Jan 5
Acquire the right customers or suffer in customer retention
Leverage customer data and learn from segments to GROW RELATIONSHIPS WITH CUSTOMERS through your DTC channel.
If you’re a marketer, it’s important to focus on acquiring the right customers. Otherwise, you’ll spend all your time and energy trying to retain them — which can be costly. So how do you know who the right customers are? The customer segments that spend with you should stand out in the data. And once you’ve identified them, how do you attract them? Keep reading for tips on acquiring the right customers and retaining them for the long haul with data-driven marketing strategies.
Check your churn
If you haven’t acquired the right kind of customers, you will see it in that churn rate. Even if it is a lagging metric, many customers will leave.
Before you automatically conclude that you have a problem with keeping customers, consider whether your real issue is acquiring the right ones. Consider the type of customer you want to serve and focus on bringing them in. Remember, it’s all about collecting clients to whom you can provide value and value to your company.
Look to see if you are attracting the wrong kinds of customers. Often a high churn rate is the result of poor customer acquisition efforts. We see this in industries that promote price heavily upfront. They attract deal seekers who leave quickly when they find a better deal. In customer data, you can see it in the customers that use many different email addresses to obtain the discount. Remember the Groupon trap for vendors before? The deals might have assisted companies in acquiring new customers, but they were usually high-churning customers who didn’t stay to make another buy when a substantial discount wasn’t given.
Utilize Engagement Scores
While modeling may not seem helpful, technology has been able to meet the commuting needs of advanced data analytics.
Predictive modeling in the modern customer engagement approach is on the rise. Data scientists and business intelligence experts have traditionally been in charge of executing artificial intelligence and machine learning, including creating, training, and deploying models. These marketing teams aim to communicate the results (i.e., consumer scores) and insights from these models with marketing and other customer-facing teams to deliver better customer experiences.
In marketing automation, you can utilize lead scores to characterize what should be a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) before sending them to a sales representative. This makes the salesperson’s job more efficient because you are not sending someone what isn’t ready to buy.
Engagement scoring used to be labor-intensive, highly manual, and time-consuming, with data analysts pouring over different excel sheets and trying to see across platforms. A customer data platform(CDP) that can first keep track of unique customer journeys helps automate the data connection and identity mapping. Business users without technical skills or SQL knowledge can extract insights from and act on first-party data in real time with a CDP.
And, of course, this includes marketers who can focus more on what moves the needle in terms of behavior scores generated by predictive models. Which segments engage better over which channels when it comes to you? Engagement is scored in others of frequency and recency, customer loyalty score. You can even predict customer abandonment.
Dive into Personas for why and what’s brand love
Are you struggling to create customer personas that represent your customer base? Are you concerned that your manager may be too biased for the outcome to be fair? VIEWN works with different customer survey approaches that use ML to randomize the answers and questions, channels, and surveys so that no one sees the same sequence. CEO Analytics has cracked the code regarding process-based advanced customer personas that get down to “why” customers love your brand. What are the preferences and attitudes that come up in the buying process? How do that process information against your competitors?
Creating data-driven customer personas starts with understanding your customers and what they want. Practically, there need to be high-level conversations about your business to understand certain nuances in the data. Then we discuss gathering customer data, identifying customer types, and creating customer profiles to help unlock love. Customers are driven away by just one bad customer experience. Consumers are calling for more interactive, relatable marketing. But only 10% of people feel their strategies can accomplish this goal.
What is the key to unlocking customer love and loyalty? Data-driven customer personas can help businesses provide tailored experiences that make customers feel special and appreciated. 70% of the buying experience is based on how the customer is treated.
There is no room for guesswork when it comes to customer loyalty. Understand your customers by taking the time to analyze their data and behavior. This way, you can pinpoint their preferences and needs. From there, create different customer profiles that represent various types of customers. These profiles can be used as a guide for marketing sales efforts. Customer Success and Support interactions will also benefit from dealings with these accurate guides rather than allowing employees to make assumptions based on guesses.
Using data-driven customer personas can help businesses focus on the right customers and provide them with the best possible experiences. This, in turn, will help businesses build customer loyalty and increase sales. So, to unlock customer love and loyalty, start creating data-driven customer personas today!
Customer retention comes from engaging direct channels.
For companies that face fundamental challenges in acquiring customer data — think of skincare, femtech, or home goods business businesses and manufacturers that rely on traditional retailers and eCommerce marketplaces (i.e., Amazon) to sell their goods. It’s difficult to understand their customer, let alone devise smarter engagement strategies that lead to greater satisfaction and loyalty. According to Forbes, this issue isn’t new, but it’s been amplified recently as eCommerce has seen 55% growth. As more consumers have shifted online, the pressure is on these companies to prioritize their direct-to-consumer (DTC) relationships to maintain relevance.
Devise smarter engagement strategies utilizing the customer data you have collected over the last three years, leading to customer satisfaction and loyalty.
The right CDP for the job can connect easily to the shopping platforms you use and merge that data to give you the whole picture of who your customers are. For example, let’s say you social sell luxury kids’ clothing and toys through social selling via Instagram and Shopify and by keyword search and ads on Amazon. You want to see the total sales and customers from both channels. Find out that have purchased on both platforms; that repurchase means they are valuable to nurture and engage on email and social ads, like on Tik Tok and Instagram. With integrated data at your fingertips, you can discover new customer insights, build smarter segments, and apply analytics to better understand and act in real-time on customers’ buying habits, browsing behavior, product preferences, and more and saving you time and resources in building any analysis, but building you a stable revenue stream with customer loyalty.
Offer your incentives to your loyal customers
I have found that rewarding my customers for their loyalty works wonders with marketing. You can easily reach on-site visitors and email subscribers by offering these discounts to those who return or subscribe; like the example above, we offer 15% off if you sign up within a certain time frame! Another tip I learned is that when you are explicit about the discount, then customers convert better.
A great way of engaging this audience is through personalized messages which get 6x more interactions than generic ones — so make sure yours are always tailored just right.
Customer retention is key to a successful business. It’s not enough to acquire customers — you need the right ones. And, if you haven’t been acquiring them through the right channels or methods, your churn rate will show it. Luckily, there are ways to fix that. Utilize customer data and analytics to learn about your customer segments and what makes them tick. Once you know more about them, you can start engaging with them directly (via DTC) and showering them with incentives for being loyal customers. If all of this sounds overwhelming, don’t worry! We can help get you on the right track by providing a roadmap to finding and acquiring the right customer for your business. Contact us today to get started!
