Do you want your software business to stand out from all other businesses out there? Effective and healthy relationships with your customers can help you accomplish that. You can use your marketing strategies to do this for you. Here’s how.
Using dynamic marketing tactics while marketing software is a great way of building healthy and constructive relationships with your customers. This also helps in retaining customers and builds a relationship of trust. While using a service provider, customers look for integrity. 96% of consumers think that the ads they see online lack integrity. Using your software ads to connect with your customers, you can make sure that this fact doesn’t apply to your software firm.
Leveraging your customers to establish good relationships with you is the first step towards making your software business boom.
Benefits Of Having A Connection With Your Customer
“Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create raving fans,” says Ken Blanchard, Co-Founder and Chief Spiritual Officer of The Ken Blanchard Companies. Some of the benefits of having good customer relationships include:
- Boost in Profits – According to the book Marketing Metrics, businesses have a 60 to 70% chance of selling to an existing customer. In contrast, the probability of selling to a new customer is only 5% to 20%. Having good relationships with your customers has always been linked with increased sales. This means that if your software company is able to build productive relationships with its customers, there’s a guarantee that you will see a boost in your revenue. Having good relationships with a customer ensures that you are always in touch with them. This means that you are the first software company that comes to their mind if they want to purchase the software.
- Customer Recommendations – When you have a positive relationship with your customer, the chances are that the customer is likely to recommend your software to others. These customers become advocates for your software company. Positive word of mouth is an excellent way of advertising your software.
- Connecting with customers personally – Having good customer relationships means that your customers trust you. They can connect with your software firm on a personal level, and that is enough for them to trust your software, your company, and your personnel.
- More profitable than acquiring new customers – Customer retention is much more profitable than customer acquisition. According to a study by Bain & Company, increasing customer retention by 5% increases profits by 25-95%. Getting a new customer for your software company is likely to cost you five times more than retaining your existing customers. So if your software firm wants to save costs, building customer relationships is a great way to do so.
Using Marketing To Build Good Relationships With The Customers Of Your Software Company
While other techniques exist to build constructive relationships with your customers, you can always integrate your marketing tactics with a good relationship-building strategy.
Use the help of emails.
Emails are great marketing tools; let’s accept it. For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42. Personalized emails are also a great way to connect with your pool of customers and provide value to your software services. A personal touch in your emails can ignite conversations that later turn into sales.
“Email has an ability many channels don’t: creating valuable, personal touches—at scale.” Says David Newman, an American Composer and Conductor known for his film scores.
Every email/newsletter that you send to your existing customers has great potential to build good relationships with your customers. While drafting these emails, make sure that they are tailored around the requirements of each customer and are highly personalized. Educate your customer with the latest software updates, new software launches, and industry news. Provide them with updates and news on the software that they’re most interested in.
Connect with them on social media
Using personalized social media campaigns has the benefit of effective marketing and proves fruitful in building healthy customer relationships. More than 90% of companies use social media marketing to build brand awareness, generate sales, and interact with current and future clients.
You should design a social media campaign that is highly personalized for your target audience. They should feel connected to it. It should have mass customer outreach and be bespoke at the same time. You can use your promotional content on social media to spread awareness and updates about your software firm.
You must also use your social media channels to interact with your customers effectively. Introduce your customers to your team so that productive relationships are built not only with your software firm, but your personnel as well. Frequently answering the questions of your customers and asking them for feedback also helps.
Use blogs
Blogs and online communities prove as powerful customer-building/marketing tools. 53% of marketers say blogging is their top content marketing priority. By creating blogs and updating them frequently, you create an online community. This community consists of your loyal customers and people who are keen to hear the updates your software firm has to offer. Use blogs for marketing your software that only appeals to that specific community.
Unlike other marketing channels, an online community only consists of your target audience and customers only. Share your latest news on these blogs, update them on the industry, and use it to announce new software/updates. You can use one-to-one marketing/spreading-awareness techniques on your blog as you only have your loyal customers in this online community. Tell them how you would go the extra mile to serve their needs. This makes them feel connected.
Ending Note
While building relationships using marketing tools is a good call, there are also other techniques that you can go for to build customer relationships. These techniques involve using other means to connect with your customers, offering them incentives and rewards, and keeping them informed at all times, the sky’s the limit. It’s up to you to develop an innovative strategy to build customer relationships that best suit your software firm.