Your existing clients are a great source for additional revenue. This is by no means new information – many companies have been making use of the upsell and referral marketing for many years. The question is: how can you engage your current clients to generate more sales and referrals?
Both the upsell and referrals rely on a solid relationship between the seller and the buyer. There are only so many ways that a company can engage their clients. Typically, these include:
- Event Invitations
- Face-to-Face Meetings
- Phone Conversations
- Personal Emails
- eNewsletters
- New Initiatives (Client Recommendations)
- Gifts
- Thank You Notes
However, each client base is different and will respond differently to the ways a company engages it. In fact, different segments of a particular company’s client base may act in very distinct ways. For this reason, when evaluating and analyzing client engagement, the first step is client segmentation – identifying the aspects your different customer groups, that make them similar.
These segments can be based on a number of factors. Your business may sell one product, but it could be purchased by three different types of consumers (for the sake of this example, these could be end-level consumers, contractors, and retail stores). Each segment will act uniquely and therefore your engagement strategy should be customized based on the client segment. Of course, you will have to determine what segments of your client base are relevant. These segments could be based upon identifiable differences between the types of consumers, or possibly just the amount of revenue generated over a specified period of time. Initially, keep things simple. You can always make your segments more advanced/specific as time goes on.
Once your client segmentation process has been executed, it’s simply a matter of planning out and monitoring how your company is engaging each one. First, you should begin measuring the specific engagement activities across client segments, while simultaneously monitoring the number of clients and revenue produced by each segment. From this data, you can get a pretty good idea of which activities are most effective for engaging your clients.
Another aspect of monitoring client engagement is calculating referral scores. There are two in particular that Webolutions utilizes: the Net Promoter Score, and the N.U.D.E. Score. The Net Promoter Score asks existing clients how likely they would be to recommend a company to a friend or colleague on a scale of 1-10. The N.U.D.E. Score calculates a company’s Novelty, Utility, Dependability, and Economy, each out of 100, to form an aggregate score out of 400 that indicates the likelihood that your clients will refer your business. Regardless of the scoring method you choose, it’s just a good plan to have some kind of a quantitative indicator for referrals.
To refine this process, you can create more specific engagement activities customized to how you run your business. The more specific this is, the more insightful the data will be. Additionally, you can use statistical analysis to identify the actual correlation (or even regression) coefficients for each of your engagement activities and referral scores as they relate to revenue, the number of clients, the number of referrals, or any other goal you deem relevant. If doing this, it may be worth your while to experiment with different time lags to account for delayed responses.
How to use this Information
Begin to monitor the way your company interacts with clients. By identifying key customer groups through client segmentation, and by measuring the engagement activities you make use of, you can quickly notice trends as to how clients react to the ways you engage them.
Here at Webolutions®, we utilize the model described above to collect and organize our clients’ engagement data, as well as our own. Of course, the specific segmentation strategy, as well as the engagement activities and scoring systems that you choose to employ will be specific to your business. As a full-service marketing agency, Webolutions® can offer assistance in starting this process within your organization. If you would like to learn more about how Webolutions® can help you with this or any other digital marketing questions, contact us online or give us a call at 303-300-2640.
