As a business owner, you want to grow your business and reduce expenses. This is possible through customer acquisition and customer acquisition strategies. However, there are also customer relationship management), or CRM, tools that help with this process.
CRM tools allow people to build their brands and grow their businesses while finding new customers and turning them into loyal ones. The key is to know which CRM tools to use and how.
If you own a restaurant business or are looking into opening a restaurant, you’ll want to explore different customer retention tools and strategies. This article covers five CRM tools that you won’t want to miss out on for your restaurant business.
CRM Tools: What Are They?
CRM tools refer to different software that helps businesses to reach out to their existing or potential customers. They also help with customer acquisition and customer retention strategies. CRM tools allow businesses to manage customer data, profitability, and support.
The customer acquisition process involves converting a business’ niche market to becoming loyal customers. This process includes marketing efforts such as DTC marketing, eCommerce email marketing, distributor marketing, and social media marketing for restaurants.
One of the crucial parts of the customer acquisition process is providing an excellent customer experience. Utilizing CRM tools is how you can make the most of these kinds of efforts.
CRM tools allow businesses to track how effective their marketing campaigns are over a period of time. With this information, it’s possible to adjust the campaigns accordingly, if necessary.
Marketing campaigns and assets should speak to your ideal buyer’s goals and challenges. In order to do this, you have to create targeted and effective content. This requires you to have the right information about your customers.
With CRM tools, you can get a clear understanding of who you’re marketing to. These tools help you collect and analyze information regarding your customers’ characteristics. It’s also ideal to know their needs and wants in order to create the ideal buyer persona for them.
Key Takeaway: As a restaurant business owner, you want to take advantage of CRM tools in order to help you gain new customers and manage existing ones to ensure they remain loyal.
7 CRM Tools to Use for Acquiring Customers
It’s important to communicate with your customers through different channels. However, you need to know the right channels to target. This way, you can be sure that your efforts are effective.
Here are seven CRM tools that will help businesses with customer acquisition through different channels:
1. Drift
Connecting with your customers is crucial, especially for a restaurant business. Drift makes it possible to do this using AI-powered Conversation Cloud technology that improves customer acquisition.
Using Drift gives your business access to customer prospecting features that allow you to prioritize accounts that you should get in touch with. It’s also possible to get customer insight using visitor intelligence and real-time personalization. This information allows you to create customer acquisition strategies.
With Drift, businesses can have automated customer support features and custom chatbots. These features help increase customer satisfaction.
2. Unbounce
Unbounce enables businesses to use AI to help them create conversion-ready landing pages. It’s used by restaurant businesses, SaaS companies, small businesses, eCommerce businesses, and other professional services.
When you create campaigns through Unbounce, you have access to A/B testing features. This allows you to test the performance of each campaign and make adjustments accordingly. It’s also possible to use customizable templates for each campaign compared to creating your own from scratch.
It’s possible to integrate Unbounce with different CRM tools and email marketing software. These integrations will improve customer acquisition strategies.
3. Wunderkind
Monitoring your marketing performance as a business is crucial to determining success. Wunderkind makes it possible to evaluate customer acquisition and marketing performance in order to improve the customer experience.
Wunderkind uses multichannel marketing solutions that tailor to retailers and businesses such as restaurants. They offer real-time messaging features and audience development solutions. These allow you to turn potential customers into loyal ones while also improving customer service.
4. Outgrow
It’s possible to create quizzes, forms, surveys, calculators, and chatbots with Outgrow. This is one of the CRM tools that businesses can use without design or coding knowledge. These features make it possible for you to increase your customer engagement and grow your business.
Outgrow allows businesses to customize the look of their website so that it’s consistent with the brand identity. This includes customizing colors, logos, fonts, styles, and assets. You can also customize and optimize for mobile devices.
Businesses have access to detailed analytics regarding each user through funnel analytics solutions. This way, you can make changes as necessary and improve your business.
5. GetResponse
Another one of the common CRM tools that is also an ESP (email service provider) that businesses use for customer acquisition is GetReponse. It’s a digital marketing and acquisition tool that customers use to grow their audience and increase sales.
The use of GetResponse increases user engagement through landing pages, email marketing tactics, automation, and autoresponders. It’s possible to automate your marketing campaigns in order to provide a better experience for your customers.
Businesses can create their own sales funnels and increase conversions with GetResponse’s conversion funnel features. GetResponse also includes email marketing solutions and features such as email analytics, autoresponders, email creator options, transactional emails, and list management.
6. OpenTable
OpenTable has CRM functionality and features that allow restaurant businesses to easily take reservations. Restaurants that use OpenTable get access to a guest database that includes notes and tags, as well as automated email campaign options.
With the help of marketing automation features, businesses can send personalized messages to specific customers. These are often based on the customer’s buying characteristics.
7. Salesforce
Salesforce is a cloud-based software company that provides the hotel and restaurant industry with CRM tools. With Salesforce, businesses can utilize cloud technology to improve customer experience through sales, customer support, and worldwide marketing.
It’s possible to customize your dashboard on Salesforce to highlight certain metrics that are crucial for your workflow. Businesses will also have the chance to optimize their processes. As a result, they will automate certain tasks and reduce the time it takes to send emails and generate leads through marketing campaigns.
Frequently Asked Questions About Customer Retention Tools
Bringing new customers into the sales cycle is tough for any business. It’s also challenging to keep those customers coming back. However, with the proper CRM tools, you can improve your restaurant customer acquisition strategy and hold onto them for years, even decades to come.
Read the following commonly asked questions to better understand why CRM tools are crucial for guest retention and overall business success:
What Are Different Types of Customer Acquisition?
Different types of customer acquisition include:
- Online marketing
- Telemarketing
- Email marketing, such as restaurant email marketing
- Referral marketing or word-of-mouth marketing
- Social media
What Is a CRM Tool?
A CRM tool allows businesses to store and secure customer information, record service issues, identify sales opportunities, and manage marketing campaigns from a single platform. This information makes it possible for businesses to adjust their customer acquisition efforts to reduce customer acquisition cost.
What Are Different Customer Acquisition Channels?
Customer acquisition channels refer to the places where your customers become familiar with your business or brand for the first time. They include organic search results pages, social media, or paid advertisements.