Did you know that according to 96% of customers, customer service is important in their choice of loyalty to a brand? Also, loyal customers are five times more expected to purchase again and four times more expected to refer a friend to the company.
What we are trying to say is that strong relations with your customers always matter! Just as we can’t imagine an amicable environment in our family without strong relations, we can’t imagine a successful business without strong customer relations.
The term ‘customer relations’ is a collective term to denote a bond that gets established between customers and business owners over time through various processes including sales, marketing, and customer service.
Strong customer relations benefit both your business and your customers. While your customers get quality products, their faith in your brand becomes stronger and they spread good word-of-mouth to others that brings in more business.
Building strong relationships with your customers is not easy but definitely not impossible. The key lies in crafting a journey that is equal amounts of engaging and valuable to your customers. They want first hand interaction with your brand where they feel acknowledged and have some value to take back. So, how do you do that?
By crafting a flawless customer journey.
If you are using WordPress, then these 5 WordPress plugins will make this a piece of cake for you. Each plugin helps you with a specific stage of your customer journey by making it easier for you to manage your customers as well as the data in the backend. This will also allow you to connect to your important customers face-to-face keeping your retention rate high. So, let’s check out these WordPress plugins.
5 WordPress Plugins for Customer Management and Relations
1. OptinMonster – Lead Capturing
The first and foremost stage of any customer journey is the introduction of the brand when they visit your website for the very first time. So, it becomes imperative that your website is engaging and providing right information in the right order to your visitors so as to take them further in the customer journey. Here are few tips to make sure your website has good conversion rates:
- Include clear value proposition: what’s unique and different about your brand.
- Keep the contact form as short as possible with only necessary fields.
- Use strong action verbs with your CTA copies.
- Add testimonials, reviews, or any sort of element that humanizes your brand.
- Give them the live chat option.
- Add a pop-up to your site – that’s where the first WordPress plugin comes in.
OptinMonster is the world’s leading conversion optimization toolkit available for the WordPress platform. It can help you convert and optimize your website traffic. Features like drag ‘n’ drop builder, a variety of campaign types like side-in scroll box, floating bar, countdown timer, etc., targeted campaigns like referred detection, Onsite Retargeting, etc., a number of seamless integrations and actionable insights including A/B testing make it a powerful tool for marketers to gain new leads and customers.
It is of great significance that you make the most of your website visitors and leverage the current traction you are getting without adding much to the customer acquisition cost. And this plugin helps with that. It makes your website engaging while letting you offer valuables like PDF, Whitepapers, Checklists, etc. in different types of pop-ups or engagement elements.
2. LeadPages – Lead Generation and Nurturing
So now you’ve captured the leads from your website, social media, emails, etc. What’s next? How do you convert these leads to customers and then your promoters?
Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered!
The second stage in the sales funnel or customer journey is lead bifurcation and lead nurturing. Based on the source/medium through which you captured your leads, bifurcate them into three categories:
- Hot leads – these are the leads which can be converted easily as they came from a particular landing page, decision stage blog, etc. They are ready to buy from you without you putting in much effort.
- Warm leads – these leads are easier to convert as well but you will have to convince them as to why your solution is the best suited for them. You will have to put in a good amount of effort with them.
- Cold leads – As the name suggests, they are leads on which you will have to work the most. They will go through the whole cycle of lead nurturing becoming warm and hot leads and then convert into your customers.
Again, there are many methods to do this bifurcation, you will have to adapt which suits best for your business.
Once you’ve done this bifurcation, it is time to nurture them and take them further into the funnel. This is where our next plugin comes in.
LeadPages is a marketing automation tool that automates the whole inbound marketing funnel from capturing leads to nurturing them. With you can get connected with your audience in a better way. It has an easy-to-use interface that can help you create a conversion-optimized professional-looking website and landing pages with the help of customizable templates and the ‘drag and drop builder’. It also helps you make every piece of content you post highly conversion-oriented with the help of alert bars, pop-ups, and opt-in texts, etc. With features like A/B testing and real-time conversion tips, it gives you better insight into your marketing campaigns and optimizes them effectively.
