“Well done is better than well said”– Benjamin Franklin
The famous aphorism also stands true for any business as it implies that your customers respond better to what you do for them in spite of what you are saying or you are going to do. This is exactly why exceptional customer service needs to be closely aligned with your marketing strategy.
With consumers increasingly turning to digital mediums including social media networks, review websites, web chat sessions, and online forums in order to connect with businesses, the need for a symbiotic relationship between customer service and marketing is at the utmost priority. In today’s fast-paced environment, it is important for your business to employ this harmonious amalgamation to take a leap and derive huge revenue.
Let’s have a close look at customer service as a marketing strategy
Customer service and marketing are usually the two different approaches with completely separate objectives. Staff employed in customer service operations don’t necessarily require any marketing training while professionals involved in marketing don’t need to learn about customer retention. In a certain perspective, marketing is all about new customer acquisition, or outreaching a wide audience, while customer service is all about taking care of customers in every aspect. Considering in another perspective, these approaches are two sides of the same coin, with remarkable overlap between them.
The combination of customer service and marketing is the most lucrative option when it comes to generating huge sales. You rely on your marketing strategies to reach out new customer base and increase your business sales, so you should also use it along with customer service to bolster your business terms with your audience or customers.
According to Marketing Metrics, you have around 60-70% chance of getting business from your pre-existing customers in comparison to only a 5-20% chance of selling to new audience.
In this blog, you can see how customer service can be leveraged as a marketing strategy to improve your customer acquisition as well as marketing efforts.
Make use of customer reviews and testimonials as promotional asset
Using customer reviews and testimonials as promotional material is one of the most powerful ways of improving your selling points, according to the Income Store. In this digital business world, customers trust on peer reviews in the same way as they trust on personal recommendations from friends and family persons. With great customer service, you can reap the benefits of positive comments and reviews which you can further implement in various onsite or offsite means of promotion. This will definitely showcase your care towards your customers and sell your brand on your behalf.
Create a hype with top-of-the-line customer service
Creating some organic or even a viral buzz by ensuring over-the-top customer service to one or more of your best customers is a very compelling tactic to increase your brand reach. Let’s understand this with a simple example. You are running an e-grocery store, and if one of your customers had a bad experience with a specific product (suppose milk), then you can contact them in-person and offer them a complementary product (cookies) in addition to the same product (milk) for free. Such an ecstatic experience will certainly work as a makeover for any bad experience. Now that customer will appreciate your brand, he or his/her friends will most likely talk about the experience on social sites which in turn can increase your brand reach. So, the point is you just have to create an unforgettable experience for your best customers and rest of the marketing processes will initiate automatically without spending huge amount.
Integrate customer service into your marketing strategy
In actual, content marketing is meant to provide information to your audience about your business domain, product/services or about the needs your company addresses. Considering using a customer-focused part of your website as an extension of your content marketing tactic paves the way for targeting more customers and generating more leads. Content and resources published on website should be highly focused on identifying and addressing customer needs with your products and services. This is not only useful to drive higher search rankings, but also more inbound traffic for your business.
Recommended For You: Customer Service–The Key to Your Business Growth
In short, customer service is an inevitable part of your marketing efforts. By combining this reciprocal approach, you can accelerate the profitability. Companies specialised in outsourced telemarketing are inclined towards latest marketing trends to generate rewarding results. You can prefer telemarketing outsourcing to build a higher ROI.