Creating a Customer Relationship Management Marketing Plan

In today’s competitive market, it is very important for a company to have a good customer relationship management marketing plan. This ensures that it retains the customers they have had over the years. It is a written rule in business that at all times customer retention is always better than customer attraction. It makes more business sense for a company to retain one customer rather than attract ten of them in a day as repeat business and customer loyalty are key in ensuring a business thrives for many years to come. According to various research surveys carried out in various top companies in the world, the key ingredient that has helped them retain their customers for the long term is sound customer relationship management. However, having this relationship management is not enough as there is the need to create a sound marketing plan.

Creating a Customer Relationship Management Marketing Plan

Growing Relationships with Existing Customers

A good illustration to demonstrate the effectiveness of growing a great relationship with your customers is that of a gardener and their crops. The gardener after sowing his seeds expects them to sprout and when they finally do that is the beginning of the real work. The crops have to be well nurtured and taken care of in order for the gardener to be assured of a bountiful harvest. The gardener will constantly water their young crops, ensure they are able to get as much sunlight as possible and all other things needed for plants to grow. In the same case, a company ought to develop a personalized relationship with its customers. This would include offering customized services to them, always anticipating what they need and satisfying it well and always going out of their way to delight them every now and then.

The end result will be the growth and formation of a strong bond between the customers and the company brand or products. The stronger the bond gets with time the harder the competition will find it when they try to disentangle a loyal customer to such a product or brand. However, in order to achieve this great relationship it would also require an elaborate plan as the company cannot afford devoting so much special attention and care to all customers. It is therefore important to strike out a balance between the services and attention you devote to the customers and the cost associated with doing such.

Identify The Company’s Best Customers

In order to minimize the costs involved in nurturing the relationship between the company and its customers, the company ought to identify its best customers first. After that it will know the customers who it will concentrate its efforts more than the others but at the same time ensuring that all customers get adequate customer care and service. From a business point of view, a company’s best customers entail the most valuable customers to the company. These ought to be the kind of customers that the company would not wish to lose at any given time. After clearly identifying these customers, the company marketing team will know the class of customers to target with their various marketing strategies. This will in turn mean more revenue to the company which is one of the advantages of having a great customer relationship management marketing strategy.

Using Social Media

In order for the company to fully enjoy and exploit its customer relationship management to matters marketing its products, it should embrace social media. In the past companies used to obtain crucial customer data through analogue means like customer feedback forms or through reviews on their websites. Social media networks offer a fast and more efficient solution to this data collection stage. Through the various social networks, a company will be able to track, obtain and improve their customer data fast and effectively. A company will also be able to get reviews about their products and gauge how well or bad their brand is doing in the market.

Another marketing plan would be to create a social media platform and market it through their customer’s database. This provides the company with the opportunity of using technology to access more information about its customers as well as build a link with which they can reach their customers effectively and fast. It also enables a company to quickly resolve any issues that a customer could be facing with its products or ant brand that the company deals in. The swift the response the more the company will endear itself to customers thereby creating an unbreakable bond between the two. In a nutshell social media offers any company with so many options for creating great ties with its customers. It also brings about a huge impact between customer relationship management and marketing of its products.

Finding out What Customers Love

If a company wishes to succeed in their CRM marketing plan, then it should labour to find out what exactly their customers love about its brand or products. This will in turn realize the goal of marketing which is to place customer needs at the front of the “production function”. The company will thus tailor make its products and brand to match the needs of its customers in order to satisfy their needs completely. If a company can score big on this front then their volume of sales would increase together with the company revenue and customer relationship. The customer retention process would be so easy for the company due to its understanding of the market via knowing what customers need and want.

Strategy

In order for this marketing plan to work positively and generate results that are good, the company ought to have a clear strategy on how to achieve all this. It should conduct a well informed survey to fully understand its target market who are the customers, market share, brand equity and penetrating such a market. These important aspects should then define the marketing strategy that will be employed by the company in order to ensure that the plan works. There should be clear set objectives on how to penetrate the market and great measures to ensure that the market this company product gets is well retained as that is the only sure way of ensuring that it will thrive well in the market.

All the above points are some of the important factors to consider when creating a workable and successful customer relationship management marketing plan.