Marketers today are focusing on the importance of building a good Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), but at the same time, B2B companies are struggling to utilize its full potential. A recent survey suggested that 34% of the marketers are "completely aware of the term and its connotations," but only 24% of respondents felt their company was monitoring CLV effectively. While companies develop effective strategies to increase customer retention and expand loyal customer bases, it is equally important that they enhance the post-purchase customer experience and maximize the customer lifetime value.

Customer Lifetime Value: Increase ROI with Loyal Customer Bases

Maximizing a B2B buyer's customer lifetime value requires companies to enhance B2B customer experiences to increase customer satisfaction. But why do companies need to improve their customer loyalty strategies after they've already made the purchase? Here's why -

CLV helps companies prioritize leads
You might think that your customer's first purchase is all that really matters when deciding which leads to focus on. However, it’s actually the total value of the purchases they could make from you over the next few months or years that’s more important. Hence, figuring out your customer's lifetime value is essential.

CLV

Fig 1. How to measure CLV

CLV helps find look-alike customers
Narrow down the focus to your VIP customers with high CLV. Ensure to retain these high-quality B2B customers and expand your customer base by targeting customers with a similar background. As 84% of B2B customers expect to be treated like humans instead of a number, personalized customer experiences are the only way to top competition. Slowly upselling customers with less CLV can also help your revenue and profits.

The process of ascertaining CLV helps companies better understand customer journeys
Customer lifetime value is more than just a statistic in today's market. To have an in-depth understanding of maximizing a customer's lifetime value, companies must dive into their customer journeys. This helps them collect essential information about the customer, such as when, where, why, and how much price customers will make the purchase for. Answering these questions can help B2B companies understand their customer journeys better and fix issues that they might have overlooked before.

To thrive in today's competitive market, businesses must focus on maximizing CLV, which translates to how often your customer comes back to make the purchase or how many referrals he has gotten for the company. This customer-centric metric can help companies boost ROI by enhancing customer experiences.

How IBM restructured their business with enhanced post-purchase experience
The company invested in enhancing post-purchase CX to support multiple customer journey stages for customers using IBM's Cloud Storage service.

When a customer signs up for the service, a team of specialists is assigned to help them integrate the service into their systems. This team helps enhance the post-purchase customer experience by assisting the customer to optimize the software usage. This ensures that the customer stays engaged even after the purchase. Engaged customers are more likely to renew their contracts, and IBM's personalized account approach encourages personal interaction and product awareness.

Focusing on investing in their customer base resulted in increasing profits by over 20% of the company. The cloud services currently account for 21 percent of IBM's total revenue, reflecting that investing in post-purchase CX enhancement can boost profits and improve innovation.

#1. Provide Digital Receipts and Order Confirmation Through Email

Emails are an effective way to provide personalized CX after the shopper has turned into a customer. The first interaction that a customer has with your company after the purchase is the order confirmation SMS or email. This is where customer engagement plays a crucial role in keeping the customer interested.

Most companies here make the mistake of just plainly informing the customer about the purchase by listing out the contents from their order and the price they paid. Increasing engagement at this stage with personalization can help you enhance B2B CX. Adding a few elements such as -

Discounts to promote repeated purchase
Referral programs with incentives for the buyer
Request for customer feedback
Link to social media channels to enable them to connect there

Research by Conversion showed that receipts with an added element of engagement from the above, on average, saw up to a 14.6% increase in open rate, a 64.7% increase in click rate, and a 2200% increase in conversion rate.

#2. Add FAQs and Product Usage Instructions

Although returning products might be free for most buyers online, they can cost companies a lot of money. So, how do B2B companies today avoid incurring such losses?

Add a small FAQ box in your order delivery mail to ensure that your customer can get his questions answered without any difficulty. If an FAQ box cannot be added, link your FAQ page on your website to help your customers optimize the product usage. Allowing your customers to understand how to extract the most value from their order and list all of its different use cases, you remove the post-purchase obstacles.

Sterling B2B

Fig 2. Product Usage Instructions from IBM

#3. Include Cross-Selling and Product Recommendations

A recent Mckinsey study showed that Amazon generated 35% of its revenue from its on-site and email product recommendations.

CX-Zendesk

Fig 3. Zendesk Email Informing Customers About Feature Update to Increase Engagement

The idea behind this is very basic. Diving into customer journeys and deriving valuable insights from them can help companies recommend similar products. This also allows them to suggest products that might go with the initial purchase to keep the customer coming back to make more purchases in the future. This is an excellent way for marketers to understand how past purchase information can predict future orders. In such cases, emailing your buyers a promo code can also be a subtle way to promote repeat purchases, further improving a customer's lifetime value.

#4. Send Out Replenishment Reminders

Few products have a predictable consumption cycle, so sending out replenishment reminders is a smart option for marketers. Using email to send out reminders for customers to reorder can be an excellent way to improve post-purchase customer engagement.

While many customers today have adopted monthly and yearly subscriptions with auto-payment modes, a reminder for subscription renewal and automatic delivery can keep your customers coming back. For companies selling products that need less frequent replenishment, issuing scheduled email reminders can be helpful.

Non-Email Ways to Enhance Post-Purchase CX?

"Customers who had the best past experiences spend 140% more compared to those who had the poorest past experience," a report by Harvard Business Review. This makes it vital for companies to enhance post-purchase experiences to maximize customer retention and expand B2B customer bases. There is no doubt that businesses today must elevate their post-purchase CX to increase customer retention and CLV. It might be that your customer has had a great customer journey with personalized CX pre-purchase. The experience later has been a reason for him to never recommend or return to your B2B company.

Most customer journeys start with just a Google search, and while companies allot resources to rank higher on Google, most of their support content isn't optimized. In some cases, this information isn't even made public! For this, post-purchase customer support must be enhanced.

CX-Asana

Fig 4. Asana FAQs Page with Short Form Content for Easier Readability

Others might lack at adding timely, relevant content such as branded support videos, and customers might end up seeing competitor content or third-party sources, reducing credibility. As all these experiences are outside the company's control, they lack insights into the customer journeys.

Another way to do this is by making the post-purchase relevant content on your website more readable and discoverable. Reduce the text in FAQs and try to add more visually appealing content such as videos. Eliminate long PDFs and add shorter content that can be discovered easily. Make sure your marketing teams generate omni-channel compliant content that can be accessed from all devices like phones, tablets, and PCs.

Companies must focus on adding the right elements to stay in touch with customers even after making the purchase. As customer experience is rapidly becoming a key differentiator in today's customer-centric market, enhancing CX through the customer journey is vital for companies to stay in business.

TLDR?!
Now more than ever, having a successful post-purchase experience is not only vital to building customer loyalty but, it is also essential to put them back on the pathway to re-purchasing, renewing, and referring your name along.

For more information on enhancing CX and increasing marketing and B2B sales ROI, you can connect with our Digital Marketing experts at marketing@altudo.co and have a more detailed discussion.