We live in a digital age where every business is caught between the tug of acquiring a new customer and retaining existing ones.
Research has backed the claim that customer retention trumps customer acquisitions. According to a survey, it costs five times[i] more to get a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. In fact, you have a 60-70%[ii] chance of selling your product and services to an existing customer, compared to a 5-20% chance with a new customer.
So, how do you keep your existing customers, drive new ones, and keep up with everything else involved in running your business?
Automated content is the answer! By leveraging content marketing and marketing automation platforms, you can spread the word on your digital platforms about your latest offering to existing customers and also acquire new ones.
Marketing automation platforms are gaining traction in the marketing industry, as marketers look to automate repetitive tasks, improve efficiency, and generate greater ROI from their marketing efforts.
In this blog post, we’ll cover how a combination of content marketing and marketing automation can help to win new customers, all while retaining existing ones, along with 4 tips to be a winner at both ends!
4 Tips to Win With Content Marketing and Marketing Automation
1. Monitor and Evaluate Your Campaigns at Regular Intervals:
You can efficiently pursue customer retention and acquisition simultaneously by monitoring and evaluating your marketing campaigns at regular intervals. You can segment the campaign by channel, medium, and stage of your buyers’ journey to figure out exactly where prospects are falling in your marketing funnel. For instance, when creating your email campaigns via a marketing automation platform, you can use persona-specific email content in a drip campaign to maximize the impact of your campaigns. When it comes to re-assessment, campaigns for products with shorter path-to-purchase should be checked at least once a week.
2. Serve the Customers’ Intent by Offering Personalization:
In today’s competitive marketplace, offering contextual and personalized customer experience is no longer “nice to have” – it’s an expectation. Consumers today are drifting towards brands that listen to them, understand their specific needs, and deliver personalized experiences.
So, collect, analyze, and use information about customers’ demographics, behaviors, and interests to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time via the right channel. With personalized content and product recommendations, you can engage and re-engage with your target audience and loyal customers.
3. Offer Additional Perks to Customers:
To optimize your marketing automation program, you need to focus on other aspects and offer additional perks like:
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Publishing High-Quality Content:
Publish high-quality, engaging, and informational content consistently that resonates with your target audience and existing ones. Remember that your marketing automation tool is just a delivery mechanism, it’s your content that seals the deal for you. So, create educational and informative content that resonates with your audience.
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Solving Your Customers’ Challenges:
Go beyond promoting the highlights of your actual product and service by educating your customers about ‘how’ your product or service solves challenges and what makes it unique. Understand your customers’ needs, figure out what would make their life easier, and build it. When you can pull this off right, it will make you almost irreplaceable as a brand.
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Building a Community for Your Customers:
Customers will always trust their peers more than they trust your brand. Build a community that encourages customer-to-customer interactions by adding a community. A community allows consumers to interact with each other on numerous matters, like raising product-related queries or sharing service experiences.
4. Take Customer Feedback Into Consideration:
One great way to acquire new customers and retain existing ones is to constantly improve by encouraging your customers to share their feedback for your campaigns, products, or services. Instead of just going by your gut, try figuring out what your customers want next. Try executing Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys using your marketing automation platform to your loyalists. Here, you can ask how satisfied they are with your frequency and method of outreach. And with these insights, you can understand the gaps and areas of opportunity.
Also, you can use customer feedback to innovate around products or services. For instance, create a poll with a few of your product ideas and send it to your target audience through blogs, social media channels, and email campaigns and see their response.
Conclusion
When you strike the right balance between your customer acquisition and retention efforts using the combination of content marketing and marketing automation, it resonates with your customers and makes them feel valued. With a proper content marketing and automation strategy in place, you can shape your brand’s expertise and empower your marketing operations.
However, it doesn’t mean that human understanding and efforts have come to an end. Your marketing automation campaign deserves your attention irrespective of whether it’s just a newborn campaign or a fully-grown one. Just ensure that you’re providing value and doing something that makes you unique, hard to replace, and impossible to forget.
Want to Leverage Marketing Automation to Deliver Your Content Right? Talk to Us!
Our content marketing and marketing automation experts will be happy to play a part in helping you be a winner at both ends. Just drop us a line at [email protected] and we’ll take it from there.
Statistics References
[i]https://www.outboundengine.com/blog/customer-retention-marketing-vs-customer-acquisition-marketing/
[ii]https://www.groovehq.com/support/upsells