills, and reminders to make the purchasing process fast and convenient. Be ready to solve problems. Ensure to provide customers with everything necessary to solve their problems through all the available channels. If social media platforms or your blog aren’t your main channels, you still need to be ready to bring the solution using these channels. Provide customers with unique value propositions. This step isn’t about the discounts that every company offers to the customers, but about features, services, resources that can bring value. Be ready to provide incredible value to a particular group of clients who can become your loyal customers in the nearest future. If you can’t do that, try to be as useful as possible when your clients need help. Ensure to provide the best quality. If your product is the best on the market and you keep improving it, you have the opportunity to obtain loyal customers. People always want to have high-quality things, and when they know that the product is the best, they will purchase it. To conclude, the customer equity metric enables you to track customers with different engagement levels, different spending habits, and the profit your customers bring to your business. The tactics above will help you acquire positive customer equity.