10 Proactive Outreach Strategies to Build Loyalty: The Power of Personalization

Modern customers want to feel valued, knowing that your business cares about them as much as you care about your own success. In order to build loyalty, it’s essential to create proactive outreach strategies that demonstrate your awareness of their challenges and show that you’re taking action before they even need to ask for help. When and how you reach out to your customers should always be based on real-time data and information so you can meet your customers where they are and provide exactly what they need. Every customer is unique, and no one wants to feel like they’re just another number. In this blog we’ll give you 10 strategies to improve your proactive outreach so you can anticipate customer needs even before they do.

76% of customers get frustrated if they don’t receive personalized experiences -McKinsey State of Personalization Report

Data Driven Proactive Outreach Strategies

1. Personalize Outreach Based on Real-Time Customer Behavior

To start, you really need to understand your audience. Your CRM should allow you to capture data about individual customer behaviors, challenges, interests, preferences, and intent before and after a purchase is made to refine your targets and reach your customers with the right message, on the right channel, at the right time. Marketers use this strategy to drive leads and revenue, from top of funnel messaging, down to bottom of funnel requests, but contact center managers need to start thinking about it as well in order to communicate effectively with customers and prospects alike. This critical behavioral intelligence encompasses both historical customer actions (website/app visits, for example) and your insights from interactions with the customer. 

For example, if a customer had previously told you they wanted a blue toaster, but you only had a red toaster in stock when they purchased, you can use that data to drive future conversations. If their red toaster malfunctions and you need to send them a new toaster, you can use that historical data and ask if they’d like the blue model instead. They’ll be pleasantly surprised that you remembered their previous requests and your loyalty will improve. 

‍2. Leverage Event-Driven Outreach for Tailored Engagement

Timing is everything. Use an event-based approach to trigger personalized outreach precisely when it’s a good time to connect.  Use real-time customer actions to trigger calls, texts, and emails when and where the customer needs you and is most likely to respond. For example, let’s say a prospective client who’s looking for a loan abandoned their application halfway through. You can capture data from the form fields they did complete and the previous pages they visited on your website to help you better understand their needs. This way you can re-engage the prospect with personalized messages via email, sms, or a phone call (or all-of-the-above) based on their actions to get them to come back and complete the form.

3. Implement SMS-Based Outreach for Optimized Impact

Keep your targets top of mind. Precisely align specific information in a customer or prospect inquiry (quote request, for example) when crafting welcome and follow-up text messages. Additionally, SMS outreach has some of the highest open rates and engagement rates so your message is very likely to be seen. Be sure to build your proactive outreach strategies for SMS in a concerted and conservative way to start so you do not overwhelm your prospects and customers on their personal devices. Going all out on SMS and overwhelming your customers and prospects with texts might cause increased unsubscribe rates, which is why it's important to use an omnichannel approach when communicating with your prospects.

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Brand Focused Proactive Outreach Strategies

4. Use Branded Caller ID to Improve Answer Rates

State your name and brand every interaction by displaying your company name on your customer’s mobile device with Branded Caller ID. This allows the caller to see your company name instead of an unrecognized number or a spam alert. Initiate all outbound calls and texts from a single branded number that the customer recognizes to ensure a consistent experience and improve call answer rates. If it’s an unknown number, your outreach will likely go unanswered driving your call directly into the dreaded voicemail inbox, no matter how proactive you’re being. 

There are 50 billion spam calls made every year in the United States so in order to stand out from the noise and boost answer rates you need to make it easy for customers to see that it is your company calling or texting. In addition to higher answer rates and reaching the right users the first time Branded Caller ID also drives longer calls with higher conversion rates. It's a win-win!

5. Deliver a Cohesive Experience‍

‍In order to optimize the performance of your agents you should simplify their workflows as much as possible. Give your agents and sales teams on the front line all the customer information they need to have productive conversations, at the right time, on any channel.  A 360-degree synthesized view of all CRM information and details regarding the contact’s specific scenarios prepares the agent for engaging interactions, building rapport, and seamlessly managing ongoing omnichannel conversations. In addition, it's important to make sure all of that data and information is visible in one location so your agents don’t need to bounce between platforms or dashboards to find what they’re looking for.

