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Every business has its own set of problems when it comes to Customer Relationship Marketing. Whether you’re selling beauty products or streaming services, the key to profitable growth for any organisation is reaching the right audience, at the right time, with the right messaging. But what is the ultimate cost of getting your marketing approach ‘wrong’?
There are over 7.9 billion people on the planet and counting. Approximately 4.6 billion of us are internet users. But assuming that you’ll be able to reach all of them, or even that your product or service is relevant to them, it’s likely to cost you in time, money, and reputation.
Raising the profile of your business, whilst keeping marketing costs down and profits high, is part of every business owner’s dream, right? Defining your specific goals and the problems that sit in the way of you realising them is often the first and most difficult step. But once you’re also able to narrow down the customer insights that may unlock the door to your success, the task of realising your goals can become more aligned, efficient, and realistically obtainable.
The Problems
What are the problems that ultimately lead businesses to get things wrong in their approach to marketing?
Firstly, a lack of customer data. To have insights, you need information about your customers. Brands need to build a profile of who they’re marketing to. In turn, this informs your strategy as it’s one of the single most important aspects of building a successful marketing campaign strategy. All the information you collect from prospective and active customers, such as from surveys, sales, or other marketing exercises should be stored and organised so that you can interpret your data. For retail businesses without data analysts, CRM (customer relationship management) systems with decision engines are often the best way to store and analyse customer data. This helps you to form a picture of the types of customers that are most interested in your brand, services, or products, by analysing and interpreting the information your customers provide at the point of sale (first-party data), or that your prospective customers provide (via hand-raising or zero party data).
Secondly, understanding your data. Are you asking for the ‘correct’ information at the point of sale that will enable you to form a clear picture? How do you know the demographics of your customers, without making assumptions? Look for opportunities to build customer profiles over time, using a combination of direct questions and implied behaviours. You can also gather relevant information at sign up – contact details, location, age or birthday, gender, interests or whether they would like to join your mailing list so you can recommend things that might interest them. Plus, you can gain insights from digital resources such as social media platforms and website analytics. Or even simply by asking your customers in the form of a survey, perhaps with some sort of incentive to generate a higher level of responses. You may find that your actual customer personas are quite different from the assumed ones you thought you should be marketing to.
Thirdly, using the correct marketing channels. It’s important to build a customer journey map to understand where you’re most likely to reach your audience. There’s a vast range of media available, but not all channels will be relevant to your specific target audience. You may also find that using one method over another deserves more focus and investment as it generates more income. For example, if you find when you analyse your customer data that the majority of your sales come from just 20% of your loyal base – you may wish to invest more of your marketing budget in retaining these customers using a personalised email marketing approach. After all, it can cost less to retain customers than it can to gain new ones. A good CRM system can help you do this.
Lastly, determining the correct messaging at the right time. An often-overlooked part of email marketing is deliverability, reputation management, and making sure that your emails reach the intended recipients to help preserve your reputation and budget. Building a story around your brand and products or services is important when trying to appeal to your customers on a human level. Styling your creatives and communications to make them more attractive to your target market, could help to encourage higher levels of engagement and conversions for your campaigns. And knowing when to send them so that they have the biggest, most positive impact, can be the difference in achieving your target ROI (return on investment).
The Costs
Deciding how much to invest in your marketing can be hard. This is a pretty tough area to explore and in every campaign ever executed, there has been a level of testing, failure and success before an approach has been found that works. And even then, your strategy will evolve and change over time alongside the changing behaviour of consumers, developments in technology or culture, and in your business growth.
Getting some expert advice on strategy from customer journey marketing experts like the team at Flourish, as well as considering all of the above points, will help you make the best use of your budget.
If you don’t pay attention to what your customer data is telling you, you could spend a lot of time on a marketing strategy that can set up for failure. This can not only cost you money, but also time and even your reputation. “Getting it wrong” can affect more than your ROI. It can make you appear out of touch with your customers, ultimately turning them away.
The Solution
The team at Flourish have partnered with Mapp Cloud, to help businesses optimise, elevate and transform their marketing which ultimately helps them grow. Targeted customer journey marketing is the key to unlocking your organisation’s potential and achieving real, tangible results. This can be achieved using email marketing, web and social marketing, mobile marketing, direct marketing or a combination of them all.
For help with developing your very own personalised CRM approach, utilising tools like those developed by Mapp Cloud to help you succeed, get in touch and tell us what your problems are so we can help you find a solution.
This article was first published by MAPP. Permission to use has been granted by the publisher.