Why Growth and Retention Marketing Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
In many organizations growth and retention marketing can be bulked into one category called “lifecycle marketing” — keep reading for why this is important below.
Don’t spend all of your budget and resources on driving traffic to your website by methods like paid advertising if there are no processes in place to re-engage these first time purchasers through email/SMS flows and campaigns.
Think of retention and loyalty as going hand-in-hand with good customer experience.
Don’t lose your most valuable customers because of disorganized data and poorly designed retention programs.
If you know the difference between retention and growth marketing, you’re probably ahead of 90% of business owners and (non-marketing) department heads. It is common knowledge that your existing customers are the most valuable contacts in your CRM or in your owned data across any platform.
A lot of new brands focus on spending money to get new customers in the door. However, one common mistake that brands make is not having infrastructure in place to collect contact information and engage with previous purchasers that have come in through top of funnel advertising channels like Meta. If an email/SMS opt-in strategy is not in place, your brand is missing out on the valuable opportunity to engage these one-time purchasers again in the future. Worse still, you risk losing this customer forever if they forget your brand name and can’t find your brand again because you simply did not stay in touch.
The 3 most important steps in making sure your retention channels are optimized for preventing leads and customers from falling through the cracks are:
1. Set up an opt-in strategy.
This means having a consent, opt-in, or subscribe form (all different words for the same thing) on your website or landing page that opts customers into email and/or SMS communications. If you run a mobile app, make sure customers are opting-in (or at least are asked to opt-in) to communications when they download your app. That way, even if they delete your app, they can still stay in the loop and have opportunities to re-engage with your brand when you send out relevant deals, or when the brand is once again relevant to them.
An example of when a customer might make a one-time purchase and then disappear is swimwear. Imagine you are browsing Instagram and you come across an influencer post during resort season of a swimsuit that is just perfect for you. You might click through right then and there and purchase via LTK, or you may save it to your Instagram bookmarks. Let’s say you purchase the swimsuit, cut the tags, and end up wearing it during the cruise/holiday season. By the time spring comes along, you may want another swimsuit by the same brand, but you’ve forgotten the brand, deleted your email receipt, and cut the tags from the swimsuit. There is no way for you to find another swimsuit from this brand you loved. For the brand, this is a huge missed opportunity to retain a customer that already loved them, but simply didn’t have a way of finding them again.
In this example are multiple points where a brand could have gotten consent to contact the customer via SMS or email. If they collected consent at the add-to-cart or checkout stage, they could have reached back out (with an abandoned cart email if a user happened not to make it to checkout) or after the purchase with upsell opportunities (new launches, sales, winback flows, etc…).
However, if a brand misses the opportunity to collect consent, virtually all opportunities to reach that customer again are gone.
2. Set up a flow for maintaining relationships with high intent customers.
For D2C/B2C businesses, browse abandonment and cart abandonment flows would check this requirement. Any customer that was browsing product pages or added to cart likely had the intent to purchase. If they navigate away from your website and forget your brand’s name, they may never be able to find your brand or products again, even if they wanted to. This is why it is important to have browse abandonment and cart abandonment flows set up.
For B2B, any leads that are qualified, have expressed interest in your products, or have had meetings with your sales team should have a strategic follow-up. If your pipeline is so full that your sales team can’t possibly do tailored follow-ups in a timely manner, setting up some sort of automated follow-up is a good idea.
3. Have a strategic and regular cadence for staying in touch with customers in your listserv.
The most important part of a campaign plan is to be strategic. Don’t send email blasts just to send email blasts. We live in a day and age when consumers are inundated with marketing messages. Any messaging that is useless, or worse, annoying to your customers will drive them towards clicking unsubscribe or marking as spam, even if they love your brand.
Remember, customers that have opted-in to hear from you want to hear from you. Make it worth their while. Annoying customers that once liked your brand by over communicating with not-so-great content is a thin line to toe. Don’t be the brand that makes this mistake.
Your relationships with your customers are just that, relationships. Treat them as such.
Think of your sales and marketing engines as relationship builders. The goal of your marketing should not be to just sell one item to one person, your goal should be to build a relationship with each customer. Having a strategy and a plan around your retention channels are important for maintaining relationships with your customers.
Some organizations lump growth and retention marketing into one category, calling it lifecycle marketing. Thinking through “lifecycle stages” is another great way to think through all of the touch points, possible touch points, and places where you may be losing customers.
In summary, you don’t want first time buyers or consumers that browsed your website and then left your website to completely forget about your products and brand. You also don’t want these customers to have no way of reaching or finding you again, especially if they liked what they saw and had intent to buy. Growth marketing only works when your retention processes and channels are set up and optimized.
Do marketing right and make sure your omnichannel marketing messaging actually reaches your customers at the points in their lifecycle where they need to be reached. That’s 90% of the battle in making sure all of the effort that you are putting into your marketing is doing the most work for you.
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