Automate Customer Self Service with Web Forms and Drip Marketing
It is hard to find a business model or industry that hasn't been disrupted, or is about to be disrupted by the Web. The insustrial revolution has been outsourced and is coming back again as robotics, cars and trucks are being able to drive themselves, you wait for your Uber instead of a cab and EVERYTHING is now connected on a single network.
A key driver in all of these revolutions has been automating Web Self-Service.
If a business wishes to scale operations or to deliver better customer service, or build a better relationship with existing customers then it is probably involve someone visiting a web page or a Facebook page or read an email that allows them to fill in a form and sign up online for something. An email is sent right away, thanking them for signing up and with instructions on next steps, and then a series of emails are sent to each signup, in a timed fashion, and based on their activity, and then allowing them to opt-out without ever talking to anyone at the company. This idea of Web Self-Service is now ubiquitous and part of our daily routine.
If you don't have Web Self-Service that is point-and-click easy to setup, and comes with your own dedicated consultant who can be called upon to help, then you are already behind.
The point is today it is more about plotting out what to say, when and how to deliver the message, and over what medium. This allows the business to see the customer lifecycle as a holistic thing, in a closed loop, from Marketing to Sales to Support and Billing and Production and beyond. How many emails are you going to send them? You can't bombard them or SPAM them, and you don't want to neglect them at any time either.
It is something that every business has have a plan for, and this makes you a better business. Here's why: if you haven't done this already then now is the time to focus on how and when you interact with each customer and what is the message you would like to send them.
Let's not kid ourselves, this is not a one-and-done thing. It is something that evolves and changes as you refine your processes and make them more about identifying customer pain-points and what information is going to most efficiently help them. And by customer, we don't just mean helping your Leads and Accounts, we are also talking about your internal customers, ie your employees. Allowing them to browse alongside the customer to read and find the best solution for them is the best thing for everyone. A system has been made on what to do in each circumstance and you have anticipated their questions, wrapped it up in a nice email message, or text message, or app alert, etc. so that the customer and their peers, along with your employees, can purchase and continue to be served by you.
Drip campaigns are the rules to the game, and once everyone understands the rules, it is time to play.
Drip Marketing campaigns send out messages and the best exampe is the monthly newsletter that gets sent out every month at the same time, and you have to have your content ready to put in the email and send it out. This can be a manual process or it can be more automated so that emails are qued up for sending on a timed basis as long as you have your content ready to send before the deadline, the system will automatically send out the emails and have and automated opt-out where users can click to unsubscribe and automatically fires it out to the right group of emails that have been double opted-in and consent to all the CAN-SPAM rules, with duplicates removed, and sending only one message at a time to each email address.
A good Drip Marketing stragegy for the business as a whole is to look at the Web Lead to Closed Sale Process, then the Customer onboarding, fulfillment, training, etc, and then look at the billing and fulfillment, and then ongoing building on the Customer relationship to better identify cross-sells, upsells, renewals and referrals, etc. Each one is a discrete set of processes that must constantly be reinvented to be more streamlined and with better information and delivered at the right time. It is a constant refining of the message and timing so that you approach being timely and relavent with every customer interaction so that the business understands their pain point, if fact has already anticipated such and event occuring, and already has a plan of action - just do this. That is how today's businesses are growing and suceeding.
Business is going through a new Revolution, the Internet Revolution as we call it. Remember when e-mail was hotly debated as to it's merit to business? One of the key drivers in all of this is Customer (or Client) Self-Service. Well business will be talking about Cloud CRM like that in the near future. Cloud CRM has already reached a tipping point for the large Enterprises an it is raching small and medium sized businesses.