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retention, and as a result, they are not getting a realistic ROI.
monthly customer attrition, which in this case is 2.4 percent, or 12 customers per month. All of a sudden, the necessary 14 new customers per month is now 26 new customers, almost double the original figures. Neglecting to account for attrition is why most companies stall out with their growth or report inaccurate numbers for their ROI. In this example, if you aren’t factoring in attrition, then when you finally look it up at the end of the year, you’ve actually only grown by 24 customers. That’s only 0.4 percent per month, or a 4.8 percent annual growth rate. Don’t make this same mistake; start tracking your attrition today. That way, your ROI will be an accurate glimpse of investment, income, and retention.
ROI, in theory, is the most comprehensive way to determine whether an investment is bringing home the bacon. The problem is there are a lot of confounding factors that can skew the numbers and make profitable strategies look like a flop. The biggest factor among those is the retention of customers. Of course, it is impossible to keep 100 percent of your customers, but any good business owner will tell you that it’s difficult to grow a business if you aren’t focusing on retention.
Consider these numbers as examples of the roles of attrition and retention:
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Current number of customers = 500
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Desired annual growth rate = 33 percent
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New customer goal = 165 new customers per year, or 14 new customers per month
On the surface, these numbers seem totally achievable. 14 new customers per month is reasonable for most businesses. The problem is that it doesn’t account for one important factor:
The problem that many entrepreneurs run into is that they are not accurately tracking their
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INFUSIONSOFT CRM WILL HELP YOU GROW Turn Leads Into Customers and Keep Them Happy
Once your business reaches a certain size, it becomes impossible to manually manage all of your customers and leads. You want to give every prospect and client the attention they deserve, but you can’t do that if the bulk of your time is spent simply tracking customer interactions and opportunities. That’s where Infusionsoft comes in. Infusionsoft offers customer relationship management (CRM) software that features marketing automation. It’s aimed at small businesses growing quickly — companies that need to track, manage, and stay in communication with their clients. Infusionsoft is cloud-based, allowing you to access information from anywhere. It keeps you in-the-know with all of your customer interactions. The main page for any of your contacts is called “the contact record.” The contact record contains an activity feed that shows a timeline of your interactions with the given contact. It also houses
tabs dedicated to notes about the client, tasks that need to be performed by your marketing team, a calendar of upcoming events, and any emails between your company and the contact. In addition to this vital data, the contact record also shows which campaigns the contact is currently taking part in. Those campaigns are one of the highlights of the Infusionsoft system, automating contact and moving prospects along long-term nurture programs. The Infusionsoft campaign builder allows you to create custom campaigns easily by using landing pages, emails, prompts for phone calls, and any other type of contact you want to make. These campaigns are built through a drag-and-drop interface that’s easy to use and gives you an infinite number of options. Another benefit of Infusionsoft is its searchability. You can generate reports to segment contacts based on a wide variety of criteria. From these
reports, you can get a bird’s-eye view of which campaigns contacts are participating in and where they are at in your marketing funnel. Tracking contact information and maintaining regular, proactive contact are the cruxes of Infusionsoft, but the software has tons more features to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses. In fact, signing up for Infusionsoft comes with one-on-one onboarding sessions to make sure you get the most from the software. Pricing structure depends on the package you select, which can include add-ons for e-commerce and sales automation. If you feel like your mind is cluttered because you’re trying to remember every last detail about your clients and leads, it’s time to think about Infusionsoft. If you’d like more information, let us know, and we can help you get started with your own CRM.
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