Customer Enagement
What this is all about...
The new focus on Retention Marketing is mostly due to customer choice having reached an all-time high while attention spans have dipped to an all-time low. This means companies need to take a more customer-centric approach in order to keep them interested. Customers now demand a more engaging and personalized experience, and companies must respond accordingly in order to nurture them into advocates.
Nurturing as many of your customers into advocates as possible makes good business sense. Research over the past few years continues to prove that existing customers are worth more than newly acquired ones. According to Gartner Group, 80% of your company’s future revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers. While Adobe reported that online retailers spend nearly 80% of their digital marketing budgets acquiring shoppers, for each 1% of shoppers who return for a subsequent visit, overall revenue will increase by approximately 10%. This means if online retailers retained 10% of their existing customers, they would double their revenue. The numbers don’t lie: it’s clear to see that customer retention is more valuable than acquisition. Jerry Jao - forbes.com
For most industries, the real value comes from retaining and deepening the customer relationship over time. This includes selling more of the same product to the customer (up selling), selling additional products to the customer (cross selling), as well as customer loyalty and retention. This is the role of relationship marketing. It involves much more than sending a monthly newsletter or launching a discount card. You need multiple tracks for each buyer persona and buying stage that “listen” to how the customer behaves, and adjusts accordingly – just like a real- world relationship. The challenge is to do this at scale.
While modern marketing automation started with email, many platforms today provide a single source of truth for everything you know about a prospect or customer. They combine information from your CRM system, social activity, your website and blog, buyer purchase history, and other behavioral information. With this complete view of a customer’s needs and interests, you can trigger relevant interactions at the right time, over any channel.
The result of all this? Greater intimacy with your customers that leads to greater customer lifetime value.
Every customer is on their own unique journey. Motivations to try, buy or stay loyal change depending on the individual making the choice. But marketers can ‘own’ that moment by using technology to harvest and interpret data and create contextualised campaigns that are triggered by customer behaviour, not by their best guess. A decade ago, the most a visitor could expect from a website were messages that aimed at making them feel welcome, using phrases such as ‘glad to have you back’. These messages were being used to try and develop a relationship. More recently, with the affluence of implied and obvious shopper data available to the marketers, personalisation affords opportunities that have been completely altered and transformed beyond recognition. Kym Reynolds - Smartfocus