Create Loyal Customers – Setting Up A CRM Strategy For Your Creative Business

There always seems to be an emphasis in online marketing advice on getting more customers. Everyone wants to expand their audiences, grow their email lists, find new people to sell to. The same emphasis is not placed on how you’re going to nurture those customers when you’ve got them. It’s all about getting them in through the door, taking their money, and then turning your attention to the next person. That’s not what a soulful marketing strategy is about, right?

Taking care of your existing customers isn’t just a nice thing to do, it makes business sense too. Think of all the time, energy and money you spend on finding new customers, getting in front of them, and convincing them you’re amazing. You don’t need to do any of that with your existing customers, because they already know. It’s much easier to sell to someone who’s already bought from you - and in retail terms 80% of value comes from 20% of consumers.In big marketing departments, this customer retention is usually done by the CRM team. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and basically does what it says on the tin – comes up with ways to manage the relationship a brand has with its existing customers, encouraging them to remain loyal to the brand.

With everything else you've been juggling in your business, I expect that a CRM strategy hasn't quite been at the top of your to do list.In this post I’m going to go over the main pillars of what goes into creating customer loyalty and some pointers for starting your own CRM strategy. And before you cry ‘oh no, not another thing’, don’t panic – much of CRM and customer retention can be systematised and automated so that it doesn’t need much day to day input from you. Winner.

Objectives

As with setting up any strategy or system, you need an objective. Your objective will depend upon your business model and the nature of your product. If you’re a shop selling homewares or gifty items, then your main objective for the CRM strategy is going to be to encourage repeat purchases. However, if you offer more bespoke or one off services, while you can still strive for repeat bookings a greater focus might be on driving referrals.So before you set up any systems, be clear on the outcomes you want; what you want your customers to do.

Incentives and Rewards

Incentives and rewards are the mainstay of any CRM strategy. Point systems and loyalty cards, all the way from the Tesco Clubcard to the little card you get stamped in your local café, are the most common form of retention marketing. At the sophisticated Tesco level they also collect data to help the company to show you products which will tempt you to spend money based on what they know you buy, but at the basic level all loyalty schemes to the same thing: incentivise an existing customer to spend more.Rewards aren’t all about loyalty points though. Sending a free gift with their third purchase, including a time-limited discount code in your packaging, exclusive freebies for email subscribers are all ways to reward your customers and incentivise them to buy again.Incentives also work really well with service-based businesses. Start a referral scheme where if a client refers you new business they get an extra call or bonus graphics. Or incentivise clients to book again by offering a discount within a certain time period.

Be Helpful

Have you ever ordered a card or flowers online for someone’s birthday, and then a year later the company reminds you that birthday is coming up? That’s CRM in action – using the data it knows about your previous purchases to encourage to purchase again.Which sounds a bit cynical, but let’s look at this in a positive way – the company is making sure you don’t forget an important birthday and is making it easy for you to buy a card and tick it off your list. How can you be similarly helpful and valuable to your customers?

Maybe put together a curated shopping list for them around Christmas time, remind them of key shopping dates, give them exclusive access to a new collection. Send through some resources you think they’ll find useful, notify them of lead times in busy periods, show them some inspiring projects.

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Surprise and Delight

‘Surprise and delight’ tactics are the ones we all love as consumers: the discount code on your birthday, the freebie in the packaging, the exclusive giveaway entry. In small creative businesses surprise and delight works particularly well as you want to develop a more personal relationship with your customers. You also have a real edge against the high street stores – as you’re working with lower numbers of customers you can use surprise and delight more liberally than larger businesses.

Why not send your first five customers a gift to say thank you? Send people a handwritten card on their birthday, or enter your mailing list into a special giveaway. What surprise and delight tactics do is create a positive feelings around you and your brand, as well as make you much more memorable to your customers. You can also plan to make your surprises shareable (an Instagrammable freebie, for example), giving you a double whammy.

So now you're convinced, let's look at how to set up your CRM system:

Email Automation

The majority of CRM happens via email because it sends your messages direct to the individual, and you can schedule it all out in advance. The first place to start is with your list – make sure you have a separate list in your email provider that is just for people who have bought from you (to be GDPR compliant you'll need to make sure that they knew they'd receive marketing emails from you at the point they gave you their email address). Depending on your business model and how much data you have, you may want to segment that list further into the sorts of things they’ve bought, but for now we’ll focus on one list.

Then you’ll want to plan out an email sequence each customer will receive over the course of a year or so (again, depending on your business model and product). Here are some ideas for emails within that sequence:

Incentive/encouragement to share their purchase on social media
Incentive to leave a review/give you a testimonial
Event-specific emails – i.e. Christmas, Mother’s Day, a trade conference
Discount code or offer incentivising a purchase
A reward when they’ve made a certain number of purchases
A reminder email and incentive 3/6/12 months after they’ve purchased

Set up all these emails to trigger at intervals after their first purchase and your work is pretty much done. It’s important to check in on your automations and review them every couple of weeks (which ones are getting the most clicks, are some sent too far apart, which subject lines work best) to make sure they’re working hard for you, but in the day to day you can let the automations do their thing.

Hands-On CRM

In amongst the automation will be more hands on customer management you’ll need to do. This may be responding to a less than positive review and doing what you can to turn their opinion round. It might be sending out free gifts to big spending customers or running a campaign encouraging customers to share their purchases online to be entered into a prize draw.

Given that we are all small, personal businesses it is important that that is reflected in our approach to customer retention. Customers come to you because they want that personal touch, so make sure that you give it to them.