In today’s digital age, there are a wide variety of technologies that make it easy for businesses to track and manage relationships with their customers. Tracking your audience can come with a lot of benefits, like driving sales, saving money, and more.
On the surface, it can seem like these tools are only essential for large enterprise companies with too many customers to count. But no matter if you only have a few thousand or even a few hundred customers, tracking them is a valuable strategy for any size business.
Here are 5 reasons small and medium size businesses need to start tracking their customers as well:
1. Keep a close relationship with your audience
Even for small and medium size businesses, it can be a challenge to maintain a close relationship with your audience, especially online. Audiences expect personalized messages from brands, and that can be hard to do without the help of tracking software.
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools can help you track your audience’s online behavior so you can provide a more personalized experience for them in your marketing message. For example, you can use your CRM to queue up a series of emails to a prospect, selecting a customized delivery schedule for their point in the sales funnel.
Personalization can also improve your sales activities, as you can recommend products and services at the right time based on individual audience interests. You can track leads based on acquisition channel (your website, social media, in your office, etc.), then use this information to tailor your message to their needs.
2. Organize your data
Keeping track of your audience and your communication with them manually isn’t an easy task. You have to deal with messy spreadsheets, email inboxes, calendar notifications and whatever other tools you use to track and contact them. Meanwhile each member of your sales team has their own information and method for storage. It’s nearly impossible to pick up where someone else left off with your customer data.
But if you use customer tracking software, all this information becomes uniform and centralized in one place. Anyone with permission can easily search databases of information about your leads or customers, and how you’ve interacted with them in the past. This kind of data organization is essential, especially if employees leave and you need to piece together what they were working on.
3. Improve customer service
Tracking your audience and keeping all their information in one place also makes it easier to provide customer service when complaints or issues come up. A CRM will track your customers’ purchases, interactions with your service team and complaints, ensuring all relevant information is available to address their needs quickly and efficiently.
Customer tracking technologies can also help you discover insights to improve your customer experience overall. For example, you may discover patterns in when customers tend to reach out to customer support. You can address the issue, then institute changes in your product or sales process to mitigate it in the future.
4. Optimize the sales process
Customer tracking software can provide a multidimensional look at your audience’s behavior and your relationship with them. Spreadsheets can never do that. That’s why CRM makes it possible to identify which sales processes are the most effective, so you can implement these strategies wide scale.
For example, you might discover that your leads are significantly more likely to convert if you schedule a secondary follow-up call after offering them an initial quote. You can add this insight into your sales workflow, making it easy to automate and benefit from practices that work best.
CRM software can also help you automate many other sales funnel opportunities to help drive more revenue, such as directing your sales reps to cross sell and up sell at the right times. When a previous customer hasn’t been in contact with your business in a while, your workflows can also prompt sales representatives when they need to reach out for re-engagement. These strategies can help ensure you get the most value out of every customer relationship at every stage.
5. Cut costs
Cost is one of the main reasons small businesses choose to forego customer tracking software. Will a CRM really be worth the financial investment?
Yes — in fact, the right CRM can help you save money by streamlining your business processes.
Consider the amount of time your sales and marketing teams spend entering and sifting through data on your customers. CRM helps you automate data entry and easily find whatever customer information they’re looking for. That frees your employees up to spend more time doing what they do best, instead of wasting money and resources on inefficient databases.
CRM software also isn’t as costly as most small business owners are led to believe. There are actually free CRM options available. Alternative options also offer affordable tiered pricing, catering to whatever size business you have.
The bottom-line
Customer tracking isn’t an advanced sales and marketing strategy for big businesses. It’s quickly becoming a standard best practice for everyone, especially given the benefits.
Take advantage of the right CRM software, and it can help you build a closer relationship with your audience, providing invaluable insights to help you move them down the sales funnel. In turn, it can also help simplify your business processes, saving time and money. So what’s there to lose?
