Six ways to automate customer retention using Zoho Flow

While generating new leads is crucial for any business, retaining existing customers is just as important. Customer retention helps your company build a loyal customer base and take your business further, as well as help you generate new leads through positive feedback and word of mouth. A customer who has made a purchase or signed a deal with your business will likely come back if they're impressed, and it's crucial to build a loyal base with these customers.

There are numerous remarketing strategies that you can use to retain existing customers. This ranges from sending out surveys to creating strategies based on lead analytics. You can push out content to your customers in many ways to make them feel valued and relevant. However, setting up automated workflows in this phase will ensure that all your customer retention strategies are consistently in place.

Using an integration platform like Zoho Flow to automate these tasks will not only eliminate the time and effort spent on those operations but also ensure that you don't forget them.

Now let's check out a few workflows that you can build using Zoho Flow, to help you retain customers and save time and effort.

Instantly get customer information from e-commerce websites

Over 20% of every sale made around the globe is through e-commerce websites. This is why it's important for you to reflect your e-commerce purchase data in your CRM, as it makes up a large number of customers who have a lot of potential for remarketing.

By integrating your e-commerce applications like Shopify with your Zoho CRM, you get the chance to create a better audience segment for remarketing purposes. You can automate adding new contacts for first-time customers or updating contacts for existing customers, ensuring your customer data stays up to date. This way, all your customer data is instantly uploaded to your CRM database.

Automate sending out surveys whenever a lead is converted

Sending out surveys to customers can help businesses get a better understanding of how customers see your services or products, offering you the chance to address any shortcomings or problems on your end. Automating the sending of surveys can ensure that you don't miss out on getting feedback from any of your customers, and it can be done with a simple integration.

You can integrate invoicing applications like Zoho Invoice with survey applications like Zoho Survey, to ensure that every time an invoice goes out after a sale is made a survey will also automatically be sent to the customer.

One of our customers, Master Liveaboards, implemented a workflow like this, including numerous actions being performed through a single automated workflow. It starts from the point a survey response is collected and goes on to initiate several other steps that would take a lot of time and effort if done manually. The image below is a representation of their workflow, and you can check out their case study for a more detailed understanding of how it works.

Enhance the quality and speed of customer support services

While updating customer information in your CRM or sending out surveys is a great way of data accumulation, your customer loyalty is truly based on how responsive you are to them. Enhanced quality and speed of customer services are the foundation for building a loyal customer base—but decreasing the wait time for customers through your help desk applications will require automation.

Some of the best ways to speed up the customer support process is to automate the creation of tickets in your help desk application and notification of support executives when a ticket is assigned to them. Thankfully, both these processes can happen in real time with the help of app integrations. If you integrate desk applications like Zoho Desk with Zoho Cliq or Slack, it will notify your support agents instantly, letting them get in touch with customers and solve their problems as soon as possible.

Automate the analyzing of customer behavior

Gathering customer information is key for customer retention. However, analyzing the gathered information is the first step towards building a customer base that will keep coming back consistently.

Once you convert your leads, it's essential to categorize them based on multiple factors, including their purchases, interests, goals, and behavior. It's also important to treat your customers as humans rather than just data, and this information can help you do that—by creating personalized campaigns that cater to their specific needs with your analyzed data.  

You can automate the analyzing of customer data by integrating analytics applications like Zoho Analytics or Outreach with Zoho CRM to ensure that all your customer information is consistently uploaded into your analytics applications instantly.

With the analyzed data, you'll be able to create targeted content that aligns with the interests and needs of your customers. This integration also makes it easier to categorize your leads and customers and create targeted content that resonates with each of their unique requirements, helping you build a strong customer base.

Send automatic newsletter emails to your customers

Analyzing customer behavior properly can help you create relevant and personalized customer retention strategies. Sending out newsletters is one such strategy to keep your existing customers in the loop on all the updates and news about your business. It's also a very cost-effective marketing method to retain your relevant customers. The best way to ensure that all your customers are a part of your newsletter campaigns is to integrate your CRM application, where all your customer information is present, with your email campaign application.

For example, integrating Zoho CRM with Zoho Campaigns will make sure that when a lead is marked as a customer in your CRM, they'll be instantly added as contacts in Zoho Campaigns, letting you plan your newsletter or email marketing activities with those customers.

Provide discounts to repeat customers

Offering a discount to your customers is an efficient incentive to encourage them to buy more products or services. While integrating your e-commerce website with your finance applications is a simple and efficient integration, when you bring the discount factor into this process, it can get tricky. This is because, in this integration, the records on an e-commerce platform like Shopify will directly get uploaded into a finance application like Zoho Books.

However, with the custom functions option in Zoho Flow, you can build an integration that includes the discount factor. All you need to do is write custom code that can calculate the discount percentage before uploading the record to Zoho Books, then place the custom function between Shopify and Zoho Books in the builder.

Now, every time a sale is made, the discount value of the order will also be calculated before being entered as a record in your Zoho Books account, helping you manage your finances much better.

Automation can bring efficiency into play and reduce the amount of time and effort spent on almost every part of a business—and just like that, your customer retention strategies can also benefit a lot with the introduction of app integration into the process. While these are just a few integration ideas that can be helpful for remarketing and retaining customers, you can head to Zoho Flow's gallery to browse and build countless integrations that can be useful for your business.