How to Use Sales Apps to Listen to Your Customer's Needs

How to Use Sales Apps to Listen to Your Customer’s Needs

Updated on July 2nd, 2018 by Quertime Writer in Mobile

Customer engagement is at the core of any marketing strategy. The ability to engage your customers effectively can provide a wealth of information on the best ways to attract them, but even more importantly retain them, turning them into brand ambassadors.

With the technological advances that have taken place over the last five to seven years has completely revolutionized the marketing industry. With the emergence of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and more, the internet has become a marketing gold mine. In addition, there is a new and powerful player on the block: mobile and web applications.

Mobile App Growth

The web and mobile app industry is the fastest growing industry in history. Current projections predict that the app industry will reach $100 billion in annual revenue by 2017. The reason that this industry is experiencing such exponential growth is because of the level of convenience and functionality that it provides to its users.

Engage Existing Customers and Potential Buyers

Many businesses have begun to exploit the benefits of sales apps. Sales apps allow you to engage your customer in a manner that is less evasive than many traditional methods, while being more effective in yielding results. One of the biggest issues with customer engagement is user experience. Bounce rates increase when visitors to your site fail to have an enjoyable experience. Sales apps help monitor these bounce incidents, while providing valuable feedback that will allow you to improve the experience and increase your conversion rate. According to Shopify, you can use sales apps like Twitter’s Vine app to provide video tutorials on a number of topics in order to grow your base.

Communicate With Your Customers

You can use sales apps to provide valuable information to your customer base, normally accomplished through push notifications. Sales apps can have interactive mechanisms that allow your customer to play a major role in creating your brand identity, allowing you to build and protect your brand. Sales apps allow you to control the manner in which your customer receives information about your company. You can tailor this information to meet specific criteria based on customer intelligence gathered through the sales app.

A good example of this is the Chase Mortgage app, My New Home. They launched their smartphone app last year to help customers navigate the home-buying process with ease. My New Home allows users to find and then rate homes based on their own criteria. They can also make notes, calculate monthly payments, and take photos and videos. Best of all, it enables users to locate Chase mortgage bankers. Chase Mortgage is creating an enhanced version of the app for the Apple iPad, which will include additional features, like access to the My New Home YouTube channel, where users can view videos that feature advice on home buying from both the experts, as well as experienced homeowners.

Keep Track

Sales apps have the capacity to compile data on your customers for the sake of building customer profiles. These profiles provide a portrait of your customer and their spending habits, likes and dislikes, giving you an inside pathway to market directly to their specific needs and preferences. These apps will allow you to manage the complete customer life cycle, from initial engagement to the customer retention phase. One tool you should have is a lead tracking app, which can help you organize your sales leads.

A popular organizational and lead tracking app is Base, which you can download alone, or use as an extension of the Base CRM software package. Start with the basic starter edition, which is currently free. You’ll find that Base allows you to run reports, and schedule meeting and phone calls with reminders. Because you keep your information in a centralized location, you can manage all accounts from anywhere at any time. What makes Base one of the most user-friendly tracking apps around is the fact it lets you synchronize your data with Google, so you can use the apps you are probably already familiar with, such as Google Calendar, Tasks and Contacts.

Promote Social Local Media

A fun and effective way to find out more about your customers is via social local media, or SoLoMo. One way to do this is to use the popular location-based rewards program, Foursquare, which allows you to integrate the marketing power of social media. Start by going to Foursquare to add your business listing. Follow the easy steps, and then update it to get access to all the free tools and analytics. When customers who use Foursquare check in to your business, or search your website for deals and rewards, they see your updates and offers. You can offer discounts to attract new customers, or provide rewards to frequent customers, top-spending customers and much more. The free analytics tools provide insight about your customers and allow you adjust your rewards, sales and discounts accordingly.

Give Back

If you want your customers to grow your business by being brand evangelists, you must give back to them. You can be creative when you reward your loyal customers back in a big way without affecting your profits. For example, one popular app for restaurants is the new Belly app, which encourages repeat customers using a digital rewards system that enables customers to earn rewards points for every visit. All they have to do is scan their rewards cards or codes into their smartphone. The participating restaurant then determines the range of rewards to meet the needs of each individual person. Restaurant owners can use the information from each member’s visit by looking at their name and time of visit, as well as their total number of visits and redeemed rewards. They can also modify each Belly member’s points, verify their reward redemption, and even acknowledge their most loyal customers.

Create Connections

You can also use your sales app to have your customers do your marketing for you. With the rise of social media, features including the Like, Follow and Share buttons have become one of the most powerful marketing tools available. By insuring that your sales app integrates with all of the major social media platforms, you can leverage the efforts of your existing users as they share their activity while you engage them. These apps allow you to control the content, subsequently controlling the outcome.