How do you identify and segment your customer advocates?

1 What is CRM and why does it matter?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, which is a system of managing your interactions with your current and potential customers. CRM helps you collect, organize, and analyze customer data, such as their preferences, behaviors, feedback, and referrals. CRM also helps you design and implement personalized marketing campaigns, loyalty programs, and customer service initiatives. CRM can help you improve your customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty, as well as your sales, profitability, and growth.

2 How to identify your customer advocates

Identifying customer advocates is one of the first steps to segment and target them. You can use various criteria to define who your customer advocates are, such as how often they buy from you, how much they spend, their Net Promoter Score, their activity on social media or online communities, their reviews, ratings, or testimonials, and their responsiveness to surveys, emails, or offers. To track and measure these indicators, you can use your CRM system to create a list of your customer advocates.

3 How to segment your customer advocates

Once you have identified your customer advocates, you can segment them into different groups based on their characteristics, needs, and motivations. For instance, you can segment them by demographics, such as age, gender, location, income, or education; psychographics, such as personality, values, interests, or lifestyle; behavior, such as purchase frequency, recency, or amount; attitude, such as satisfaction, loyalty, or advocacy level; and channel, such as email, phone, web, or social media. Utilizing your CRM system to create and manage these segments can help you tailor your communication and offers accordingly.

4 How to target your customer advocates

After segmenting your customer advocates, you can target them with strategies and tactics to strengthen their relationship with your brand and motivate them to spread the word. You can reward them with incentives, discounts, freebies, or recognition. You can also engage them with relevant content, feedback, or surveys, empower them with tools, resources, or platforms to share their opinions, stories, or referrals, educate them with useful information, tips, or best practices, and inspire them with your vision, mission, or values. Additionally, you can use your CRM system to automate and monitor these activities and measure their impact on your key performance indicators.

5 How to optimize your CRM for customer advocacy

Optimizing your CRM system and processes is essential for segmenting and targeting your customer advocates effectively. Integrating your CRM with other tools and platforms, such as your website, social media, email, or analytics, is a great way to start. Additionally, you should update your CRM regularly with accurate and complete customer data, analyze the data to generate insights and reports, test and refine your CRM strategies and campaigns, and train and align your team on how to use your CRM for customer advocacy. By optimizing your CRM, you can improve your efficiency, productivity, and results.

6 How to grow your customer advocacy program

The final step to segment and target your customer advocates is to grow your customer advocacy program. To do this, set clear and realistic goals and metrics, track and evaluate performance and outcomes, celebrate and share successes and learnings, solicit and implement customer feedback and suggestions, and expand and diversify activities and channels. By growing your customer advocacy program, you can increase your customer base, loyalty, and advocacy.