Successful marketing means adapting to new trends, and responding to changes in customer behavior and expectations. Today, customers want a lot. They want personalization. They want brands to know about them. And they want to have two-way interactions with those brands in order to build relationships.
How can marketers better respond to changing customer needs?
In our podcast, the One to One Consumer Marketing Podcast, we talk to marketing leaders each week, and here are some pro CRM tips from Shaurya Tyagi, Amanda Long, and David Hixon.
#1 Create relevant content that draws in the customer, instead of pushing promotions.
Retention marketing shouldn’t be a one-sided conversation. It’s not about telling customers why they should engage. It’s about providing them value and drawing them into a relationship.
“It’s not all about telling them that this promotion is going on and that is why you should come back to my app. But also telling them that — taking the route of content marketing — telling them that this is how you can use my app better, or this is how you can do business with me better.
“So again, making that same loop that starts with some content which is relevant to them and then telling them that, okay, if this content is relevant to you, why don’t you check out these promotions that I have?”
#2 Prepare for a future where marketing creates digital and physical experiences.
Creating omnichannel experiences include in-store and online, too. Are your customers having a consistent brand experience in both? As Shaurya explains, brands who are able to do that will lead their industry.
“The consumer will make sure that they are expecting similar experiences when they are going into a store and when they are coming on to your own website or they are buying from a marketplace. From a marketing perspective, it would be essential for people like us to understand that.
“The future of marketing and retail and consumers would be a mixture of physical and digital. And then whoever is making sure that they’re able to give that consistent experience throughout platforms, in that particular category, that brand would be a winner.”
💡 Tactical advice:
“What works is that we have to understand the consumer to the team. We have to understand which places do they go out for lunches, or what mode of travel do they have? Those nuances which you get to learn.
“There are two ways to understand it. One way is the offers that we are providing. How many of them redeem it? … Then you have the persona, and you understand what did we assume the persona to be and what it actually is. You keep fine tuning that as you keep launching new products.”
Learn the nuances, behaviors, and habits of your customers so that you can serve up more personalized content to them. Constantly iterate and improve upon your processes, and continue to update your persona as needed.
#1 Be as efficient as possible with your channels.
What’s the biggest killer to efficiency? Having channels that don’t talk to one another. It’s one of the biggest challenges Amanda found — and one that she’s looking to solve.
“The biggest thing that I ran into or that I honed in on as I was coming in was making sure that we were using all of our channels as efficiently as possible. That all of the channels were talking to each other, so that you don’t have a paid channel that’s potentially going after a customer that’s on your email file. Then you can use those dollars elsewhere more efficiently in your paid channel and let the email have its window of time to try to reactivate or drive that customer back in.”
#2 Set goals and measure them.
Effective measurement always starts with setting goals. And setting goals informs what metrics to measure. But the danger is being too rushed that you don’t think about it.
“Know what your goals are. Know how you’re going to measure those goals. A lot of times, us being in the retail space, we’re moving a million miles an hour, and it’s just like, ‘I got to get this done and get it into market and get it done now.’ Challenge yourself to really outline what the goals are, what your KPIs are going to be, and make sure that you’re referencing those. Whether your campaign is something that’s lasting three days or it’s something that’s lasting three months, just to make sure that you’re ticking and tying and really going back to what you said you were trying to achieve.”
💡 Tactical advice:
“You have to make sure you’re staying top-of-mind with your customer and doing simple things like sending a post-purchase trigger or retargeting a customer after their first purchase, are key things that have to be done. I would also say even looking further out, making sure that whatever your business’s purchase time window is, making sure that you’ve got things like reengagement triggers in place. And then even further out, winbacks. Making sure you’re doing all of those, again, key principal marketing things to ensure that you’re keeping your customer in the funnel.”
Stay top-of-mind with your customers in a variety of ways: post-purchase triggers, reengagement triggers, or winbacks. Make sure to have short and long-term strategies for retention as well.
#1 Be diligent in building relationships with new customers after onboarding.
Marketers need to be thoughtful about onboarding. At Ally, they don’t welcome you in and immediately try to sell you more products. Instead, they spend time building that initial relationship.
“When a new customer comes in our door, we’re introducing you to who we are as a company. … We spend at least two months having conversations like that with our customers before we ever try to sell you anything else. That’s very purposeful and we’ve seen that work too. It’s building that foundational relationship, which is in a lot of ways trust-based, that then leads to actually changing that behavior and driving more conversion.”
#2 Constantly iterate on your approach to influence customer behavior.
If you want to influence customer behavior, have a plan for it. Have a plan for every type of customer behavior you want to change. Then build a strategy to execute that acquisition or retention plan.
“The work that we do is really all about … just changing behavior. Getting you to do something that you weren’t otherwise going to do. In our world, that behavior that we’re trying to change is constantly shifting. Here at Ally, we shift between, okay, today we want to focus on getting new customers in the door. That’s what’s most important, so let’s figure out how to go build a really smart acquisition strategy. Well, then tomorrow it might be, hey, let’s go get the existing customers that we have to build their balances with us faster. So let’s go figure out a really smart balance build strategy.”
💡 Tactical advice:
“The next best offer model today drives 6,000 different unique variations of Ally.com. It gives us a channel to get really, really personalized based off of all the stuff that feeds into those models. … It allows us to get a pretty good feel for, hey, I have your eyeballs right now, because you’re at Ally.com for whatever reason. I might as well try to show you something that I think you’re most likely to be interested in.”
Create dynamic models that give customers offerings and products based on their preferences and behaviors. Then, collect data from your customers from various sources, and leverage that data to create that personalization.
Want more insights on customer retention? Subscribe to The One to One Consumer Marketing Podcast for the full episodes with these amazing guests and more!
