Focusing on the impression your customers have of your company is key for a sustainable business. A positive customer experience creates loyalty, retains customers longer and is a fertile soil for brand advocacy. How much value do you bring to them in their experience? How good can you avoid friction to retain them longer? It all starts with two major touchpoints: people and products.
"Customer retention is the new conversion."
The main preoccupation right now for many businesses is the customer experience. At the end of the day customers will spend more for a great experience. The customer experience includes every single touchpoint they might have directly or indirectly with your company. We might not help you for every single one of them, but we can make sure you have the right set-up in order to avoid friction and provide the most value to your customers online.
Depending on your business model, you will have to define clearly what are the strategic actions to properly delight your customers. The priority is to be aware very rapidly once a client is not satisfied or if he is about to churn for any other reasons. There are ways to monitor that, such as sending customer surveys at the right moment. For instance, if the client is used to placing an order every month, if it doesn’t contact you 2 months in a row, it is a massive trigger for sending a NPS score survey or even to automatically add a task to the account management team to get in touch with the client. There are plenty of options to make sure that your customers can experience the full value of your product and services.
As a Media and Hubspot Agency, we build delighting inbound strategies to ensure that your customers are happy, satisfied, and supported through their whole life cycle. This includes incorporating dedicated chatbots and surveys to support, and request feedback from your customers at the most critical moments in their journey. By implementing the right CRM and marketing automation software you will be able to help your customers at all times and never miss another opportunity to delight them and eventually turn them into brand advocates and promoters.
No need to say that it costs way more to acquire a new customer than retaining an existing one. But here is the thing: humans are lazy. And most of your customers are probably humans. So you need to create an experience that is a no-brainer so that these lazy humans don’t have to think too much. Making your customers' lives smoother can be a tricky process as we are really digging deep into behavioral science. To cut a long story short you can follow these steps.
As we can see, retaining customers is all about continuously onboarding them. And this is mostly a matter of getting the right timing. Every customer journey will be unique and your approach should be tailored on what they have done so far and what they should from now on. As a Media and Hubspot agency, we have seen a huge increase in demands for automating this whole process.
The very first step to create a connection with potential customers is to genuinely help them solve some of their problems. In order to do so, we promote special content to our audience so that we can start building a relationship and retarget them afterwards. As soon as a content has to be downloaded or exchanged against contact information, it becomes what we call a lead magnet. The leads are then integrated into your database so that you can directly get in touch with them through email from now on. Note that depending on the business model, this can also be done with a combination of outbound efforts where we advertise by pushing the information to your specific audiences.
The format of a lead magnet can vary from blog articles or video masterclass to chatbots or more complex engineered marketing among many others. It has to be adapted to both your business goals and audience. No matter the selected format, it has to comply with a few prerequisites to make sure you don’t push the wrong content.
Even if you comply with these prerequisites, it doesn’t mean you will have it perfect right away. We can share best practices and give our best gut feeling at DIGITAG but we can’t read the future yet. What we can do though is to track the engagement with your content and A/B test to optimise your lead generation.
Finding the right communication channel can be hard. New media are appearing all the time as technology enables richer interactions. Every day there are more and more options to promote your product and getting the combination is not an easy task. Is traditional media relevant for you? Should you rather focus on social media or use programmatic platforms? Can you rely on third party ambassadors? Are search engines still a viable option today? Your media mix will have to evolve and adapt during the overall customer journey. Now the question is how do you select your channels?
At DIGITAG, we conduct a permanent market watch to compare every option so that we can guide you through this process. We categorise the different channels based on several variables.
Once we have shortlisted the main channels, our goal is to start testing and measuring the return on investment for each single channel. This is also when we start integrating different media together to create a multi-channel approach.
