How Your Content Changes When a Lead Becomes a Customer
You’ve done it. You’ve successfully brought a lead all the way through your sales funnel and converted them into a customer. Good job! Unfortunately, though, that is not where your efforts end. When a lead becomes a customer, it is the beginning of a new type of relationship that must be cultivated with the proper messaging and approach to ensure customer satisfaction, foster brand loyalty and encourage repeat purchases.
While you are trying to convert a lead, you focus on how to solve a problem for your lead and convince them to buy your product or solution. You’re trying to pique their interest, inform them and guide them toward a decision. You may send emails with information about different features of your products or provide sales and discounts as incentive to purchase.
Customer Service & Satisfaction
However, when a lead becomes a customer, your messaging should change along with your goals. When it comes to current customers, the first and most important objective is customer service and satisfaction. Here are some ways to tailor your content for customer service and satisfaction:
- Check in after your customer’s purchase to make sure that it arrived in good condition and is functional, then check in again some time later to ensure it met their expectations.
- Consider a customer satisfaction survey with some incentive for participation, such as a gift card awarded to a random participant each month (depending on your sales volume). If you go this route, make the survey quick and easy to complete, along with a chance for the customer to provide you with more details of a specific encounter if they would like.
- Provide a clear and easy way for them to contact someone about concerns or complaints.
- Directly address complaints and make an effort to remedy them.
Taking these steps to ensure customer service and satisfaction, and making a specialized customer care team readily available, will help you maintain customers beyond their initial purchase.
Brand Loyalty & Repeat Purchases
The real goal of any sales funnel is not just the initial conversion or purchase, but a loyal and engaging customer who continues to interact and recommend the company. If customer service and satisfaction are done properly, they foster loyalty and encourage repeat purchases, but so can your content.
You can use content that contains offers appropriately timed after their initial purchase to send incentives on replacements or continued service. If their first experience was a pleasant one, they will be likely to repeat the experience with expectations of a similar outcome than go to another brand and risk a bad experience.
You can also use your content to recommend similar or complementary items, send them discounts for items left abandoned in a cart online, etc. You can even use your content for something as simple as sending out your latest blog posts or community events to encourage continued engagement from your customer.
Your content must change when your lead converts into a customer, because your goals change and thus your message changes. The best way to set up this change in content is with a marketing automation or CRM platform that automatically manages workflow and content for you once you set it up.
