If you’re a small business every sale, every customer, and every interaction is important. To successfully grow your business into what you’ve always envisioned, you need to create relationships with your customers. In order to create those successful relationships, you need to make use of the data you are collecting.
When you’re collecting information from different sources like in-store sales, online sales, social media interactions, and more it can be challenging to sort and organize it in a meaningful way. Most of the time the data that you worked so hard to collect just sits, unused, on servers and hard drives and your company isn’t seeing any of the benefits from it. And in that unused data are potential customers and sales you are losing out on.
An online database for customer information can help you sort and organize the customer information in order to better connect and increase your sales. However, the database won’t increase your sales unless you utilize the information correctly. Here are some ways an online database can help you increase your sales.
Create a Sales Pipeline
A sales pipeline is the visual representation of your prospects and where they are in the buying process. Using an online database, you can track your customer as they go through the process and work with them accordingly. Seeing the pipeline laid out like that allows you to determine how to approach the customer for follow-ups, touch bases, and the final sales call.
Identify and Define Your Customers
In an online database, you can store information that can help you identify and define your customers. You can track the number of purchases they make which will allow you to see who comes in on a weekly versus monthly versus yearly basis. Tracking these sales shows you their purchase history which allows you to potentially predict their future purchases and use these to set your sales goals.
Offer Personalized Promotions
When you track your customer’s sales you are able to see the products they have purchased, the products they have expressed interest in, and possibly even products they may be interested in. This allows you to send personalize promotions tied to their specific purchasing history, either an updated version of a product or a complementary product to something they’ve already purchased. Personalized promotions are more likely to generate a sale as you know its something that is already of interest to your customer.
Re-Engage Old Customers
When all of your customer information is stored in an online database you are able to easily sort by last purchases date to identify customers who haven’t made a purchase within the last year. With those customers, you can start a re-engagement campaign in order to entice them back to your business and potentially even make a new sale. If you know what they purchased last it also lets you use your personalized promotional strategy to market to them individually.