Marketing Shouldn’t Stop at Acquisition

The first step to retaining a customer is keeping them engaged. Sometimes your product or service will achieve this by its nature, but even if you have that luxury (and particularly if you don’t), going one step further, and investing in both product marketing and customer lifecycle marketing are essential for retention. But why?

First, product marketing. Whether you’re selling an action camera to consumers or software to businesses, helping existing customers take full advantage of your product(s) is one of the best ways to ensure satisfaction and build loyalty. This might include anything from onboarding programmes and sharing customer success stories, to new feature announcements or periodic newsletters. Product marketers should create high-value content, push it out to customers, and work with colleagues to ensure that everyone can talk confidently about products and services.

As the name infers, product marketing focuses on the product - but what about the customer? That’s where customer lifecycle marketing comes in. Building a profile of your customers, carefully considering (and researching where necessary) how they use your products, ascertaining what their needs are, and communicating with them regularly are all part of an effective CLM strategy. Recognising where a customer is in their lifecycle is key, as it allows you to deliver relevant content, and make interventions at the right time.

A few examples of product marketing and lifecycle marketing working hand-in-hand include;

• For membership organisations, delivering induction content for new members.
• For self-service software providers, reaching out when user session time reduces significantly or when recurring errors are spotted.
• For durable goods manufacturers, ensuring customers are aware of new product launches
• For finance brands, engaging customers at key times of the financial year, such as year-end
• For high-value customers, thank you messages and rewards for loyalty

Know Your Customer

For volume sales, high-value items, and particularly in B2B, taking retention to the next level means having a personal relationship with your customers. Account management makes specific individuals responsible for ensuring customer satisfaction and growing accounts, giving customers a point of human contact within an organisation, and giving organisations the opportunity to nurture meaningful relationships.

Nobody enjoys being constantly sold to, so account managers should be careful to act consultatively, keep the frequency of their contact reasonable, and really seek to add value for their customers. As a general rule, account managers are professional, respectful, and importantly, knowledgeable - a good account manager will be up-to-date on their industry, their products and services, and their customers. They will seek to understand customer pain points, anticipate problems, and identify opportunities to grow accounts.

As many of the most successful organisations in the world will attest - for significant relationships, you simply can’t beat the human touch.

Accurate and Timely Data is Pivotal

For both marketing and account management, when it comes to customer retention - good data underpins it all. As business leaders know, customers expect a certain standard of service and personalisation - let’s face it, if a busy account manager can’t remember their contact’s name, or a marketer sends introductory deals to existing customers, the damage can be significant.

As such, accurate and well-maintained profile and categorisation information (everything from name and job title to industry sector) is the bare minimum, and data such as call notes, contract status, and purchase history are a close second.

With good underlying data, organisations can build highly personalised lifecycle management plans, ensuring that customers get an appropriate level of contact, and that resources are used to their best effect. When high priority events occur, such as a purchase, a service issue, a contract renewal, or when a contact leaves their company, retention workflows can be triggered, deploying specialised retention campaigns, offering special discounts, or simply alerting account managers, so they can make contact at the right time.

But some events are harder to detect than others. It might be simple enough to generate a reminder to contact a customer before their contract expires, or automatically update systems after an ecommerce purchase, but when an individual moves on or an organisation grows, the signals can be more subtle - or even non-existent. Monitoring customer organisations, and identifying these key events can mean the difference between keeping or losing a customer, so investment is warranted.

As a poignant example, any seasoned account manager will recognise the shudder of someone who finds that their contact left 6 months ago, and they don’t know who to speak to now that it’s renewal time.

It goes without saying then, that marketers and account managers should make data quality and timeliness a top priority. Where organisations don’t have the resources to monitor accounts as closely or regularly as they might like, leaders should seriously consider 3rd party solutions to help them identify critical events quickly, so they can take proactive retention measures.

Tools & Partners

If some of the above sounds like it’s out of reach, you’re not alone. For many organisations, particularly SME’s, the scale of the challenge can seem overwhelming - but fear not, there are a myriad of specialist vendors and agencies who can help you meet your retention needs without increasing your own headcount.

Working with third parties might sound daunting, but if you don’t have the time, resources, or skills to achieve your retention goals, don’t let that hold you back - investment with carefully selected partners will usually deliver exceptional ROI when compared with customer acquisition costs, not to mention that many can offer specific expertise, experience, and bespoke tools. 

In fact, the vast majority of the world’s largest corporations make unashamed use of external partners for everything from strategy consulting to technology - this is particularly true in marketing, where specialist skills and proprietary assets, such as data sets, are especially beneficial.

For customer retention programmes, some of the most commonly engaged partners include:

• Marketing Agencies
  There are a wide and varied range of marketing agencies, but specifically thinking about retention, agencies can offer services ranging from complete ownership of customer lifecycle marketing to more ad-hoc email template design, retention related content creation, and more.
• Data Services Providers
  Manually building the data you need, or augmenting the data you already have can be challenging and time consuming. Data companies can help you leapfrog these challenges, and offer complimentary services, such as data cleansing, monitoring, and research.
• Telemarketing Agencies
  Where customer numbers are high, telemarketing can offer a valuable way to stay in touch with individuals and provide elevated service levels. Many telemarketing agencies offer white-label services, allowing companies to appear to personally engage with customers without committing to in-house account managers. This can be particularly cost-effective for less complex customer relationships. 

A Worker is Only as Good as Their Tools

As the saying goes, “a worker is only as good as their tools” - and customer retention is no exception. Account management and marketing are both highly specialised roles, which in the modern business environment require specialised technology. 

When it comes to retention, some of the key components of a good customer management and marketing technology stack include;

• CRM
  Customer relationship management software is used to manage and record interactions with customers (and prospects). It’s a key tool for data accuracy, completeness, and more. Many systems have enhanced capabilities for scheduling, customer monitoring, and more.
• CDP
  A customer data platform is technology that collects information from disparate sources to create a unified view of customers. This might include transactional data from your eCommerce properties, behavioural data from customers moving around your apps or websites, conversational data from customer interactions with service reps - and much more. Importantly, CDPs play a critical role in identifying bad data.
• Channel Marketing Tools
  Everything from email marketing, to live chat, sms, social media management, advertising management, and much more, this group of technologies helps you reach out to customers in the many channels where they are, to drive activation or awareness.
• Analytics & BI Tools
  In all their various forms, analytics and business intelligence tools help marketers and account managers gain valuable insight into their data - to understand what content works, identify which customers haven’t been contacted for some time, and more. Modern tools with AI capabilities are able to assist with predicting future behaviour, such as identifying patterns that often lead to customer churn. Not just from a retention standpoint - when implementing technology, it’s important to focus on fully automated interconnectivity, ensuring that all departments have access to a complete view of the customer - Nothing annoys customers more than organisations who supposedly value their business not knowing who they are, or failing to act in a joined up way!

Proactive Customer Retention Pays

In this piece, we’ve revealed some of the secrets of customer retention, and shared some of the information you need to make it an enduring competitive advantage. 

By focusing the tools and resources you already have on preventing churn, you can improve customer experiences, and protect your valuable clients.

The reward for getting all this right is happy customers, lower retention costs, and higher profit margins.