The Fundamentals of Customer Relationship Management

The whole exercise of building a loyal customer base and retaining it is known as Customer Relationship Management or CRM in management jargon. Although not elusive, this has always remained a challenge for the marketers of all walks of business. Small business and home business faces upto this challenge often with an uneducated approach and with mixed results.

The Fundamentals of Customer Relationship Management

The modern customer is a free thinking individual grown up and basking in the glory of economic freedom and pampered by the new found consumerism. The culmination of these results as carefully cultivated pride. Customers of the day pride in buying often what they scarcely need. They rightfully want to be treated as important.

Building and retaining customer base demands rational; break free thinking from the business owner. A holistic view and approach allows understanding demographics, financial behavior and geographic location of the individual customer. While all three are keys to successful CRM, there is a crying need to rationally understand the financial behaviors for profiling them and later segmenting.

How Do You Apply These CRM Techniques To Your Business?

Attempting anything without the full knowledge can be disastrous. You can have three segments of customers based on financial behavior.

1.    Saving driven customers

2.    Credit driven customers

3.    Transaction driven customers

The profiles of each of these segments clearly indicate their product preferences, purchase habits & frequency, purpose of buying i,e; whether ego driven or need driven.

Take for example the first segment which possibly has a combined family savings of $5,000 plus across products whereas the next segment more or less has a similar savings available through credit account suitable for lending products. The last of the segments is driven by transaction and occasionally could qualify for any of the above category but just right for $1000 anytime.

Below these averages, customers can be treated separately with redesigned and re-priced products as they might take longer on their way above.

Reengineer Products and Services Accordingly

Non traditional products may be targeted at the first segment by direct mailing, storefront caring and packaging etc. Reengineering is no-nonsense, nonstop evolution. Success lies in answering questions such as which products satisfy both customers and the owner or which segment is the prospect for each product and how packaging communicates and translates into sales etc.

The concept of internet marketing is comparatively new.

Too many links and banners:

It has developed alongside the emergence of Internet as a cost-effective customer building platform. Companies from all over the world are crowding the Internet to take part in this ever expanding commercial phenomenon. Online marketing involves both product promotion and traffic generation.

Links and banners are used mostly for traffic generation. But too many links and banners could adverse effect your site prospects. On one hand too many links can distract the visitor and chances of his getting lost are high. Every page must have a link back to the home page so that the viewer can find his way back even if he is lost. Links may take him away from an important page to an irrelevant one. If the reader sees too many links in your site he might get irritated and leave the site altogether.

From search engine optimization perspective outbound (links that lead to other sites) are not beneficial. Some search engine algorithms take into account the number of outbound links a site has, which in turn reduces search result rankings. This is one of the reasons why having too many links in your site may cause problems. Again links placed in your site must have some relevance to your site content. If links are placed as a part of link exchange program then links should be exchanged only with sites that may be useful to your visitors. If the links lead to another site then you can loose your customers to other sites. For this reason having too many links in important pages is not a good idea. Instead of placing links in every page you can place all the links in a link page which visitors can access if they want to.

Banners are more distractive than text links. Colorful banners can divert viewer attention away from text content. Irrelevant banners confuse the viewer. Moreover banner advertisements overload the page and make it slow.  If your site is taking a lot of time to load then chances are high that you are loosing valuable potential customers to competitor sites which take less than ten seconds to load. Moreover search engine algorithms also take into account site loading time. Sometimes free hosting services introduce graphic advertisements which make your site slow. Banners should be restricted to no more than two per page. For this reason one should be careful about placing banners and links in a site page.