By: Steven Noels, CTO and Co-Founder of NGDATA
What is your company’s customer acquisition strategy?
Do you concentrate your strategy on website content, email blasts, and focusing on ‘out maneuvering’ your competition?
Whichever it is, acquiring new customers is difficult. It requires a myriad of different processes, channels, marketing techniques, and money—and this is all contingent on the assumption that you’re targeting the right prospects.
There are so many factors to consider in your strategy, including details such as understanding how (and why) individuals interact with each channel differently, recognizing how to leverage multi-channel data to connect with the right customers at the right time, and respecting that customers want to be treated as individuals.
What do all of these challenges have in common?
The customer. And your knowledge about the customer.
It is all about putting the customer first, and we’re not talking about simply adopting a ‘customer first’ mentality. This means more than just technological change. It’s about committing to better understanding your customer—at all stages of engagement—and building personalized relationships with each.
Acquisition targets fall into three buckets: anonymous, identified, and existing customers. This is critical because companies must first understand who they’re targeting, when, and how.
If you’ve been reading NGDATA’s blog, you’ll know how keen we are on incorporating personalization and building Customer DNA to attain and keep valuable customers. This is no different, for each of the three buckets.
Anonymous Visitors
Compare current customer behavior to online traffic information you were already collecting, and you can turn anonymous website visitors into valuable leads. Behavioral information can help focus your marketing efforts and more accurately evaluate the potential acquisition likeliness of prospects.
Building and targeting these individual profiles and providing the right messages and incentives for further engagement, it is possible to personalize the on-boarding experience and thus increase acquisition campaign performance.
Identified Prospects
For recently identified prospects, it is possible to use previously collected data to immediately identify the top potential converters and/or highest value prospects and provide them with a personalized web experience based on behavioral data, using appropriate data at the right time. This will allow you to anticipate prospects needs throughout the process and deliver to them incentives on which they’re likely to take advantage.
Existing Customers
I mentioned Customer DNA earlier, which is a collection of thousands of predefined metrics, calculated in real-time and organized for each customer. Now, use this DNA to improve service immediately after acquisition to increase cross- and up-sell opportunities. This can significantly help to maximize the ROI within the first few months of acquisition and increase customer lifetime value.
Regardless of your company’s customer acquisition strategy, it’s important to provide relevant personalized messaging and offers through the right channels. This will increase acquisition efforts and help you gain high value customers.
We explored this topic on a recent webinar. Check out the replay here, but we’d love to hear from you.
How is your company using personalization to improve the customer experience at any stage?
