Every summer I get inundated with questions from both B2C and B2B marketers who are looking at the fall season as a heavy customer acquisition opportunity. They want to know what they can do now to ensure they keep these new customers after using lots of resources to acquire them. Many don’t have the resources to “do anything big” because of budget or political constraints – the boss simply rejects the idea customers are defecting or doesn’t believe customer retention marketing is profitable. Still, these folks understand how important it is to retain good customers – especially newly acquired ones.
So I’m going to outline a basic method for developing your business case and taking some action on the customer retention front. We’ll get into reporting, budgets, politics, culture, the whole thing, and wrap it up before you need to start taking some action early next year.
In many ways, the issue at the root of this discussion is measuring and understanding the overall productivity of marketing efforts. For example, a campaign that generates more clicks than any other but generates fewer sales dollars than any other isn’t really very productive, is it? What about campaigns that generate really high response but 98% of the customers generated never buy again? What would happen to the bottom line if you could make these campaigns much more productive, or could justify swapping money spent on these campaigns into other campaigns that generate much more profit?
To talk about marketing productivity, you need data. So what we’re going to do in this series is create your first tables & charts on customer productivity using your own data, which you can use to bring people to the table. Then we’re going to walk you through the terminology and discovery of what your data means and how to go about creating programs that increase your marketing productivity by efficiently re-capturing customer value lost along the way.
And in the process, we’ll put some real tangible life into all those customer-value-centric terms like Retention & Lifetime Value while de-mystifying the story these metrics tell. And then show you how to take action on this data that will increase the profitability of ALL your marketing efforts, both in Acquisition as well as Retention.
Sound good? Let’s get to it.
Proving the Business Case – Simply!
Spreading the Average (Recency)
Setting the Tripwires (Latency)
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