It goes without saying that managing customer relations is a crucial aspect for ensuring the success of your brand. The consumer lifecycle is one that must be continuously nurtured if businesses want to retain advocates. And this is equally as important for customer acquisition.

For consumer brands, social media is one of the best ways to manage and foster customer relations. Reports showed that around 67% of consumers have used a brand’s social media platform in the past to seek customer support. Facebook and Twitter are perhaps the best channels for this, and especially Twitter, with 86% of customers who voice their complaints on there saying they would like to hear back from that company through the site. And for brands, there’s reason to nurture your customer relationships on social media- the same report showed that 71% of customers who experienced quick and effective responses were likely to recommend the brand to others.

For smaller businesses, using social media for customer service establishes a personable presence, but manually responding to individual queries and tracking leads can be time-consuming. For larger organisations therefore, it can be helpful to utilise tools to manage your customer base. CRM software is designed to look after every part of a company’s audiences, from data and insights, to interaction, support, and even sales automation. Perhaps the best known programme is Salesforce, which offers a wide spectrum of features, allowing brands to segment audiences, leads, opportunities relating to those leads, create campaigns, and see data reports. Other similar platforms include the likes of HubSpot’s CRM programme, Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM, Zoho, and Oracle. Perhaps the primary advantage of these tools are their automation capabilities- this ensures there’s no duplicate marketing, or re-marketing to disinterested individuals. Some tools offer advanced automation, automatically sending our appropriate marketing to leads based on their location, or sending automated responses en-masse depending on a customer’s query.

So which marketing tactics can brands employ to nurture their customer base? Once a company has seen new sales prospects enter their system via their software of choice, the next step is to build upon these leads. The most popular methods involve incentivising their fans with special offers or rewards. For instance, an online clothing brand may notice repeat behaviour from its customers- such as their preferred sizes, typical browsing times or purchase amount, and offer incentives accordingly. For this, email marketing is perhaps the most effective medium, allowing brands to offer specific incentives to only those most engaged- those who have clicked on links for instance, or taken action on the company’s site such as creating an account or placing an order. Offline, a loyalty card or rewards scheme is also an effective method. Finally, social media of course, is highly beneficial, although targeting is likely to be broader, while there is also less opportunity for capturing precise customer data until the lead has been converted. However, mass customer relationship management can prove just as successful- brands who regularly offer their followers non-personal incentives, such as flash discounts or promo codes on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram for instance, can achieve both unique and repeat customers.

Does your company have a CRM strategy in place? And which best practices have worked for you? We’d love to hear your thoughts as always, so please tweet to us @PracticeDigital and share your comment on our Facebook page.