How to Use the Benefits of a CRM to Expand Your Pool and Spa Offerings
As a pool and spa retailer, the main benefit of a CRM database is to manage the relationship you have with your customers. This helps to increase your sales and grow business. By leveraging your CRM database, you can unlock information and identify new business opportunities that are relevant and timely to each customer.
In order to maximize this year’s surge in demand, smart pool professionals are capturing additional data in their CRM database to ensure their company’s long-term growth and expand revenue streams for the future. The goal is to move beyond capturing only basic information and look for more details about each customer in order to gain insights about potential new business opportunities. Whether it’s offering new products, new services, or opening a new store location. With the right CRM system, your company can set up specific user-defined fields that will enable you to gather data about whether or not your clients are shopping at other retailers for patio furniture, toys, chemicals, or are using a different company to service their pool or spa. Rather than just following a hunch about a business opportunity, gather data in your CRM this summer to see if data supports your hypothesis.
Capturing Valuable Data
It’s important to have a CRM database that is integrated with your business software so you aren’t having staff enter redundant information. Asking your team to add basic customer information will distract them from capturing more powerful profile information for use in future sales campaigns. Eliminating the need to re-enter basic data will also boost staff productivity—which will be particularly important this summer. This is the important data that should be captured:
Transactional Details: Be sure your CRM database automatically captures all transactional details like the spa or pool brand, serial number, size, and all other products ever purchased by the customer.
Profile Details: Your CRM should also capture all the basic customer profile details—such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and email(s). With all the basic transactional and profile details captured, staff can focus on obtaining and entering more valuable, user-defined fields/customer profile details.
User-Defined Details: Take the time to choose specific profile details you want your team to capture while they have clients in the store or on the phone or while the service tech is in the backyard. For example, RB Pool & Spa Software allows you to define fields and have staff prompted to ask customers if they have a salt chlorine generator, how old the pool or spa is, whether they have a vinyl liner, gunite or fiberglass pool and whether or not they have a winter cover, solar blanket or automatic pool cover. By having this information you can quickly run reports that allow you to target specific groups of customers with specific service and product offers.
Categorizing customers through user-defined fields allows pool and spa businesses to create powerful targeted sales campaigns. With RB Retail & Service software, your sales and service information is all in one place allowing you to really drill down to communicate with customers. It’s easy to know who hasn’t purchased chemicals lately, who hasn’t had a service call or who has an older model spa. Once you know the target audience, use direct mail, regular emailing and social media to reach out and bring these people back into our stores to sell to them. Your CRM database is the ideal way to generate emails, texts and phone calls to reach out to your customers and drive them to your online store, retail location, construction or service department.
Powerful Benefits of CRM Data
There are a few ‘best practices’ that successful pool and spa retailers regularly capture to help identify potential expansion opportunities. These pieces of ‘must have’ data are a terrific place to start expanding your CRM database:
Inventory: Set up profile questions for inventory items so that when items are sold they are added to the customer’s profile. For example, if you sell an EC40 filtering system, have that part number and warranty information added to your customer’s account to start building out the customer’s equipment profile for service work. By having this profile information, service techs can easily access the information from Mobile Live in the field allowing for quick up-sell opportunities by service techs.
Email Addresses: It may seem obvious, but collecting and updating customer email addresses can be very valuable. Being able to send bulk emails, AR emails, quotes, and even receipts from the shopping done by your customers in the store will likely yield additional sales opportunities. Pro Tip: Be sure your staff always asks and confirms email addresses when interacting with customers—even if they see an email address listed in the CRM database—as we all know that people change and update their email addresses regularly.
Customize Direct Mail: Savvy pool professionals note that it is also very important to classify customers by product types. For example, if you know a customer has an inground swimming pool, be sure that this is captured in a ‘Direct Mail Type’ field that can be pulled for all promotions related to inground pools (and not above ground pools or spas). For example, if the customer is tagged with an “Inground Pool” Direct Mail Type, then that customer is perfect for a promotion on safety covers or automatic pool covers
Track Customer Referral Types: Creating a field to identify how customers found out about you, provides very valuable data to make business decisions. This type of information will help retailers determine which marketing dollars are working –whether it be from radio, social media ads, billboards, loyalty reward programs or other word-of-mouth promotions. Oftentimes retailers will discover customers coming from new zip codes and learn that word-of-mouth referrals point to a geographic area that doesn’t have a pool store. This could point to an opportunity to open a new retail store in an area where competitors are scarce—guaranteeing long-term income by capturing an entire new market or increasing market-share in a particular region.
Building a Valuable CRM Database
With the surge in demand for pools, spas and all things outdoor-living, our industry has an opportunity to start harnessing valuable customer information that can be mined for use both this year and for many more years to come. Now is the time to use the power of your CRM database to know what products your customer owns and buys and what products they don’t have interest in.
Knowing what products a customer owns including brands, sizes, what they have purchased from you in the past, what their water testing results have been, etc. enables you to proactively run more effective, targeted sales campaigns and take advantage of new market opportunities.
This summer is the perfect time to make sure your business software system has an integrated CRM database that pulls customer information from your POS transactions, your water testing lab and your service and construction departments. Additionally, this is the time to train staff to populate your CRM database with valuable customer profile information.
RB Retail and Service provides an unlimited CRM customer database that supports your growing business, and you will always be able to keep a cleansed database with the ability to combine duplicate customers, import new or purchased customer lists through the customer import features, and build upon your mailing and e-mail lists by tracking all sales and customers through the system. Remember, the benefits of a CRM aren’t limited to only capturing valuable information for the future, but also to increase revenue and boost productivity in the short term.