In the Regal Agent Desktop, a call triggered by a customer or prospect form fill appears on the agent dashboard. From there, in addition to accepting the call, the agent can send an email or text, schedule follow-up calls, and transfer calls. The single dashboard allows agents armed with a unified view of customer information and interaction history to efficiently and effectively engage with users in a personalized manner.

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Proactive Outreach Based on Customer Journeys

6. Orchestrate Omnichannel Journeys to Improve Conversion

When building campaigns to improve conversion rates, it's important to create a “journey” at key moments to ensure you’re engaging your customers and prospects at the right moment. Let’s say someone submits a new service request, triggering an event-based journey. You can utilize Regal’s Journey Builder to orchestrate proactive outreach to your customers across multiple channels and touchpoints based specifically on that service request. Send personalized messages based on your events to ensure your customer knows you’re thinking about how to assist them specifically, and not just sending a bulk message to your entire database.

7. Re-engage Lapsed Customers Using Retention-Focused Outreach

Build triggers to automatically reach out to at-risk customers who have not recently used your products or services. Proactively determine why their usage has dipped, and address the issue before the customer churns. For example, let's say someone hasn’t visited your app or opened an email from you for 3 months straight. You can use those signals to send personalized messages via different channels based on the lack of interaction. For the people who haven't visited your app in a while, you can send a personalized text and email to get them to re-engage, and for those who haven't opened an email in a while you can send a personalized SMS and give them a call to see if they're still interested in your services.

8. Utilize Post-Interaction Follow-Ups for Upsell Opportunities

It's important to contact customers who have posted positive reviews on websites or social media to ensure you show your appreciation for their support. They may be ripe for purchasing additional products or services, but even if they're not, it's important to maintain healthy relationships with customers who could become advocates for you in the future. Ensuring you are engaging in proactive outreach with the customers who support you the most improves your overall brand affinity, trust, loyalty, and the opportunity for you to be spread to potential new customers via word-of-mouth.

9. Speed to Lead: Engage Potential Customers Immediately 

Prevent any lead from slipping through the cracks. Immediate contact is critical when a prospect or customer expresses interest.  Engage customers in conversation as soon as possible, find out more about their needs, and convert them before they opt to purchase a competitor’s product or service. There are multiple ways to go about this including the use of AI agents alongside your human agents to create what we call “super agents.” Since AI agents and human agents excel in different areas of support and customer interactions it's important to understand which touchpoints should be handled by humans and which can be taken on by AI agents.

10. Create and AB Test Multiple Outreach Campaigns

Finally, keep refining to find the sweet spot in what works for your business, and what needs some tweaking. Get critical feedback by A/B testing campaign elements to determine which are the most successful, and always be ready to pivot based on what you learn. You can tweak the subject line in emails, the content you send via text, discount offers, and so much more. It's important to continuously tweak and improve messaging, timing, and scripts and keep an eye on metrics of your controls and tests.  Use data-driven insights to adapt and sharpen your journeys and call center strategies to:

• Create highly personalized experiences for every prospect and customer.
• Automate one-on-one conversations at scale.
• Drive better customer outcomes and revenue.

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Conclusion

As you can see, incorporating proactive outreach strategies is essential for businesses looking to drive customer loyalty and long-term engagement. Personalization and timely communication not only allows you to build relationships with your customers, it also increases your trust and loyalty leading to higher answer rates, improved conversions, and increased revenue. By incorporating this playbook into your customer and prospect engagement strategies, you have the power to transform relationships,  anticipate needs, deliver relevant messages, and create seamless interactions. Ensure you stay ahead of your competition, while fostering trust and loyalty with your customers and prospective buyers.

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Explore our customer stories to witness real-world examples of businesses achieving remarkable results through our innovative solutions and learn how:

• Angi Key concierge services increased booking requests per customer by 50 percent.
• SoFi realized a 21 percent increase in the average face value of issued loans.
• The Farmer’s Dog achieved a 58% lift in conversion.

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Listen to the How to Elevate Your Customer Experience with Proactive Outbound webinar