White papers, webinars, extensive marketing campaigns, and intensive advertising: B2B companies rely on these strategies to win over new customers. The focus is often on newly acquired customers, in the hope of significantly increasing sales as a result.
Unfortunately, this sometimes means that you neglect your existing customers, even though they account for a significant portion of your turnover. However, if you maintain customer loyalty, they'll likely buy from you again or at least recommend you to others.
In this article, we'll show you how you can promote sales growth among your regular customers and intensify customer loyalty without neglecting lead generation.
Neglecting Existing Customer Care
It is crucial to grow your business to maintain valuable leads and to constantly expand the customer base. Direct communication with interested parties, from initial contact on the website to full integration into the customer base, plays a central role.
However, too much focus on lead nurturing has led to complex lead nurturing processes in many companies. These processes are time-consuming and require a great deal of attention. It is often the new customers who benefit from the most attractive offers and feel particularly appreciated. However, many companies are thus rewarding incorrect customer behavior with financial benefits. The best price/performance ratio is ensured by an unfaithful customer, who spares no effort to constantly switch between different companies. That makes for a high churn rate Customers migrate.
Instead, your goal should be to ensure a high retention rate that reflects the satisfaction of your customers. In some industries, such as the energy sector, this has led to the creation of a very specific type of customer who was never specifically targeted: consumers willing to change who can only be retained with constantly new financial incentives. Customer loyalty? Bad news!
The Problem: Customers Don't Come Back and Don't Recommend You to Others
In the worst-case scenario, this creates a cycle that hurts the profitability of the company. At the same time, a particularly effective and cost-effective form of advertising is slowly disappearing. After all, it is the convinced existing customers who will say a few words of praise about the product in their personal environment. Because enthusiastic personal recommendations from enthusiastic customers can be particularly convincing, even though their absolute impact is difficult to measure.
If you do not guard the treasure of loyal existing customers, there is a risk that this type of recommendation will continue to be reduced. The strong focus on lead nurturing among your new customers can result in you losing sight of one of the most important needs of your customers: the desire to be able to purchase your products or services quickly and from anywhere at any time.
The Solution: Marketing Automation
To get closer to this goal again, marketing automation can make a significant contribution based on continuous campaigns. It helps you improve customer loyalty along the customer journey and reestablish a balance between acquiring new customers and maintaining customer care.
It should be clear that marketing automation is an effective means of achieving new successes in lead nurturing. Perhaps you too have a classic understanding of this very important system. These three major benefits are usually discussed:
Better leads — You can noticeably improve the quality of your leads with marketing automation. Lead scoring methods help to differentiate between cold and warm leads and to focus entirely on the latter in sales. There are also processes for following up on leads, which provide detailed insight into the needs and wishes. Here you can realign your lead nurturing.
Better timing — Better timing is undeniably an advantage of automated processes. You can ensure that the decisive moments in the sales cycle aren't missed. The next planned step is carried out automatically and potential customers receive further information at just the right time. This goes hand in hand with ideal support when making a purchase decision.
The right measures on an ongoing basis — At the same time, marketing automation in the sales funnel ensures that the right action is taken at every stage. The basis for this is data from previous successful transactions, from which you can draw conclusions about the communication. The result is an effective process and significantly increased sales success.
Maintain Existing Customers with Marketing Automation
So what can you learn from these advantages of classic marketing automation about caring for your existing customers?
Here is our suggestion: Use marketing automation for your loyal existing customers and put it ahead of new customers. Acquiring new leads is only in second place.
Why do I recommend that you transfer marketing automation to new customers in the company? With this approach, you have the opportunity to offer your existing customers the appreciation they earn with their loyalty and to reduce the churn rate. Automation processes are ideal for interacting with this customer base in a targeted manner and picking them up at the right time with the right measures — good lead nurturing is the keyword.
This requires appropriate planning as a first step. Maintaining existing customers should follow a clear plan. To design it, you should take a look at the following questions in advance:
- What content is required?
- At what point in the customer journey do you pick up your customers?
- What data do you need for this?
Marketing automation allows you to significantly increase sales success with your most loyal customers and at the same time strengthen loyalty to your company. By providing all interested parties with relevant information at the right time, you increase customer satisfaction without causing additional sales effort. This satisfied, long-term customer base can then create additional value again through word of mouth.
On the other hand, if you focus too much on new customers, you weaken the effect of this strategy. Attentive and valued existing customers, on the other hand, reinforce the value of recommendations and promote the success of your measures. A higher retention rate is a clear sign that this process is beginning to bear fruit.
The Opposite of Growth Hacking
Perhaps you're considering growth hacking as another measure to increase growth and work in a customer-focused manner.
Growth hacking, however, is different from growth marketing and marketing automation for existing customers and can be seen as a direct opposite. After all, the goal of growth marketing is rapid lead generation to be able to achieve the fastest possible growth. In most cases, a combination of various hacks is used, the short-term benefits of which are prioritized over the long-term evaluation. Growth marketing makes the speed of results the top priority and takes little regard for long-term development.
