Gathering and analyzing customer data is a crucial step for any business that wants to succeed in the long run. It allows you to make smarter decisions, increase stable revenue growth, and make sure that your customers are happy.
By collecting and aggregating customer data, you can create personalized messaging that will bring a higher ROI and more effective marketing campaigns. Data analysis also helps you identify trends in customer behavior and preferences so that you can tailor your services accordingly. In short, gathering and analyzing customer data is the secret ingredient for making smarter decisions.
Starting the path to personalized marketing doesn’t have to be complex. For example, by greeting your customers with a simple “welcome back,” it shows that you not only pay attention to who is coming to your salon but shows new visitors that you want them to return. Gathering this data is simple with the right tools in place.
The key is to flow data into a centralized system that you can use to manage your customer interactions, their feedback on your services, your website and related data, your social media presence, and any customer issues that your team resolves.
With every visit, swipe, website click and purchase, you have the ability to connect customer data to your business goals. This gives you the power to track customer loyalty by connecting data from customer behavior on your social media, their visits to your salon, any loyalty programs you may have, scrolls through your website and more. The potential for gaining a loyal customer base is very high in the salon industry, which makes it imperative to make your customers’ visits count: About 70% of salon-goers in the US reported being loyal to their hairstylist or salon. (Gitnux)
Having an online presence is important for a salon: By 2023, 12.7% of total revenue in the Beauty & Personal Care market will be generated through online sales. (Gitnux) Knowing what customers are up to can help grow your brand. This concept of using customer data to fuel the growth of your business while achieving customer delight is called the flywheel.
How the flywheel drives business growth and customer delight
Business owners and executives acknowledge that their industries have changed in recent years. Customers are now more skeptical, knowledgeable, and have higher expectations. They expect businesses to care about more than just transactions. This applies to salons as well.
Companies that align their success with their customers, not only scale, but create delight, loyalty, and love from the people who matter most. When companies grow better, they meet even the highest of customer expectations, and the result is a better business, better relationships, and a better path to growth.
To grow better, your organization needs to deliver a remarkable customer experience – that’s where the concept of the flywheel becomes relevant. When you think about your business as a flywheel, you make different decisions and adjust your strategy.
Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don’t always want, inbound marketing forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have. When you use the inbound methodology as a foundation, the three phases of your flywheel are attract, engage, and delight. By applying force to these three phases, you can provide an amazing customer experience.
For example, in the attract phase, you attract visitors with useful content and eliminate barriers as they try to learn about your company. The key is to earn people's attention, not force it. Some forces you can apply are content marketing, search engine optimization, social media marketing, social selling, targeted paid advertising, and conversion rate optimization.
In the engage phase, you make it easy to shop and buy from you by enabling buyers to engage with you on their preferred timeline and channels. Focus on opening relationships, not just closing deals. Some forces include website and email personalization, database segmentation, marketing automation, lead nurturing, multichannel communication (chat, phone, messaging, email), sales automation, lead scoring, and try before you buy programs.
And finally, in the delight phase, you help, support, and empower customers to reach their goals. Remember, customer success is your success. Some forces you can leverage are self-service (Knowledge base, chatbot), proactive customer service, multichannel availability (chat, messaging, phone, email), ticketing systems, automated onboarding, customer feedback surveys, and loyalty programs.
Companies that choose to use the flywheel model over other models have a huge advantage because they aren’t the only ones helping their business grow — their customers are helping them grow as well. They ask their networks for advice, they search for mentions of your company on social media, and you bet they’re reading third-party review sites.
Learn more about how ITBiz Partners can help you set your foundation for your business growth and your customers’ delight!
