Whether you are a Managed Service Provider (MSP), Independent Software Vendor (ISV), Value-Added Reseller (VAR) or somewhere in between, there is immense value in regularly communicating with your customers. Not only will these communications ensure that your business stays top of mind within your customer base, but it can also lead to increased revenue through upsell opportunities and stronger customer retention.
The benefits of regular communication
There are many benefits to regularly communicating with your customers. It can improve customer retention, as you develop a working relationship where the customer feels valued, which then allows you to resolve any pain points before they cause major problems. Similarly, it can make the customer complaint process smoother, as regular communication builds the relationship between yourself and your customers.
Sending customers educational content can increase engagement and generate cross-sell and upsell opportunities as customers learn about the other services that your business offers. This is a key point as it is significantly more expensive to generate leads to onboard new customers, rather than upsell services into your current customer base, as you have already built the relationship.
For some communication channels, such as on your website and social media, regular posting also improves engagement and reach, which can help with lead generation. Finally, regular communication makes it significantly easier to deliver messaging around major service changes, such as NCE.
What communication channels should you use?
Website
Your website is the face of your business, where current and prospective customers can go to learn more about your business and services. If your website has a blog, it can also act as a one-stop-shop for the latest updates on products, cybersecurity and how technology can solve challenges within a business. Your website is a channel with a ‘snowball effect’, as traffic to your website results in higher search engine rankings, resulting in more traffic to your website, and so on.
Whilst your website can act as a hub for education and communication, your business needs a way to drive customers to your website, to read the content and create upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Email is one of the most cost-effective methods of communicating with your customers. We recommend that partners aim to send out a minimum of monthly newsletters, with a selection of blogs posted throughout the month, along with a company update to show your business’s personality. Additional emails can also be sent for important product updates or particularly relevant blog posts and eBooks.
There are many email platforms available on the market, however, all Vuzion partners have free access to our Go-to-Market Hub through Vuzion GROW, which includes an email automation platform, and ready-made email templates relating to blogs and specific products.
Social Media
Social media, in particular LinkedIn, can be a powerful tool for marketing and communication. Similar to email, it is essentially a free channel for communication, and it does not take long to start regularly posting. Some ideas for posts include product updates, links to blogs hosted on your website, links to other relevant website blogs, polls, as well as what your team is up to in the office (or at home).
Whilst all content should be posted from the company page, employees should also share the posts to increase the reach to their connection base. This will help with ensuring your customers follow your business on social media. Some other methods to increase your customer followership are to include a link to your social media accounts on the footer of emails and on your website. Whilst we are on the topic of social media, are you following us on LinkedIn?
Review Calls
Along with the previous communication channels, regular calls are an essential method of communicating with your top accounts. Typically, these calls are a quarterly business review, allowing you to have a deep dive into service delivery over the past quarter, and look forward to the next quarter for areas of improvement or implementation of additional services. Whilst this may not be feasible for your business’s micro-accounts, it can be a great exercise for building relationships and trust with larger accounts, and can lead to substantial cross-sell, upsell or project work opportunities.
How Vuzion can help
Here at Vuzion, we want to make it as easy as possible for you to have regular communication with your customers. Whilst we cannot help with review calls, we can assist with your email, social media and website communications! Vuzion GROW, our sales and marketing support program, has a large selection of free pre-made marketing campaigns, all ready to use. To make communication even easier, email and social media posts can be automated, allowing you to spend more time growing your business, and less time creating and sending marketing content.
For partners that want to take the next step and post weekly blogs, along with regular infographics and eBooks, GROW Premium give you access to all of this and more! If you want to find out more about how Vuzion GROW can support your business click here. If you would like a free trial of GROW Premium, book a call here.