A CRM is your best follow-up tool

Note: This is article #3 in the The Ultimate Guide to Creating Repeat Customers

Everyone's favorite tactic for converting new customers to repeat customers is following up with the customer. You should always follow up one month after the sale, but you should also send as few emails as possible to not be annoying. This sounds easy to do, right? All you have to do is remember to send your customer only one email a month later. However, what if you have 50 customers at once? 100? 500? Surely, you’re not going to remember exactly when to email 500 different people.

Here’s the solution: a CRM.

A CRM, or customer relationship manager, keeps track of all your customers and allows you to create events or tasks for each customer. For example, if you wanted to remember to send a follow-up email to Customer A, you’d log on to your CRM, go to Customer A’s page, and create a task that’s due whenever you want to send the follow-up email. Most CRMs will even send you reminders for events and tasks to further ensure that you won’t forget!

The best part about using a CRM to remind yourself about follow-up emails is that you’ll have a history of everything that’s happened with a customer. Instead of the traditional pen-and-paper style of scribbling notes down and frantically searching for them later, all information associated with a customer is automatically saved on their profile. You’ll be taken to the customer’s profile in just seconds with a quick name search on the CRM!

Because you have a record of all emails, notes, events, and tasks with a customer, you can check to make sure that you haven’t already sent them an email. This way, you’ll never have to worry about sending a duplicate email, which can be both embarrassing for you and annoying for the customer.

Maybe you work with other people to help you follow up with customers. You’ve divided the set of customers between you and your co-workers, but now you worry that it’ll be hard to keep track of everything. Well, a CRM is designed specifically for you and your co-workers to work together in a collaborative environment. In your CRM account, you can assign different customers to your co-workers. As I mentioned before, having a history of information that’s saved on every customer’s profile will be especially helpful when working with co-workers. You won’t have to email or message your co-workers every time you follow up with a customer -- all follow-up events and tasks are visible to everyone on your CRM account.

Using a CRM to keep track of when to follow up with new customers will not only help you email the right customers at the right time, but it will also save customers from getting annoying, duplicate emails from you.