Everything about the customer experience improves when you care about making it personal. You listen more closely, offer better solutions, and simply show customers that you want to help them. Turns out that treating people like people and acting like one yourself pays off!
And hey what a great bonus to the business that doing all that also improves customer lifetime value. Because of course customers want to spend money at a business that shows a personal interest in their success.
Use personalization in each of these five ways to take your CLV higher and higher.
1) Prioritize Open and Transparent Communication
71 percent of customers want companies to talk and interact with them in real-time. This means using the fastest and most personal methods of communication. Generally this includes web chat and business text messaging, and ideally both rely on human-in-the-loop automations. That way you have genuine conversations with some help from automated technology. Only using chat bots, email drips, or short code doesn’t help with personable experiences.
You best help customers when, from the beginning of your relationships, you make outreach easy for them. Customers should know how to get in touch with you directly and when you’re available. Best case scenario? You give them a number to text you (and not your personal cell phone number).
However, no matter your communication tools, you help customers feel heard and valued when you respond fast and respond personally. So even if you rely heavily on email, getting back to customers quickly and showing you understand their personal situation will encourage them to stick with you.
Education about your product and industry use cases doesn’t stop once someone makes a purchase or signs a contract. Nor does it stop once someone makes it through your onboarding.
By creating valuable content — anything from blog posts and infographics to tutorial videos and templates — and sharing it with specific customer groups, you give them actionable info to achieve success. And when you help them succeed, they trust you and continue supporting you.
The key here is delivering content relevant to specific subsets of customers. This requires learning directly from your customers. Know what different people care about and then literally share the right content with the right people once you create it.
3) Encourage Community Learning
Providing useful and relevant content is good, but don’t stop education there. When customers can ask you for help as well as each other, you start creating an actual community. (You can’t get much more personal than that.) You help create a sense of belonging when you create a space for customers to “gather” and talk together.
Skipio has found great success by moderating Facebook groups of prospective and current customers. Other companies love their forums, such as WritersDomain. In their writer forum, freelancers from around the world gather to talk about business and their hobbies.
In both situations, community managers or moderators quickly engage 1-on-1 with the community.
Other ways you can promote community engagement include exclusive webinars or small group consulting. By training people in this way, you help a lot of people at once, give customers the chance to engage in real-time, and show everyone the humans behind the business.
All of these community efforts give customers a place to speak and feel heard.
4) Do Individualized Outreach That Has Nothing to Do With Upgrades
Yes, you technically improve customer lifetime value by getting a customer to pay you more. But reaching out only when trying to get someone to upgrade isn’t nearly as effective as focusing on your overall customer retention strategy. Pushing an upsell hurts your relationships and practically gives customers an excuse to consider other options.
Instead, solicit feedback about how they specifically use your product(s) and reference what you know of their goals. Give advice and offer insights based on what they do now and what you know they could do in the future. Have ongoing conversations!
And remember, “individualized” doesn’t have to mean “non-automated.” With a platform like Skipio, you easily automate this outreach by integrating with your CRM. You set up message triggers and custom merge fields that auto-populate into personal, engaging text messages. You contact different segments of customers at specific times all without having to remember to follow up.
5) Lead With Gratitude and Appreciation
Some well-timed coupons won’t keep customers loyal to you, no matter how personalized the deal is. But repeatedly showing your gratitude to those who matter most to your business? That counts for more than you might think.
There’s endless ways to show customer appreciation, including:
- Sincerely thanking anyone who reaches out or who agrees to speak with you if you contact them
- Improving your products based on feedback and then directly acknowledging the customers who made suggestions
- Celebrating customer milestones with personalized text messages, phone calls, emails, or even postcards, sharing swag or small gifts
- Rewarding customer loyalty with discounts or offers relevant to each customer
Don’t worry about being super formal or making it a whole process. Just be gracious and kind in all your conversations. It goes a long way.
How Does Personalization Fit Into Your CLV Formula?
It’s no surprise that there isn’t a perfect formula for adding personalization to your CLV formula. Exactly how you create a personable, human experience for your customers must adapt and change as your business grows.
Simply remember that as you scale the business, personalization can and should scale too. That’s where Skipio shines.
Skipio helps sales reps and teams prioritize personalization because that’s what leads to responses, appointments, and sales. As you close more sales and grow your business, use Skipio to scale your communication and improve customer lifetime value along the way.
Sign up for Skipio now to start boosting your CLV.
