Category Archives: Measuring Engagement

Use Discounts for Customer Retention? (Incremental Sales / Subsidy Costs)

Brand Management, DataBase Marketing, Driller Q & A, Measuring Engagement, Newsletters

Jim answers questions from fellow Drillers
(More questions with answers here, Work Overview here, Index of concepts here)

Q: Most CRM experts agree that discount is a terrible way to attract new customers. They seem to all agree that these “transaction buyers” are money-losing customers and have no loyalty.

A: I think using discounts profitably for customer acquisition depends a lot on your “Brand Personality” and your business model. That said, often people screw this up and attract the wrong kind of customer.

Q: But, I have seen a lot of different opinions on the use of discounts to increase loyalty and retention among current customers. I have seen experts contradicting themselves on this subject saying that discount is a terrible way to reward gold customers or to move up customers to a “better segment”and after some time they contradict themselves mentioning a successful discount case study (points are a common method used). Jim, what is your opinion about using discounts as a weapon in a retention program?

A: First, we have to define “discount”. Price discounts have the effect of reducing margins, but so do “better service” ideas like “VIP phone lines” and loyalty programs. So you can take your discount on the top line or the operational line, the fact is it costs money to provide good service to best customers in hopes of keeping them. I mean, what’s the $10 million you spent on a CRM system? Choose your poison, it costs money to retain customers.

Continue reading Use Discounts for Customer Retention? (Incremental Sales / Subsidy Costs) →

Visitor Retention Mapping

DataBase Marketing, Driller Q & A, Measuring Engagement, Newsletters, Web Analytics

Jim answers questions from fellow Drillers
(More questions with answers here, Work Overview here, Index of concepts here)

Q: The research folks in my company are trying to convince me that measuring sessions and Page Views per Session is more effective than using Recency and Sessions, as you advocate in your book, for a retention metric.

A: For a content site, the Page Views / Session measure can be used as a measure of visitor quality and appropriate marketing to the right audience – a customer acquisition idea – not retention. And it really needs to be broken out by Source – the average has little actionable meaning. You want to know the Visitor Sources, and then look at this metric by Source. This is still Frequency though – what about visitors who don’t come back?

Q: I am having some difficulty in making a decision regarding this. They want to give me a matrix with Page Views per Session on the Y axis and Total Sessions on the X axis as the “customer retention map”.

Continue reading Visitor Retention Mapping →

From Audience to the Individual

Analytical Culture, DataBase Marketing, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics

Prompted by Avinash’s post on Recency (if this topic interests you, there is much more here), I have to return to an idea that keeps running through my head:

Why do so many Marketing people fail to understand the basic underlying dynamics of Interactive / Online Marketing?  Relative to the Comments on Avinash’s post, why would Marketers not be interested in the Recency metric?  If the Marketers are not aware of it, why would Analysts not push it to them, show them the power of it?

The more I think about this issue, as I have been for several years now, the more confident I become the answer is quite simple: Nobody ever taught most Marketers how to communicate properly to Individuals.  Their training, their experiences, their peers, their conferences, all of it is about Marketing to Audiences.  The nameless, faceless hordes represented by GRP’s.

They simply don’t know how to do it any other way. 

And as a result, neither does whoever they report to. 

Which means any Marketing Accountability or Productivity Metrics, if they exist, are about Audiences, not Individuals.

So, all the Marketers care about are Audiences, these one-off blips on the screen, as opposed to Individuals, who carry longer-term, Potential Value to the Company that can be measured with Recency.

That’s why they allow the blasting of e-mails, they buy untargeted impressions.  They repeat what they know from offline, online.

Sad, really.  A one-way thought process in a two-way world.

What can we do about it? 

I’m going to talk about these concepts with a few Marketers during the AMA’s Digital Marketing Lab at M.planet next week.

I’ll let you know how it goes…

Update: I should probably skip Marketing, go straight to the CFO.