3. Amelia – Lead Nurturing
This plugin is also for lead nurturing. You can’t have too many lead nurturing tools as it is one of the most important stages of any customer’s journey. Make sure while nurturing your customers, you are offering them value. It can be in the form of discounts, special offers, or any sort of valuable content or advice. And these valuables are best delivered in one-on-one interactions.
This is where Amelia comes in!
Amelia is a simplified automated booking specialist available 24*7 to make sure that customers can book appointments or events and pay online round the clock without you having to manage it manually.
This booking specialist is a very ideal plugin for law consultants, sports or gym coaches, private clinics, spas and salons, beauty salons, repair centers or any other such field where customers need to make appointments first. It automates interaction with your potential customers with real-time SMS reminders and online payment option, and options for scheduling, rescheduling or cancelling appointments. These all features combine to make your brand professional and trustworthy and develop strong faith in your customers. Further, it doesn’t require any special training or technical expertise to install or use it.
4. WP-ERP – Customer Management
Now you’ve successfully converted your leads into customers. And you have plenty of them.
How are you going to manage them? Because if you don’t pay attention to your customers, chances are you are going to lose them over a simple mistake or if you overlook a minute detail. Hence it becomes important to manage your customers properly in order to keep them with you and generate business on a regular basis.
The answer to this question is WP-ERP.
It is the first full-fledged ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system using which you can manage both your WordPress site and business from a single platform. The free version has got all the important features you need to maintain your business basic functions. It has the three modules –
HR – To create your very own HR system for your company the way that suits you the best.
CRM – To convert leads to customers in a seamless and organized way.
Accounting – To help make accounting easy for even the novice business owners.
that combine to make a complete ERP system for any type of business.
As for the owners who want to start with their paid version of CRM, it is equipped with features like smart contact management, built-in mail communication, B2B user management, and more makes it a perfect CRM to start with. Perfect for small to medium-sized businesses. Using this, you can build long-term relationships with your customers or business partners easily. Additionally, this plugin gives you the ability to easily scale your operations by offering HR and Accounting features.
5. WordPress Customer Portal – Customer Retention or Building Long-lasting Relationships
Now you have converted most of your leads into customers and have managed them successfully as well. So, what will be the next step?
Acquire more customers?
Definitely, yes! But you also have to pay equal attention to retaining your current customers and then if possible, getting them to spread the word about you. But the journey of managing customers to turning them into your promoters is the hardest one. It requires you as a business owner to be constant with them. Keeping in touch with them, providing impeccable customer service, and maybe build a personal relationship if required. These will not only help you retain your customers but will make them your official promoters.
Imagine you customers recommending your brand/solution to their family members, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Your business can quadruple without you having to spend a lot of money in acquiring new customers. Because we know how effective reviews and recommendations are in today’s ‘too much information’ world.
Also, the leads you get from your existing customers are usually warm or hot leads which makes them easier to convert.
But how will you turn your existing customers into promoters?
Simply by using WordPress Customer Portal.
From ticket management to live chat, and a robust knowledge base, this plugin has it all. Now you can manage your customer interaction from one single point of interaction. This plugin gives your customers an interface to reach out to you 24*7*365 without you having to be actually present. You can take all the frequently asked questions and create an exhaustive knowledge base for your customers. This way your customers can serve themselves without having to wait for hours at end.
This not only helps you retain your customers but also adds positive value to their experience.
Apart from that, this solution is fully customizable and scalable and enables you to provide access to unlimited customers.
Other highlighting features include:
- Secure Access to CRM Data
- All Default and Custom Modules Supported
- Single and secure sign-in
- Case deflection
- Real-time notifications
And more…
This plugin is available for:
- SuiteCRM Users
- Sugar CRM Users
- Dynamics 365 Users
- Salesforce Users
Conclusion
Customer experience is going to top most of the companies’ lists in the near future as we jump into the experience economy. And believe us when we say that companies that pay attention to their customers outperform their competitors almost all the time. Not only that, but the customers whom you pay attention to can also become your business partners, vendors, suppliers, or resellers. This can expand your business model by adding one or more sources of income. Additionally, all the relations you build expand the horizons of your business, helping you take that important leap of faith to modernize your business whenever required.
Having customers that trust and believe in you are like a support system for your business. They will always be there for you no matter what and support you whenever you need the support or are making an important move for your business. They only help you grow and achieve success.
