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Making your customers happy and keeping them that way is obviously immensely important to any business’s success. Do you know how to do this as a business owner? To make your customers happy, do you…?
A. Offer high quality products and services
B. Give competitive pricing
C. Provide excellent customer service
D. All of the above
If you answered “D,” you would be correct. Customers today expect personalized service, and quality products/services...all for the lowest price. In short, they want it all. Most businesses are equipped to offer one...sometimes two of these at an exceptional level. But offering all three simultaneously is almost impossible. To attempt to do so requires a heightened level of efficiency...one that would be nearly impossible were it not for the customer service support available through inbound marketing. Here's how it works:
What is Inbound Marketing?
Before going any further, it’s important to understand what we are talking about. What is inbound marketing? In essence, inbound marketing is a marketing strategy designed to get the attention of prospective customers, before they become actual customers. In other words, it’s reaching your buyers before they buy their first product. You can do this a few ways, some of which are listed below:
- Blogs
- eBooks
- Whitepapers
- Case studies
It’s important to remember that inbound marketing is one of the most effective ways to convert strangers to customers. Hubspot defines inbound marketing as…
“Sharing is caring and inbound is about creating and sharing content with the world. By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your dream customers, inbound attracts qualified prospects to your business and keeps them coming back for more.”
And
“The business approach of turning strangers into visitors, leads, customers and then promoters.”
Relate Inbound Marketing to Your Customer Experience
There are three main steps when it comes to when it comes to increasing inbound customer service. They include:
- Attract: You do this by attracting potential customers with resources and educational content, such as the blogs, eBooks, etc. listed above.
- Engage: When you engage with your customers, you reach out to them, responding to incoming tickets, providing different channels for them to get help, such as live chats, social media, email and phone. This includes elements of customer service, which is covered more later.
- Delight: The final step of the inbound customer service strategy is delight. This means encouraging customers who are pleased with your product or service to provide helpful feedback, refer their colleagues or friends or leave you positive reviews.
Customer Experience is Ever-evolving
It’s important to remember that customers today have more choices than ever before, which is, of course, great for customers but presents a challenge to businesses. Much of today’s marketing efforts have shifted to customers. Consequently, an effective marketing strategy has to rely on and be built upon great customer experiences. Inbound marketing helps you turn customers into superfans and effectively steers them away from your competitors. This of course involves an aspect of great customer service once prospects have become customers.
Effective customer service actually involves three elements, which are listed below:
- Customer support: This is about you reacting to customer’s needs. Helping them. It's transactional and interactive and is both initiated and concluded by the customer.
- Customer service: You guide the customer. Instead of them saying they need something, you say you have something for them.
- Customer success: This is always initiated by you and requires a bit of forethought and anticipation of your customer’s needs, both present and future. It provides customers an opportunity to garner something they might not have even known they needed or wanted.
To ensure a great customer experience, you need to incorporate the above three steps into your inbound marketing strategy. A good inbound strategy includes your efforts to attract, engage and delight your customers, which then moves into great customer support, service, and success, which perpetuates the whole cycle once again. This is possible only if you have a dedicated team behind you who can provide excellent customer support and provide the inbound marketing resources needed to convince potential clients to choose you. To accomplish this and get help with all things marketing, check out fuze32 for more!