The goal is to grow as quickly as possible, which may appear legitimate from a start-up's point of view. If you want to use a spontaneous flash in the pan to increase your turnover and reach more people, growth hacking may seem like an interesting alternative. This will involve a strong focus on the group of new customers who should be quickly convinced of the products or services.
Marketing automation for existing customers counters this with a long-term strategy, which is based on a sustainable approach. The aim is not to quickly acquire new customers, but to build sustainable support, which shows itself in the form of satisfied users.
Uniqueness Instead of Mainstream
If you consistently implement marketing automation for existing customers, you can set yourself apart from the mainstream of the industry in a decisive way.
Instead of focusing on rapid growth, which should be achieved with the help of various tricks, use a long-term perspective. Once a motivated and satisfied customer base has been built up in this way, this will also be positively reflected in your balance sheets. Your existing customers will then attract new customers.
If this commitment to new customers is still too low for you, it is also possible to transfer the content used for marketing automation by existing customers to new customers. You can reuse a large part of the analyses and material cost-effectively and adapt to the situation of new prospects who have not yet come into contact with your services.
This keeps your company's fan base first and at the same time ensures that you never lose sight of your valuable new customers.
Take Advantage of Digital Tools
It's worth taking a look at the digital tools behind these processes before we move on to the results you can expect with good lead nurturing, increased customer loyalty, and the opposite of growth marketing.
Regardless of your strategy, in the B2B sector, you'll find that your customers always have a certain amount of experience in the industry. There are no classic inexperienced new customers, but only those who have not yet become aware of your offers.
This increases the importance of a cleverly designed sales funnel through which you can guide your leads. Marketing and sales automation will help you with this project. With this concept, you too are taking the next steps in digitization. In your industry, too, you can certainly see the particular success achieved by those companies that have opted for modern software and digital tools at an early stage and in a decisive manner.
For that, you should the digital opportunities Don't dismiss it as an unromantic way of selling. Instead, functions such as lead scoring, lead nurturing, and lead management allow you to significantly accelerate work processes and transfer them to intelligent software. This significantly reduces personnel costs, which was observed in the past in large sales teams with correspondingly high costs. If the past few years have clearly shown anything, it is the unparalleled advantage of digital tools that helps you optimize the customer journey.
If you take the first important steps with your company now, you are laying the foundation for the future. Because all experts agree that digitization has not yet reached the end of its development, even in the area of marketing.
What to Do Now
Are you interested in stronger customer loyalty and benefits such as simplified lead nurturing? Then it is now a matter of generating the appropriate content.
Marketing automation is based on a content strategy that can express your expert knowledge without being intrusive or disruptive. It is necessary to differentiate between different phases in which your customers are looking for different information.
If he receives qualified answers to his questions from you again and again, he will automatically associate your company with the solution to his problem. From there, it's just a small step to the sale. The formats you can choose for your content strategy couldn't be more different.
Depending on what is easy to implement in the media, you can choose from the following alternatives:
- infographics
- user reports
- Explanatory films
- E-books
- faqs
- podcasts
- blog articles
- interviews
- presentations
- newsletters
You'd better not choose indiscriminately from these options. Depending on the topic, individual formats are particularly suitable for conveying information clearly and informatively. Looking at the response of the target group also gives you an idea of which formats provide great added value.
You Can Expect That
It is expected that you will be able to significantly increase your company's retention rate with these measures. Stronger customer loyalty is due to the higher level of appreciation that your existing customers can now be sure of. In addition, as expected, your churn rate will decrease in the foreseeable future.
If churn rate and retention rate are finally in the right relationship with each other, do you have created the perfect basis for making long-term economic progress? From month to month, more new users enrich your customer base, while only a smaller proportion say goodbye to them. Based on these factors, it is easy to foresee that this strategy will result in higher sales.
Automated Care of Existing Customers
Marketing automation for existing customers will give you save a lot of work, once the process is set up. The potential new regular customer, who was able to get an impression of the services from now on, will be optimally provided with information material, which further strengthens customer loyalty.
You're not just making sure that the information gets to him at the right time. In addition, you improve customer loyalty by taking their individual situation into account and providing them with exactly the information that is important in their situation.
Nevertheless, you still have the opportunity to accompany existing customers during the purchase process and to watch their steps. In this way, conclusions can be drawn about their profile, which can be refined by asking customers direct questions.
Automation tools can evaluate hot leads through scoring. If you use a points system, the existing customer can be transferred to a sales representative from a clearly defined point, which further optimizes sales opportunities.
This dense network of precautionary offers makes it easy to see why marketing automation for your existing customers is a significantly higher customer loyalty will bring in.
Summary: This is Why Marketing Automation Is Beneficial for Existing Customers
The bottom line is that marketing automation for existing customers can allow you to create a:
- greater customer engagement.
- lower churn rate.
- higher retention rate.
- increased sales conversion.
All of these factors make an important contribution to profitable sales growth. You don't need quick solutions such as growth hacking, which can only be a real alternative in the short term. Instead, marketing automation provides you with a long-term concept with little effort, which you can adapt and use to the conditions in your company.
