The growth of any business depends mainly on customers. Without them driving up revenue and promoting your brand, your business could fold up. For this reason, you should always prioritize efforts to improve customer service.
You should work toward building a strong customer baseāfrom creating product awareness and converting prospects into sales to retaining customers and building customer loyalty. Digital marketing can be instrumental in achieving all these goals. This article will cover how to bridge the gap between digital marketing and excellent customer service.
What is Digital Marketing?
Fortunately, digitalization has made it easier for businesses to connect directly with customers through digital marketing strategies. They leverage the internet and other digital tools to build brand awareness, establish their industry leadership, and generate conversions, among other things.
Digital marketers also donāt rely on traditional marketing media, such as television and print, to engage customers. Instead, they use channels such as email, text messaging, social media, web advertising, and search engines .
As of January 2023, there are 5.16 billion internet users worldwide, roughly 64% of the total population. Meanwhile, there are 4.76 billion social media usersāa whopping 59% of the global population. These numbers show that more and more people spend their time online, somewhat influencing their shopping behavior.
There has never been a better time than today for businesses to align their efforts with new digital marketing strategies.
How Great Customer Service Impacts Businesses
Marketing is only one side of the equation for growing a business. The other more important factor is how your marketing efforts can sustain a steady growth of happy and satisfied customers. With your marketing efforts geared toward the digital space, itās essential always to integrate effective customer service. After all, customers can either make or break your business.
In what ways do businesses benefit from having good customer service?
- Higher sales and revenue: Better customer experience is a factor in most customersā buying decisions. How your business treats a customer can result in either a sales conversion or a loss to a competitor.
Strong relationships with customers can also spell repeat sales and referrals from loyal and satisfied customers. It will be easier to upsell or cross-sell other products to these people, especially if you know their preferences. - Better customer retention: It is more costly for businesses to acquire new customers than retain old ones. Studies have shown that even a mere 5% customer retention rate can translate to a 25% profit for the business. Every prospect has a customer lifetime value, and good customer service is a critical factor in retaining them.
- Good business image and reputation: Information spreads fast in a highly-digitized world. Only reviews, endorsements, and even social media posts from customers can positively or negatively affect business reputations. In fact, 93% of customers admit to trusting reviews they see when buying a product.
- Valuable business insights: Good customer service means knowing and being in touch with your customers. Feedback systems can generate insights helpful in improving your business or creating new products.
Bridging the Gap Between Digital Marketing and Stellar Customer Service
Having discussed why customer service is crucial to your business, read on to find out how to use digital marketing to improve customer experience.
- Increased accessibility
Customers want businesses that they can quickly and conveniently reach. A well-designed digital marketing strategy that considers such ease of access can drive better customer engagement. Conversely, marketing content that is hard to understand or navigate will result in losing customers due to poor user experience.
Digital marketing also allows for interactions or communications that welcome all types of customers. Connecting with a wider audience quickly and significantly improves your brand awareness and image.
Remember that you should optimize your marketing campaign across channels. You should give customers user-friendly content and a seamless experienceāwhether the customer is using a desktop or a mobile device.
- Personalization
Digital marketing allows businesses to personalize their campaigns further and significantly improve customer engagement and retention. Companies can gather and store data about prospective and existing customers through automated tracking software. In turn, they can use this data to make more targeted and relevant offers to customers.
On the other hand, customers will feel better receiving useful marketing content. They may become uninterested in generic content sent to a general audience. Through direct marketing, you can send the right message to customers at the right time. Personalized marketing content will also make customers feel special and stay with your business.
- Faster response time
With digital marketing, businesses can interact with customers, resolve problematic accounts, and address customer concerns faster. It eliminates customer exasperation because of the long waiting time for calls to be attended to.
Digital marketing also facilitates a response toward a customerās action or behavior during the buying journey. For instance, if they leave items in their shopping cart, you can send more information or offers about the product. This way, you can support the customer with their decision and generate a sale.
- Integration with customer relationship management (CRM) systems
A CRM system is management software businesses use to store and manage customer data. Digital marketing campaigns integrated with CRMs not only gather customer data. It also analyzes and segments this information to help businesses develop more targeted digital marketing campaigns.
Through their analytics function, CRM systems can track customer preferences, interactions, and behavior. These data will, in turn, be useful in executing personalized digital marketing campaigns. For instance, businesses can use a CRM system to build loyalty programs because of its ability to track loyal customers.
Moreover, businesses can use CRM data for sales, customer service, and product development. Knowing what customers want can guide your employees in fulfilling their functions.
Types of Digital Marketing
There are various types of digital marketing that you can use to deliver excellent customer service. Below are some that you can explore.
Optimizing your business webpage for search engines can make it easier for your customers to find your product and services online. You should consider factors such as content quality, mobile-friendliness, inbound links, and technical components to rank high in search engines.
- Content marketing
Many businesses today use content marketing to attract leads which can be potential customers. Some of them also implement SEO strategies to reach customers faster. Content can be in formats like blogs, videos, infographics, newsletters, e-books, and others.
At the end of the day, you should provide engaging and informative content to attract and retain customers.
- Social media marketing
Social media marketing involves using social media platforms to engage customers, drive traffic to your business, or promote your products. Many companies use Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to promote their products and services and support other digital marketing strategies.
- Email marketing
You can also send personalized emails to customers to engage customers better. You can send promotional offers, welcome emails, and birthday greetings, among other things. The important thing to consider is that the message should be relevant to the customer. As such, you will need to segment your audience to personalize your email content.
- Mobile marketing and SMS marketing
With the increasing number of mobile device users, mobile devices have become a cost-efficient and faster way to deliver a marketing campaign. However, you should first know the discussion about SMS marketing vs. mobile marketing.
SMS (Short Message Service) marketing relies on mobile phones for marketing campaigns delivered through text messages. The content may be about special or limited-time product offers, product updates, order status, and other similar content. They are often short because text messages have character limits.
In SMS marketing, customers should opt-in or give their permission to receive SMS notifications from a business.
On the other hand, mobile marketing involves delivering promotional content to prospective customers on mobile devicesātablets, smartphones, and smartwatches. Businesses usually create customized and location- and time-sensitive mobile marketing content. They also use media commonly accessed on mobile devices.
You can use mobile marketing and SMS marketing at the same time to improve customer service. It allows your business to connect with customers in real-time, which is a huge advantage since most people already spend a lot of time on their mobile devices. You can make mobile shopping seamless for customers using mobile-optimized browsers.
Some examples of digital marketing strategies intended to deliver quality customer service include the following:
- Contact and share buttons that are highly visible on business pages, which are meant to direct customers and provide ease of access;
- Instant messaging apps, such as live chats, that can give customers instant answers and readily available support;
- Frequently asked questions (FAQ) pages, which can improve customer convenience; and
- Customer relations apps, which allow customers to find solutions to their concerns without the help of live agents and even leave feedback and other messages.
Align the Digital Experience and Customer Journey
Making the most of your digital marketing efforts can help you unlock many opportunities, particularly in providing exceptional customer service. After understanding why good customer service is essential to the growth of your business, it is time to focus your efforts on utilizing the strategies above to build and expand your customer base.
You can choose from different digital marketing techniques to turn your leads into customers and retain them. Ultimately, your business will reap the rewards for putting in your best efforts to make your customers happy.
