How Your Pool & Spa Business Can Harness Data to Boost Sales

Build a Valuable Customer Database (CRM)

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 (Customer Relationship Management) database to know what products your customer owns and buys and what they don’t own and don’t buy.

Knowing what products a customer owns (including brands, sizes), what they have purchased from you in the past, and what their water testing results have been previously enables you to proactively run more effective, targeted sales campaigns and take advantage of new market opportunities.

This spring is the perfect time to make sure your business software system has an integrated CRM database that pulls customer information from your POS transactions, water testing lab, and 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. 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 on your mailing and e-mail lists by tracking all sales and customers through the system.

Capture Valuable Data

Having a CRM database that is integrated with your business software is crucial for making sure your staff doesn’t enter redundant information. If they do have to perform this repetitive task, they’re bound to get distracted from capturing more powerful profile information to 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. Your CRM should capture:

• 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 emails. With all the basic transactional and profile details captured, staff can focus on obtaining and entering more valuable, user-defined fields and 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 when 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 your 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.

Analyze Your CRM Data

This pandemic gives specialty retailers greater incentive to “mine” their invaluable customer database. Whether you sell something through your retail operation, your construction division, or your service department, you should seek to connect all aspects of the interaction your company has with its customers. RB Pool and Spa software automatically provides staff with immediate access to important information, such as history of purchases, products owned, pool and spa size, stored images and schematics, previous water problems, equipment profiles, personal information, directions, and more. This gives you the tools to segment and target specific customers and tailor promotions, offers and services just for them! Plus, data shows that tailored offers are much more likely to convert to sales.

Successfully using pool service reporting software is about making the best use of your data and discovering valuable insights about your customers, how they are marketed to, and how they respond. The goal becomes turning those insights into successful business decisions. High-performing businesses that substantially outperform over the long term are more likely to use customer data compared to low performers. Therefore, analyzing the data in your CRM database can really help you uncover customer insights and identify areas of opportunities for business growth.

CRM software provides analytical tools that can help you identify your top customers and your time-water customers. Boosting productivity is key in our season industry, so it’s important to avoid clients who waste valuable staff time and generate low revenues. Pro-actively using a CRM program can help you better manage your workflow and allocate your resources to make sure that your top customers are getting the attention they need, which in turn means higher customer retention.

By running regular reports in your CRM, you can discover and create a list of the hassle-free customers who bought more frequently and spent the most money in your business. Focus on them. In fact, by giving them more attention, you might even uncover more business opportunities with these customers. Your CRM software also holds the information on the problem customers. They likely rack up customer complaints and consume valuable time. In fact, you may discover that these time-wasters cost more money to service them than they actually generate in revenue for your company. These are the customers you’d like to swim away from eventually.

For example, if their purchase history shows that they buy high-value items consistently, they may be less likely to pay attention to a sales pitch on a lower priced product. Likewise, if they tend to prefer lower-value products, your CRM database will show you this is a budget-conscious customer and there’s no use of trying to sell a top of the range product to them. This pool service reporting software tells you what kind of product or services a certain customer has, and how long they have them for. You can run reports to remind customers that their service contract is up for renewal. This way you can up-sell your customers at the right time.

Remember, the main benefit of having a CRM system in place is to manage the relationship you have with your customers – past, present and future – in order to increase your sales and grow your business. So remember to use everything your CRM database has to offer. By leveraging your CRM data, you can unlock information that will help you retain your best customers and acquire more customers just like them. Put your pool service reporting software to work and use it to increase the size and the frequency of each purchase. Explore it to present highly targeted marketing promotions and identify up-sell opportunities that are relevant and timely to each customer.

Be smart and use your CRM software to not only capture valuable information for the future, but also to increase revenue and boost productivity in the short term. Maximize this year’s surge in demand to capture data that will ensure your company’s long-term growth and expand revenue streams for years to come.