The Future of Campaign Management: Paying More Attention to Retention
Earlier this week I met with Kevin McShane of Portrait Software and we got to talking about the future of campaign management. Something Kevin said really struck me and has stayed with me. He said that within the next five years, he sees the industry shifting to focus more effort on understanding existing customers and providing them with the content they need, when they need it.
Sounds simple enough right? And many marketers are probably thinking, “But we already do that”. And this may be true, but the real question is how much effort are you spending retaining existing vs. acquiring new customers? A simple statistic should help lead you in the right direction:
The cost of acquiring a new customer is 6 to 7 times greater than retaining an existing one.
What’s more, the battle to create multi-channel acquisition campaigns has already been fought. It may not have been completely won yet, but it is safe to say most marketers understand the communication strategy and tactics needed to reach new customers (even if they aren’t fully implementing these strategies yet).
Where there is greater opportunity and where the battlefield is still limited is in developing the tools to realize and respond to customer needs in real-time. In other words, there is a need to truly understand customer engagement (a familiar buzz term).
After a customer takes a particular action on the website, how should that affect the message a call center representative communicates when receiving an inquiry from the same customer? How should online activity influence offline response and vice versa? Customers are constantly sending signals about what messages they want to receive, when and where they want to receive them.
Demographic, behavioral and transactional data sets are readily available. The challenge is in analyzing the combined data to serve up the optimal individualized message by email, phone, web or in-person, all in real-time.
The Flowtown infographic below shares additional insight into the value of an existing customer.
How much of your marketing strategy is focused on retaining existing customers? What challenges do you face in marketing to this group?
