Understanding Customers is the First and Most Important Component
If you ask how to make a marketing campaign more effective, I bet that you will get tons of different answers from different Individuals. I am not here to debate which is wrong and which is right. Everyone is right in their own way in their own domain of work. However, I am here to put my answer to the table and see if resonates with you for your marketing campaigns of any sort. For a clearer understanding, I will be steering the example toward the marketing campaigns designed for reducing churn rates.
The Two Prime Factors
Let me point out the two trivial yet vastly misrehearsed factors across the whole advertising industry.
- Target Audience of the Marketing Campaign
- The actual need of the target audience
The first one is too trivial to explain, but I will still do it nonetheless. If you are tending the plants in your garden, you primarily water the ones that look like dying and not the ones that are already flourishing to their most. What this translates to the corporate world is that you want to target the customers who are at the risk of leaving your company’s provided goods and services and not the ones who are loyal to your services.
Yes, you should also focus on them and keep them loyal but that another topic, and for now we are focusing on reducing churn. The loyal ones will not churn anyway and therefore the marketing campaign aimed at them will not prevent the customer churns that are about to happen on the opposite spectrum. So the point is to target the marketing campaigns according to the cause for it to become more effective.
The classic conundrum
The second one is mostly misrehearsed in the advertising industry. If a garden plant is dying because of parasites or lack of sunlight, watering them will not do any favor. It requires the proper actions regarding its own issues. The point is, even if you have targeted the right ones, the right action is more important.
This is a classic conundrum. In the corporate world, it can be very difficult to define and solve. Yes you have targeted the right customers who are very likely to churn, yet the churn rate is not falling, yet they keep becoming churn and you keep losing revenues despite all your marketing campaigns. More often than not this is because of not carrying out the right actions. For instance, if a customer group is very satisfied with your customer service, no matter how many discounts or coupons you provide them they will very likely switch to other companies for their goods and services. In such a case, the marketing campaign will simply fail.
The Key is to Understand
Let's say you know these 500 customers are likely to churn by, for instance, unsubscribing from your services or stops buying products from your e-commerce website. You are already halfway down the road and now comes the harder part. At this point, you should not be asking how do I retain these customers and how do I reduce the churn rate. The proper question you should be asking is why they are moving on from your goods and services because that's where the solution lies.
So now you want to know the reasons behind these churn rates. How do you learn the reasons? Do you call them or survey them individually. No, that would be too costly in terms of both time and money. You might have thousands of customers even sometimes millions. Simply is it not viable. What you do is turn to data, because; one, you already have the data on your customers, two, it won't cost you a dime.
You would be surprised by the amount of information and insights you can extract from the data you already have. For instance, there might be a customer segment that had faced problems with shipping of the products and that's the reason they are about to move on from your brand or company. What you do is offer them free premium fast delivery for the next few orders. What you have to lose is very few compared to the amount that you gain in the future if these customers are to stick with you in the longer term.
This is just a simpler example, whereas you will find more meaningful insights while you take the road of data. A segmentation tool can do all the work for you. Here is an example of a customer segment extracted from CRM data:
This segment of customers has a certain behavior that has led to many churn cases in the past. If you look closely at the customer segment you will see that these customers purchased products with lower ratings with an average of 116$ and have been inactive for more than 25 days. Also, they have only one order ever.
That might indicate they have been unsatisfactory with the lower-rated product that they bought. What you can do is offer them a free return or refund. Yes, you would lose a certain amount of money for such a campaign but if you are able to retain some of these customers for the long run, the revenue stream will most certainly outweigh the initial marketing campaigns.
As a result, you will be offering this customer something they want, and by doing so the customers are likely to come back and continue with your company. Not because you have offered them a refund or whatever, but because they will feel noticed their money spend on a reliable company and appreciate you by sticking with you. After all, it's a two-way relation.
The Longer Road
There is no fast forward way or shortcuts to effective marketing campaigns. You have to gradually reach out to the right customers and gradually retain them over time. But before you know you will be seeing more effective results from your marketing campaigns and the churn rate will fall over time. A better understanding takes you a long way.
Disclaimer: The picture of the customer segment and example used in this article belong to the Enhencer platform.
