There is one key point of focus that we continually re-enforce with our clients as they interact with their prospects and customers. The first is the importance of segmenting your audience based upon where people are in their relationship with your brand. The supporting sales and marketing programs around these communications are designed to move the “ideal” prospects forward in a more engaged relationship. For years, we have been counseling our clients on the importance of communicating with their stakeholders based upon where they are at in the journey with their brand. Time and again, we have seen that relevancy drives engagement which helps to move the relationship to the next level.
In order to drive relevancy and increase conversions, segmentation plays an important role. Demographic, geographic, purchasing, behavior, and sentiment data can be utilized to enhance the customer experience. Armed with the knowledge of knowing who is most likely to respond, or who is at risk, marketers can proactively assist the sales and client success teams with information to increase their effectiveness.
Opposed to a one-size-fits all approach to marketing campaigns (commonly referred to as batch and blast), prospects and customers can be nurtured with information that is most important to where they are in the relationship and is further customized to who they are or what might be of most interest to them. Don’t just look at campaign response rates (visits, clicks, likes, downloads, etc.) to determine your success. Understand who is responding and where are they in the journey with your brand. Typically the people who engage with your emails and phone calls are those that are already engaged, so the challenge is to continually find ways to get that first step in engagement.
Recently I had the opportunity to spend time with a long time client and one of the key discussion topics was around the success of their newly designed “monthly newsletter”. The main metric that they were tracking was the click-through rates, that had doubled since the launch of the new design. I asked them who was responding and they gave me a puzzled look. As we dug into the data, we uncovered that 90% of the responders were existing customers. This would have been excellent for a program designed to nurture existing customers. However, their key goals were on centered on the acquisition of new customers.
For this client, we talked through different strategies that would be more effective for the ideal, targeted prospects that were not yet engaged with the brand. It did not include another email redesign but instead focused on educating them with the most appropriate information. Thinking through who you are trying to move forward and understand what they might be most interested in is the key driver as you look to advance their relationship with your brand.
