A recession has been looming all year, but knowing how to prepare for and adapt to a down economy is no easy feat.
Each recession is markedly different in its causes, symptoms, and far-reaching effects, making it difficult to predict how to recession-proof your marketing, sales, customer support, and other core business functions.
The benefit of history, however, is that we can see clear patterns of consumer behavior during a recession on which to base outreach strategies. This ability to discern your customers’ changing needs throughout a recession is critical, allowing you to constantly optimize your messaging and offerings to always align with and support customers.
With customer communication more important than ever, let’s look at a few of these tried-and-true strategies to increase the convenience and effectiveness of your outreach so you can entrench your company with your existing client base.
1. Prioritize customer relationships with outreach
As the main avenue to sustainable growth and revenue, your outreach strategy should prioritize nurturing customer relationships. Responsive, tailored messaging that helps customers meet their needs helps develop the trust that leads to customer retention and loyalty. To start, leverage the data you have to personalize every touchpoint in the way customers now expect and then regularly check in with them to see how your products and services are working and if they have any questions. By being proactive about fielding their concerns without pushing sales, you actively demonstrate that you’re there for them.
Digital tools like business texting platforms can help build and solidify these relationships, bringing customers into an open, two-way conversation with succinct, personalized messages in a discreet but engaging way.
2. Remove barriers from the customer journey
If your customers have trouble reaching you, you’re more likely to lose them, especially in tough times when they become more selective in how they spend their money. When customers have questions or problems, they want to be heard and find a solution – and they don’t want to ‘talk’ to a robot or wait on a phone or for an email.
Adding quicker and more responsive digital options to your sales, marketing, and customer support programs removes these communication barriers from the customer journey. And with today’s technology, it’s never been easier to communicate with customers and manage the relationship through digital channels. Specifically, business texting offers your front-line team and customers a convenient way to communicate at all the various points of the customer journey and then engage them over time to build and grow that relationship.
3. Analyze and understand customer needs and concerns
Customer needs are always changing, but will undergo a more dramatic shift during a recession. Some customers will face debt issues, many will reduce frivolous expenses, and nearly everyone will harbor fear or uncertainty.
Understanding this range of different feelings and how they relate to customer needs during this time allows you to empathize with their situation. Having this mindset when analyzing your customer data helps you discern changes in customer behaviors that you can address with more personalized outreach and meet customers where they are.
4. Raise and optimize your activity levels
As customers tighten their belts during a recession, selling becomes significantly harder. This makes it vital to double-down on sales and support activities, but to also optimize your processes so you’re reaching prospects and customers in the most effective and efficient ways. Ineffective or costly outreach strategies or tools will burn your budget while producing poor results. For maximum reach and return, deploy cost-effective tools with proven scalability and ROI.
For one, business texting consistently has higher read, response, and conversion rates than other forms of outreach, and leading texting platforms like Statflo are an easy, quick, and affordable way to do mass outreach, on a personalized level.
5. Review and reevaluate your opportunities
The speed with which customer needs fluctuate in an uncertain economy means you may find your ideal customer or select customer personas are changing and that what were once sure bets for sales are not anymore.
To adapt, you’ll again need to carefully monitor and analyze customer needs, which provides you with all the information you need to review your existing opportunities and see which prospects and opportunities are most likely to buy at this point. Reevaluating your opportunities in light of changing needs will optimize your outreach to focus on high-percentage prospects.
6. Look for and promote recession-friendly benefits in your products and offerings
In a recession, your clients are thinking just like you: how to maximize returns while decreasing costs. So, when you're pitching your products or services, focus on the specific benefits that help your clients survive the recession themselves. Financial services, for example, might highlight refinancing a high-interest rate account to something more easily managed. For their part, telco can show how much money customers can save by consolidating multiple services like phone, internet, and television into one discounted bundle.
Outreach that outlasts
The equation is elegant in its simplicity, powerful in its effects: customer outreach is critical to nurture good relationships, and good relationships are essential to seeing you through uncertain economic times.
Effective, personalized, and responsive communication brings customers closer to you, a bond that can maintain sales and retention for the duration of a down economy, and far beyond. That business texting can do this in a seamless, convenient, and affordable way, on a channel that customers prefer, makes it the clear choice for your outreach strategy in the best and worst of times.
To learn how to expand and strengthen your outreach while recession-proofing your company, book a demo today!
