It’s easier to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one. This statement rings true in today’s business environment. According to Zippia, customer retention is six to seven times cheaper than acquiring a new one. Also, a 5% increment in customer retention can boost profit from 25% to 95%. Furthermore, the companies have a 60-70% chance of selling to existing customers in comparison to a 5-20% chance of selling to new customers.

These statistics highlight the importance of customer retention rate in the success of business. Despite its importance, many businesses struggle with poor CRR. The most common reasons for poor CRR are not analyzing customer behavior, lack of re-engagement with past clients, not making customer relationships a priority, taking customer loyalty for granted, and so on.

What if you could overcome these challenges, and build long-term customer retention?

Salesforce, the World’s No. 1 customer relationship management software enables businesses to build long-term customer retention.

In this blog, we will share some practical ways to use Salesforce for building customer retention.

So, let’s get started.

Ways to Use Salesforce for Customer Retention

Here we have discussed the different ways Salesforce can be used by businesses to build long-term customer retention.

1. Centralized Customer Data

Data silos are one of the major roadblocks on the journey of building customer retention. When customer data is stored in silos, it becomes difficult to access and analyze the data.

Salesforce helps businesses to overcome the challenges of data silos by centralizing all the customer data into a single place.

Salesforce has a Customer 360 platform that centralizes the customer’s data from multiple sources into a single location. This makes it easy for a business to access data and identify opportunities to grow CRR.

According to a report from Informatica, centralized customer data can lead to a 66% reduction in time spent on data searching, resulting in improved employee productivity.

The centralization of customer data also reduces the scope of duplication helping businesses to achieve data accuracy.

2. Personalizing Customer Interactions

Personalizing customer interaction is one of the most important ways to build long-term CRR.

Salesforce centralized customer data, building the foundation for adapting personalization in customer interactions. Businesses can understand customer preferences, browsing behavior, past purchase history, and other information. This information will help a business to tailor the interactions that are specific to customers and improve their overall experience.

Salesforce also introduced Einstein GPT, the world’s first generative AI for CRM. This helps businesses to deliver personalized experiences to their customers using Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Businesses can generate dynamic website content that adapts to customers’ needs, automating personalized marketing emails, and creating relevant recommendations. Furthermore, Einstein GPT can also suggest feedback to identify the areas of improvement to build a more personalized experience.

3. Recognize and Re-engage Your Inactive Customers

Identifying and re-engaging with inactive customers is one of the best practices to maximize the customer retention rate. First, customer acquisition is more expensive than retention rate. Second, the growing list of inactive customers is also proving to be a disadvantage to open and click rates of marketing campaigns. Third, existing customers are more likely to pay more for your product or services.

Salesforce can help businesses to identify inactive customers and re-engage with them. Salesforce adds the “Last Activity Field” to lead and contact records to keep businesses informed about their last interaction with a customer. This enables the business to filter the communication according to the time when they had the last interaction. Salesforce also enables the business to track customer engagement, making the identification of initiative customers easier.

For re-engagement purposes, Salesforce can help businesses identify and segment inactive customers to create re-engagement campaigns. With Salesforce, businesses can send personalized emails, special deals, or tailored recommendations to inspire them to make a purchase.

4. Enhancing Customer Service with Service Cloud and Self-Service Portals

The most effective way of maximizing customer retention rate is building efficient customer services after they have purchased products or services. This lets them know that brands truly value them – and consider them more than a number.

Salesforce Service Cloud helps businesses deliver personalized customer support. It offers support agents with 360-degree of customers and their interaction history with the business. So, whenever a customer reaches out to the support team, the agent can ask them about the issue and fetch other information from Service Cloud to offer them a fast and personalized service experience.

Furthermore, Service Cloud also has self-service portals that empower customers to find answers to simple questions independently. All these things will help a business to maximize its CRR.

5. Salesforce Enables Omnichannel Customer Engagement

Omnichannel customer engagement enables the business to interact with the customers on the channel they prefer. For example, let’s say a customer starts a conversation on social media, and then continues the conversation over mail or phone call.

Omnichannel engagement plays an important role in maximizing customer retention rates. According to a study conducted by Aberdeen Group, the companies with strong omnichannel engagement strategies retain 89% of the customers in comparison to 33% for companies with poor omnichannel strategies.

Salesforce offers a suite of tools to help businesses achieve a strong customer omnichannel presence. For instance, Marketing Cloud can help businesses to create a consistent and personalized marketing experience across all channels. Likewise, Service Cloud can enable customers to raise tickets from one platform and carry them forward across all channels.

6. Creating a Loyalty Program that Rewards Customers for Their Repeat Business

Loyalty programs are essential for customer retention as they provide customers with a strong incentive to make a purchase. According to a survey conducted by Bond Brand Loyalty, 73% of customers said that they are more likely to make purchases from a brand that offers good loyalty programs.

With Salesforce Loyalty Management, your business is all set to make the best ROI from each loyalty program. It is a unified cross-industry solution that has a host of features to help you design the loyalty program from scratch. It helps companies across industries like retail, finance, consumer goods, travel, manufacturing, and so on to create loyalty programs with point-and-click interfaces.

Salesforce also helps identify loyal customers by providing businesses with a 360-degree view of the customer. With the help of data such as purchase history, customer service interactions, social media activity, and more. This data and Salesforce’s AI-powered analytics tools can help businesses identify the most loyal customers and create a targeted loyalty program to value them.

Final Take

Although customer acquisition seems to be a fast and powerful way to make more revenue, it is not deemed to be the most effective way for long-term growth. Customer retention supports your business to establish a loyal customer base that will become a strong advocate for your long-term growth.

Do you want to enhance your customer retention rate with Salesforce? Cyntexa, being a Salesforce partner can implement Salesforce CRM tailored to your business needs. Let’s connect with us to discuss how we can help your business achieve its customer retention goals.